o many
sermons about faith, and such earnest pleading to believe, and ask why it
is they can not believe. There is just one answer: It is self. Self is
working; is trying; is struggling, and self must fail. But when you come to
the end of self and can only cry, "Lord, help me! Lord, help me!"--then the
deliverance is nigh; believe that. It was God brought the people in. It is
God who will bring you in.

One should be willing, for the sake of this rest, to give up everything.
The grace of God is very free. It is given without money and without price.
And yet, on the other hand, Jesus said that every man who wants the pearl
of great price must sacrifice his all, must sell all that he has to buy
that pearl. It is not enough to see the beauty, the attractiveness and the
glory, and almost to taste the gladness and the joy of this wonderful life
as it has been set before you. You must become the possessor, the owner of
the field. The man who found the field with a treasure, and the man who
found the great pearl, were both glad; but they had not yet got it. They
had found it, seen it, desired it, rejoiced in it; but they had not yet got
it. Not until they went and sold all, gave up everything, and bought the
ground, and bought the pearl. Ah, friends, there is a great deal that has
to be given up: the world, its pleasures, its favor, its good opinion. You
are to stand to the world in the same relation as Jesus did. The world
rejected Him, and cast Him out, and you are to take up the position of your
Lord, to whom you belong, and to follow with the rejected Christ. You have
to give up everything. You have to give up all that is good in yourself
and to be humbled in the dust of death. And that is not all. Your past
religious life and experience and successes--you have to give all up and
become nothing, that God alone may have the glory. God has brought you out
in conversion; it was God's own life given you: but you defiled it with
disobedience and with unbelief. Give it all up. Give up all your own
wisdom, and your own thoughts about God's work. How hard it is for the
minister of the Gospel to give up all his wisdom, and to lay it at the feet
of Jesus, to become a fool and to say: "Lord, I know nothing as I should
know it. I have been preaching the Gospel, and how little I have seen of
the glory of the blessed land, and the blessed life!"

Why is it that the blessed Spirit can not teach us more effectually? No
reason but this: th