p. 17 | Personal Experiences by David Paulson

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D.C. · Aug 17, 1916

Personal Experiences

By David Paulson

LAST year I went to Berea, Ky., to give a few health talks and Bible studies to the students gathered in that great educational center. While there, one of the professors said to me, “You ought to have a talk with my wife. She has had a wonderful experience since she was up to Hinsdale.” The next morning I called on her. She told me she had always considered herself a Christian, but while attending the Bible studies held in the sanitarium and listening to the testimonies of the workers in the prayer meeting, she became convinced that there was something in the Bible and in Christian experience to which she was yet a stranger.

“I went home determined to discover this divine secret for myself. I read the Bible through earnestly and prayerfully, seeking light. I had nearly completed it the second time when I reached the words, ‘Though He be not far from every one of us.’ That verse brought a flood of new light to my soul; a new sense of blessed companionship with Christ came to me, and from that hour the Bible has been an entirely new book. Formerly I read it because it was a Christian’s duty to do so, but now my soul hungers for the divine instruction it contains for me.”

She said that now when she was about her household work, she could talk to God as she would to a friend, and she invariably received some comforting answer in her very next Bible study. She had come to have a terrible dread and hatred of sin, because it interfered with this sweet communion and companionship. For years she had been troubled with sleeplessness, but from the very next night after seeing the new light in that verse, she had slept like a child; and the hearing in one ear, which had been entirely lost since childhood, was gradually restored.

I know that God gives to each of his children a different experience; hence it is useless for one person to seek for just the blessings that have been so richly showered into another’s life. Nevertheless, I left Berea with a hungry, aching void in my soul. I felt as I never had before that although I was a teacher in Israel, I needed to know in a new sense what it meant to have Christ abide in this mortal flesh. I knew I could not say intelligently and without any hesitation, “I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me.” I was determined that come what might, I would know how, in a new way, to make the study of my Bible indeed the eating and drinking of the flesh of the Son of God.

On my return home new duties piled up, new perplexities accumulated, and the very situation seemed to compel me to give my best energies to the problems that crowded in so persistently. I did not forget my new resolution, but the way did not open to carry it out to my full satisfaction.

Early this year, while on one of my travels, I evidently drank of some contaminated water, and directly I came down with a severe attack of one of the forms of typhoid fever. This was followed by a serious and persistent siege of pleurisy.

During these long, weary months the Lord did not permit the enemy to cripple my mind. It was as clear and active as in health, and I have had plenty of time under trying circumstances to carry out my resolution made at Berea. I now know as I never did before that justification by faith is the work of God in laying the glory of man in the dust and doing for him that which it is not in his

power to do for himself. I now know in a new sense that our entire spiritual experience depends on the vividness of our sense of Christ’s personal companionship; in other words, that Christ dwells in our hearts by faith “when we will consider what he is to us and what a work he has wrought out for us in the plan of redemption.”

I can now say with David, “It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I might learn,” in a new and deeper sense, these simple fundamental truths; and I also have the conviction that when I have learned them as God desires to teach them to me, he will speedily complete the good work of restoration which he has so graciously begun.

DAVID PAULSON, M. D.