A PERFECT HEART by Catherine Booth

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Mar 20, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 12.

A PERFECT HEART.

By Catherine Booth

A HEART perfect toward God! What does it mean?—It means perfect in its obedience. That man or woman who has this kind of a heart ceases to pick and choose among the commandments of God which he shall obey and which he shall not; he ceases to have his own will, and the way that God may call him to take may look to him as if it were a dangerous or risky way, and he may wait a little bit, to be thoroly satisfied, but when once satisfied that it is God’s way, the true child will not hesitate. He confers not with flesh and blood, but on he goes, irrespective of consequences. This was Paul’s kind of obedience. He conferred not with flesh and blood; he counted all things dung and dross, and he went on doing so to the end—thoro in his obedience.

People come to us and want to know what they are to do; they feel that they are only half-hearted in God’s service; they have neither joy nor power, and say, “What must I do?” And we take, as God helps us, the dissecting knife, and try to find out the difficulty. We get them down under the blaze of the Holy Spirit’s light, and try to prove them and find where they are wrong. Perhaps the Lord leads us to the sore spot, and we point out the difficulty, but instead of obeying they shrink away. They look ahead, and they see that to obey the light will involve loss of some kind—perhaps reputation, wealth, family associations, ease, or loss of friends, loss of temporal comforts, loss of good business. Loss is in the background, and they see it. They know where we are leading them to, and they slip back; they do not want to see, and yet they do not want to consider themselves dishonest, so they turn their heads away, and will not look in the direction of the light, smoothing it all over, and singing:—

“Were the whole realm of nature mine, That were a present far too small,” etc.

That is not a perfect heart, but a partial heart toward the Lord God.—Catherine Booth.