Love Militant
excerpted from: LOVE ENTHRONED (264 pages)
by Daniel Steele, D.D.

"So long as sin is in the world love must make war against it. Jesus came forth from the bosom of the Father's love to send a sword upon the earth. The cross is a center of forces hostile to sin. The sinful soul is a fortress filled with armed enemies to Immanuel. The successive approaches of love to its conquest and complete possession are:

1. The offer of pardon through the atoning blood of Jesus Christ.
2. Regeneration, or the New Birth, is a change wrought within the soul by the power of the Holy Ghost, creating within the soul a new spiritual life, a life of loyalty and love.
3. Adoption is the incorporation of a person into the family of God, with the investiture of all the prerogatives of sonship and rights of heirship. It is an exalted honor.
4. The witness of the Spirit, which has already been alluded to in this chapter, is the testimony of the Holy Ghost immediately to my soul.
The justified or regenerate person often finds it difficult to say sincerely and heartily, "Thy will be done." Self still asserts its existence as a force opposing the will of God. There is, at times, a painful duality in the soul, "the flesh (self-will) warring against the Spirit." At such times there is little peace and less joy. Entire sanctification completely harmonizes the conflict by enabling the human to acquiesce delightfully in the Divine will. "Christian perfection," says Fletcher, "extends chiefly to the will, which is the capital moral power of the soul, leaving the understanding ignorant of ten thousand things, and the body 'dead because of sin.'"

The joy that attends perfect love, in its depth, solidity, richness, and permanency, far transcends the joy of the regenerate state. It is the testimony of many witnesses, that in point of ecstatic emotion the transition into entire holiness is far more wonderful than the translation of the penitent believer from the darkness of spiritual death into the kingdom of light. But this is not always the case. As some are converted without a sudden and sharply defined joy, like a tropical sunrise, ever memorable in their history, so some mount up into the heights of perfect love as gradually as the dawn climbs the eastern sky. But even in these cases, there is a moment when the rising sun pours his light upon their waiting eyes.
 

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