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Wednesday August 13, 2025
Our Great Mistake
“Our great mistake is the locating of either sin or holiness in ourselves. I was tripped up by this for years. I could never come right out with a testimony to an experience of ‘entire sanctification’ or ‘the purified heart,’ nor could I preach it convincingly to others, because I always had this question mark. I had entered into a transaction of sanctification by faith; the Spirit had borne witness with my spirit that Galatians 2:20 was a fact in my life through grace–crucifixion with Christ, and He now living in me. But to use such expressions as being holy, or sanctified, or entirely cleansed from sin, or dead to sin, or the old man crucified, did not ring true to my experience, because of my daily consciousness of coming short of His perfections in some form or other, of sins which need repentance, confession and cleansing.
The trouble, as I say, lay in locating both sin and holiness in the wrong place. It was a great clarifying revelation when I saw that both sin and holiness are basically the attributes of two persons only, and neither of them myself. ‘Greater is He that is in you than he that is in the world.’ Now my attention was directed away from myself to these two persons, the god of this world and the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. I have already stressed this basic truth; but it is so basic, and I think so rarely presented in real clarity, that repetition won’t hurt. Put in simplest terms, sin is Satan, and holiness is Jesus. I have already said, in actual fact there is only one Person in the universe, only one who has ever said ‘I AM,’ who calls Himself ‘the first and the last,’ who is said to be the ‘All in all,’ who is named ‘the Life,’ ‘Love,’ ‘Light,’ ‘Truth,’ ‘Power.’ We created people are only so created as persons that in a complete sense the living God may manifest Himself through living people, in a way He cannot do so completely in lesser forms of creation. So holiness, love, power, life are never mine, never a part of me, neither now nor in eternity. They always are, and always will be HE in me. My attention, therefore, when I see this, is directed away from myself becoming holy in some sense (and being very conscious that I am not), to Him, made unto me ‘wisdom, righteousness, sanctification.’
But equally, when I have seen with absolute clarity that all I shall ever have of eternal life or heavenly character is HE in me; then it is easier for me to look back on myself in my former unregenerate state, and see just as clearly that the sin was not basically I, any more than the holiness is now. The sin was ‘he that is in the world,’ ‘the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience,’ the one of whom Paul wrote that he is in the unbeliever, blinding their minds. The one who is the false god, who embodies sin which is self-centeredness, who is sin, just as the Holy Spirit is holiness. John exposes him to us in the third chapter of his epistle, when he says outright that a person who commits sin is ‘of the devil,’ for he was original sin, and Christ came to destroy his works, by replacing him in us.”
Taken from: God Unlimited
By Norman Grubb
Pages 76-78
