By Arthur Vess
Preach Holiness negatively and positively: The heart must be purged from sin, before the Holy Ghost can come in. Only negative preaching diagnoses the disease of sin, but offers no remedy. Only positive preaching ignores the nature, then the fact of sin. We first become modern, then modernistic.
Preaching it negatively, with a positive emphasis, is better than preaching it positively with a negative emphasis. Compromise is the seed of modernism. You must expose carnality before people become conscious of it and plead for deliverance from it. Pride and vanity must go before humility can come. Before we can be filled with all the fullness of God, we must be emptied of all self and sin.
Before the "Beauty of holiness can be seen in me" the foulness and filth of sin must go. We must not be conformed, but transformed. Before holiness can come in, sin must go out. The death route leads to life and peace. "The very God of peace sanctify you wholly." In regeneration we die to the life of sin; in sanctification, we die to the nature of sin; in glorification we die to the presence and effects of sin in our bodies.
Humiliation produces holy humility. Lord make me meek and lowly, humble and holy. Death to sin produces the life of holiness. The church and the world, God and the devil, sin and holiness have nothing in common, and neither can tolerate or co-operate with the other.
So much of our modern holiness preaching is so shallow and neutral. Neutral means neither, and neither means nothing. Few preachers are willing to name and define sin, the world, the flesh or the devil. If you do not diagnose the case, the patient will not see the need of the remedy, and take it. When we get sin out, the Holy Ghost comes in. We do not have to beg or persuade God to save or sanctify us, but let Him do it, at His own right terms.
