The Holiest of All By Andrew Murray

ibolfest of BU 117
heart gets closed to the living voice of God. The mind is satis
fied with beautiful thoughts and pleasant feelings ;
but the heart
does not hear God. When we are secretly content with our
religion, our sound doctrine and Christian life, unconsciously
but surely the heart gets hardened. When our life does not
seek to keep pace with our knowledge, and we have more
pleasure in hearing and knowing than obeying and doing, we
utterly lose the meekness to which the promise is given, and,
amidst all the pleasing forms of godliness, the heart is too hard
to discern the voice of the Spirit. More than all, when unbelief,
that walks by sight, and looks at itself and all around in the
light of this world, is allowed to have its way, and the soul does
not seek in childlike faith to live in the invisible, as revealed in
the word, the heart gets so hardened that God s word never
enters. Yes, it is an unspeakably solemn thought,
that with a
mind occupied with religious truth, and feelings stirred at times
by the voice and words of men, and a life
apparently given to
religious works, the heart may be closed to the humble, direct
intercourse with God, and a stranger to all the blessing the
living word can bring. Wherefore, even as the Holy Ghost
saith, If ye hear His voice, harden not your heart.
Let all who would seek the blessing to be found in this
Epistle, beware of studying it simply as an inspired treatise on
divine things. Let it be to us a personal message, the voice of
God speaking to us in His Son. Let us, under a sense of the
spiritual mystery there is in all divine truth, and the impotence
of the human mind rightly to apprehend spiritual things, open
our heart in great meekness and docility to wait on God. The
whole of religion, and the whole of salvation, consists in the
state of the heart. God can do nothing for us, in the way of
imparting the blessings of redemption, but as He does it
in the