NOTE A - The Second Blessing
-
It is Murray’s belief that, rightly understood, the words “The Second Blessing” express a scriptural truth, and may be a help to believers in putting clearly before them what they may expect from God.
-
He purposefully connects the Second Blessing with the Two Covenants.
-
Why was it that God made two Covenants - not one, and not three?
- Because there were two parties concerned.
- In the First Covenant
- man was to prove what he could do, and what he was
- In the Second
- God would show what He would do
- The former was the time of needed preparation
- The latter, the time of Divine fulfillment
-
Conversion makes of a sinner a child of God
- full of ignorance and weakness
- without any conception of what the whole-hearted devotion is that God asks of him,
- or of the full possession God is ready to take of him
- in some, this transition from the elementary stage is by a gradual growth and enlightenment
- but in the great majority, this healthy growth is not found
- to those who have
- never found the secret of a healthy growth
- of victory over sin
- and perfect rest in God
- and have possibly despaired of ever finding it
- because all their efforts have been failures
- it has often been a wonderful heal to learn that it is possible by a single decisive step, bringing them into a right relationship to Christ, His Spirit, and His strength, to enter upon an entirely new life.
-
What is needed to help a man to take this step?
- he must see and confess the wrongness, the sin, of the life he is living, not in harmony with God’s will
- He must see and believe in the life which Scripture holds out, which Christ Jesus promises to work and maintain in him
- As he sees that his failure has been owing to his striving in his own strength, and believes that our Lord Jesus will actually work ALL in him in Divine power, he takes courage, and dares surrender himself to Christ anew.
- Confessing and giving up ALL that is of self and sin, yielding himself wholly to Christ and His service, he believes and receives a new power to live his life by the faith of the Son of God.
-
the second blessing is nothing more nor less than a new vision of what Christ is willing to work in us, and the surrender of faith that yields all to Him
-
A quote by William Law, with notes by Andrew Murray, from Dying to Self: A Golden Dialogue
- ”A great deal has been said against the use of the terms, the Higher Life, the Second Blessing. In Law one finds nothing of such language, but of the deep truth of which they are the, perhaps defective, expression, this book is full. The points on which so much stress is laid in what is call Keswick teaching, stand prominently out in his whole argument. The low state of the average life of believers, the cause of all failure as coming from self-confidence, the need of an entire surrender of the whole being to the operation of God, the call to turn to Christ as the One and Sure Deliverer from the power of self, the Divine certainty of a better life for all who will in self-despair trust Christ for it, and the heavenly joy of a life in which the Spirit of Love fills the heart — these truths are common to both. What makes Law’s putting of the truth of special value of the way in which he shows how humility and utter self-despair, with the resignation to God’s mighty working in simple faith, is the infallible way to be delivered from self, and have the Spirit of Love fill the heart.”