I the Lord, the first, and with the last
By A.B. Simpson

      Thousands of people get stranded after they have embarked on the great voyage of holiness because they have depended upon the experience rather than on the Author of it. They had supposed that they were thoroughly and permanently delivered from all sin, and in the ecstasy of their first experience they imagined that they never would be tried and tempted as before. When, therefore, they step out into the actual facts of Christian life and find themselves failing and falling, they are astonished and perplexed, and they conclude that they must have been mistaken in their experience. Then they make a new attempt at the same thing, and again fall, until at last, worn out with the experiment, they conclude that the experience is a delusion, or at least that it was never intended for them. Thus they fall back into the old way, and their last state is worse than the first. Men and women today need to know not sanctification as a state but Christ as a living Person. Lord Jesus, give me Thy heart, Thy faith, Thy life, Thyself.