February 21

My Testimony — By E. Stanley Jones

“I came to Christ bankrupt. My capacity to blunder drove me to his feet, and to my astonishment he took me, forgave me, and sent my happy soul singing its way down the years. By grace was I saved, through faith, and that not of myself — it was the gift of God.

“I walked in the joy of that for months and then the clouds began to gather. There was something within me not redeemed, something else down in the cellar that seemed to be sullenly at war with this new life. I was at war with myself.

“I think I can see what happened. We live in two mind rather conscious and the subconscious. The subconscious is the residing place of the driving instincts: self, sex, and the herd. These instincts have come down through a long racial history and they have bents toward evil.

“Into the conscious mind there is introduced at conversion a new life, a new loyalty, a new love. But the subconscious mind does not obey this new life. Its driving instincts drive for fulfillment apart from any morality built up in the conscious mind. There ensues a clash between the new life in the conscious mind and the instincts of the subconscious. The house of man-soul becomes a house divided against itself.

“I wondered if this was the best Christianity could do-to leave one in this divided condition? I found to my glad surprise the teaching concerning the Holy Spirit, and I found. that the area of the work of the Holy Spirit is largely if not entirely, in the subconscious. I found that if I would surrender to the Holy Spirit this conscious mind-all I knew and all I did not know — He would cleanse at these depths I could not control. I surrendered and accepted the gift by faith. He did cleanse as a refining fire. In that cleansing the was a unifying. Conscious and subconscious minds were brought under a single control and redemption. That control was the Holy Spirit. I was no longer at war with myself. Life was on a permanently higher level. It was no longer up and down. The soul had caught its stride. I went on my way singing a new song. That song has continued. It is fresher today than then.” (From The Meaning of Sanctification, Charles Ewing Brown).