(From “Waiting At Wisdom’s Gates”, 1843)
“Blessed is the man that heareth me, watching daily at my gates, waiting at the posts of my doors.” Proverbs 8:34
But when may a man be said to have heard the voice of Wisdom? When does he give evidence of having received her Divine impressions, her heavenly and powerful operations, through the Spirit, in his heart? When a man is made to feel that he is in the hand of the holy, just, and sin-avenging Jehovah, against whom he has sinned; when his transgressions and iniquities are set before him in the light of God’s countenance; when he feels himself to be justly condemned (by the law which he has broken) to the second death, and to the endurance of the wrath of God forever and ever. When the depravity, deceitfulness, and desperate wickedness of his heart is discovered to him, and he is left to cry in the bitterness of his soul, “Woe is me, for I am undone; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty”; when, like the leper, he covers his lip, and goes forth crying, “Unclean, unclean,” and puts his mouth in the dust, if so be, there may be hope; when like Hezekiah, he turns his face to the wall, and weeps sore in secret before the Lord; when a sense of his darkness, ignorance, impotency, and unprofitableness, makes him cry “O Lord, I am oppressed, undertake for me”; when he finds all human cisterns to be broken, and that vain is the help of man; when he feels that he is shut up and cannot come forth; when a strong conviction of the ability of Jesus to save and heal him is in his heart, and he cries unto Him to deliver him from going down to the pit; when nothing short of the Lord the Spirit’s application of the love, blood, and righteousness of Jesus to his heart and conscience will satisfy him; and the spirit of grace and supplication is poured out upon him, enabling him to pour out his soul before God, to acknowledge the iniquity of his transgression, to sue for mercy, to beg for pardon, teaching, wisdom, light, and power, and to crave for one smile, one look of love, one word from Christ’s lips, more than for his necessary food. I say, when he has experienced these things, he has heard more than the voice of natural conscience; more than the word of man; more than the letter of the oracles of truth. He has heard the voice of the Lord, which is powerful and full of majesty, that breaks the cedars in Lebanon, and makes the hinds to calve.