“Friend, go up higher” (Luke 14:10)

When Charles Spurgeon wrote the original morning devotion, salvation was understood as a supernatural change. Unfortunately, most modern evangelical ministers lead sinners in a prayer and tell them, if they sincerely repeated the prayer, they are saved. Follow-up studies show 90% of the “converts” have no biblical evidence of salvation. If the experience of the saint described in this devotion doesn’t seem familiar to you, please consider that you’re not saved, and seek God until you have, as George Whitefield said,  “a real participation of the divine life in the soul of man … a solid living experience in their own souls”.

The following was altered only slightly for modern readers.

When people are first saved, they draw near to God, but it’s with great fear and trembling. The soul, conscious of guilt, and humbled thereby, is overawed with the solemnity of its position; it is cast to the Earth by a sense of the grandeur of God, in whose presence it stands. With sincere bashfulness, it doesn’t lift its head.

But, later, as the Christian grows in grace, although he’ll never forget the solemnity of his position, and will never lose that holy awe which must encompass a saved person when he’s in the presence of the God who can create or can destroy; yet his fear has all its terror taken out of it; it becomes a holy reverence, and no more an overshadowing dread. He is called up higher, to greater access to God in Christ Jesus.

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