In recent years this author has become one of my favorites. Octavius Winslow (1808-1878) has a devotional style that just melts my pride and inflames my passion. He has been a welcome addition to my bookshelf.
It is interesting to pick up a Winslow book and find a blurb by Spurgeon on the back (courtesy of Banner of Truth). Winslow was a contemporary of Charles Spurgeon and actually spoke at the opening of the Tabernacle in London.
In this book, Soul Depths & Soul Heights, Winslow walks us through the 130th Psalm. The book is a series of sermons on the text that he himself preached. When you think of Winslow you think of sweet affection to Christ and sweet perservernence in trials. And one does indeed feed the other. This is fitting then with the text at hand.
In the chapter entitled Contrition and Confession Winslow pastors us with this exhortation:
Why is it that so many of God’s saints travel all their days with their heads bowed like a bulrush? Why so few attain to the high standard of an assured interest in Christ? Why so many walk in the spirit of legal bondage, knowing little or nothing of their pardon, adoption, and acceptance? May it not, to a great degree, be traced to their lax habit of confession of sin to God? It is because they go day by day, and week by week, bearing along their lonely, dusty road, the burden of conscious sin and uncleansed guilt. Oh, the great secret of a pure, holy, and happy walk is in living close by God’s confessional- is in going with the slightest aberration of the mind, with the faintest consciousness of guilt, and at once, with the eye upon the blood, unveiling and acknowledging it, without the slightest concealment or mental reservation, to God! So long as this holy privilege is neglected, guilt, like a corroding poison, an inflamed wound, a festering sore, eats as a canker into the very vitals of our peace and joy and hope.
What makes Jesus so precious? Oh, it is the daily, the constant habit of confession. We must ever remember that the Paschal Lamb was eaten with bitter herbs, and that those bitter herbs imparted a sweetness to the sacrificial offering. And thus it is that, the bitter herbs of repentance, blended with a holy confession of sin at the cross, imparts a higher estimation of the Atonement, an additional sweetness to the blood, and renders the Savior more precious to the heart. Oh the peace, the repose, the light, which springs from the confession of sin to God, no imagination can conceive or words express!
I could go on and on quoting the book; I just loved it. In addition to the chapter entitled Contrition and Confession, I also particularly enjoyed Soul-Depths, and Hoping in the Lord.
This book is great to recommend to someone who is encountering a trial. Recommend the book along with a meditative contemplation of the 130th Psalm. It is also a great book to read for training in view of the possible, potential, promised and certain trials of life (Phil. 1.29; Jam. 1.3; 2 Tim. 3.12).
Soul Depths & Soul Heights is short (146 pages), easy to understand, and very beneficial to the Christian heart.
You may find the book at Banner of Truth’s online store.
Price: $ 12.00
ISBN#: 9780851519357
Binding: Paperback
Page Count : 144
