Reacting to God's Glory

A Soul Prostrate Before the Majesty and Holiness of God

by Octavius Winslow

    "Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the Lord Almighty." Isaiah 6:5

What prostrated his soul thus low in the dust?

What filled him with this self-abasement?

What overwhelmed him with this keen sense of his vileness?

Oh, it was the unclouded view he had of the essential glory of the Son of God! And thus will it ever be. The beaming forth of Christ's glory in the soul reveals its hidden evil; the knowledge of this evil lays the believer low before God with the confession, "I abhor myself. Woe is me! for I am undone."

Beloved, let this truth be ever present to your mind, that as we increasingly see glory in Christ, we shall increasingly see that there is no glory in ourselves.

Jesus is the Sun which reveals the pollutions and defilements which are within. The chambers of abomination are all closed until Christ shines in upon the soul. Oh, then it is these deep seated and long veiled deformities are revealed; and we, no longer gazing with a complacent eye upon self, sink in the dust before God, overwhelmed with shame, and covered with confusion of face.

Holy posture!

Blessed spectacle!

A soul prostrate before the glory of the incarnate God!

All high and lofty views of its own false glory annihilated by clear and close views of the true glory of Jesus. As when the sun appears, all the lesser lights vanish into darkness, so when Jesus rises in noontide glory upon the soul, all other glory retires, and He alone fixes the eye and fills the mind.

"Hovering around him were mighty seraphim, each with six wings. With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet". Isaiah 6:2

Their own perfections and beauty were not to be seen in the presence of the glory of the Lord.

How much more profound should be the humility and self abasement of man! Have we covered ourselves; not with the pure wings of the holy cherubim, but with sackcloth and ashes before the Lord? Have we sought to veil; not our beauties, for beauty we have none; but our innumerable and flagrant deformities, even the sins of our best and holiest things; and, renouncing all self glory, have we sunk, as into nothing before God? 

Oh, we are yet strangers to the vision of Christ's glory, if we have not.

If the constellation of human gifts and attainments, distinctions and usefulness, on which unsanctified and unmortified self so delights to gaze, have not retired into oblivion, the Sun of Righteousness has yet to rise upon our souls with healing in His wings!

From Evening Thoughts , The Works of Octavius Winslow.