“I will pray the Father, and He will give you another Helper, that He may abide with you forever…The Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you.” “And when He has come, He will convict the world of sin” (John 14:16, 26; 16:8)

When sin is pointed out to you, say, “ I would rather have Christ than that.” [Congregation: “Amen.”] Then where is the opportunity for any of us to get discouraged over our sins? Now some of the brethren here have done that very thing. They cam here free; but the Spirit of God brought up something they never saw before, went deeper than ever before, and revealed things they never saw before. And then, instead of thanking the Lord and letting the whole wicked business go, and thanking the Lord that they had ever so much more of Him than before, they began to get discouraged.

If the Lord has brought up sins to us that we never thought of before, that only shows that He is going down to the depths, and He will reach the bottom at last. And when He finds the last thing that is unclean, out of harmony with His will, and shows that to us, and we say, “ I would rather have the Lord than that”- then the work is complete, and the seal of the living God can be fixed upon that character.

Which would you rather have, the completeness, the perfect fullness of Jesus Christ, or have less than that with some of your sins covered up that you never knew of? So He has to dig down to the deep places we never dreamed of, because we cannot understand our hearts. Let Him go; let Him keep on His searching work.

Jones, General Conference Bulletin, 1893, p. 404