Applying Mrs Edwards to TodayTo continue with Mrs Mumford's statement. She next applies what she claimed to be Mrs Edward's experience as she related it, to today. "So this thing is taking people over in the most remarkable way, and at the end of this time Jonathan Edward's wife said, 'I was aware of a delightful sense of the immediate presence of the Lord. And I became conscious of His nearness to me and of my dearness to Him.'" She says that she believes that this is the key to all that is happening. "That the Lord in His mercies pouring out His Spirit in order to persuade us His people of 'His nearness to me and of my dearness to Him'". But once again Mrs Mumford is presenting us with a totally misleading statement. She has put together two separate quotations from Mrs Edwards, and neither of them were said "at the end of this time" (referring to Mrs Edwards' 17 days of special blessing). It was towards the end of the evening of Wednesday 27th January, that Mrs Edwards recorded, "my mind was deeply impressed with the love of Christ, and a sense of His immediate presence, that I could with difficulty refrain from rising from my seat, and leaping for joy." It was after the experience of the next day which I have quoted in full above, that she stated, "I continued in a constant, clear, and lively sense of the heavenly sweetness of Christ's excellent and transcendent love, of His nearness to me, and of my dearness to Him; with an inexpressibly sweet calmness of soul in an entire rest in Him." Later she was to say, "I had a deep sense of the awful presence of God, and felt with what humility and reverence we ought to behave ourselves before Him.... It seemed to me, that we ought greatly to revere the presence of God, and to behave ourselves with the utmost solemnity and humility, when so great and holy a God was so remarkably present, and to rejoice before Him with trembling." (Wednesday 1st February). I am very conscious of the fact that we too can only take mere extracts from Mrs Edward's full testimony, recognising the disadvantage of doing so.. It is indeed a wonderful and most amazing testimony, but it doesn't support the experiences and claims being made for what is happening now in Toronto. Inexact and out of context quotations surely undermine the integrity of Mrs Mumford's claims.
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Copyright © 2002 Homerton Baptist Church. |
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