The only men on earth who enjoy perfect freedom are the men who have clean hearts, for they not only know that they _ought_ to do the will of God, but they _want_ to do it and they _like_ to do it and moreover they have a power that _enables_ them to do it. On the other hand, in our jails and hospitals you will find people who thought that they could do as they liked, but they have discovered that they were mistaken. _Cleansing: a Crisis_ But how am I to get this clean heart? Peter answers, "Cleansing their hearts _by faith_" (Acts xv. 9). Cleansing is God's work, and the condition on which God will do His work is "faith" on our part. There is only one way of getting anything from God, and that is by faith. One obtained forgiveness and the new birth by faith, and one obtains cleansing of the heart by faith too. You may, you will, get "cleansing" the moment you definitely _trust_ Christ for it. "We aye get what we gang in for" was one of Duncan Mathieson's favorite expressions; and along the line of God's revealed will how true it is! If you will only venture _now_ on Christ for "cleansing from all unrighteousness," He will do it for you _now_. "Wilt thou not be made clean? when shall it once be?" (Jer. xiii. 27.) Why not _now_? for "cleansing" is a _crisis_ and not a _process_; but, as Principal Moule, of Cambridge, has very tersely put it, "Cleansing is a crisis with a view to a process." It is just here that multitudes of God's people miss the track. "Sanctification is the _work_ of God's free grace."[1] Of course it is; it is a "growth," a gradual process; but "cleansing" is not "sanctification." The latter, in the sense in which it is being used here, is a theological term embracing all the Spirit's work in the believer between the cross and the crown; but "cleansing" is an _act_. While sanctification is a "growth," "cleansing" is one of the conditions of growth, and the very reason why some who hold most tenaciously by the gradual theory of sanctification are "growing in grace" so very slowly, is that they have not attended to one of the most essential conditions of growth, viz., this "cleansing." "But," some one objects, "this is not in the Standards of our Church?" That may be; but it is in the Bible. To quote the words of the saintly Dr. Andrew Bonar in another connection, "I believe all that is in our Standards, for I find all that is in our Standards in the Bible; but I believe _more_ than is in our Standards, for I find some things in my Bible that are not in the Standards;" for the simple and very obvious reason that you cannot get a quart into a pint measure. While every honest Churchman believes that all that is in the Standards of the Church to which he belongs is in the Bible, no one in his sane senses believes that _everything_ in the Bible is to be found in the Standards. The doctrine of a "clean heart" is one of these things. [1: Shorter Catechism, No. 35.]