Our Own God—Chapter 3

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The reason why so few people love God is because they do not have in them by nature the kind of love to love Him with. God can only be truly loved with His own love. We must have Divine love imparted into our hearts, by the operation of the Holy Spirit, before we can truly and Scripturally love God.
There are two words in the Greek Testament for love. One word, philos, signifies any natural human affection, which all men have. The other word, agape, signifies Divine love, the feelings and character of God. Just as we get human affection by our natural birth, so we get the Divine love by our spiritual birth into the Kingdom of God.

Our Own God—Chapters 4, 5, & 6

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The sun is another universally recognized emblem of God, both in Scripture and out of it. But the sun exists in a threefold form, as first the body of liquid fire, and then the light that is generated from that bosom of flame, and the heat penetrates and warms the solar system.


We recognize both in science and in practical life the distinction between the sun and the light and the heat, yet we know they are all of the same substance or force or motion. Sometimes they are all treated of as one, and at other times as being three distinct things, which is exactly the way the Scriptures and spiritually-minded Christians speak of God. Just as we say, “God is love,” so we say, “The sun is fire.” Christ is the light that comes from the Father to reveal all things as sunlight reveals creation, and the Holy Spirit is the invisible Person of God that softens hard hearts, melts the conscience, and with a gentle, powerful heat moves the will to choice and perseverance. Thus Jesus is called the “light,” the “wisdom,” the “knowledge,” the “revealer of God,” because it is His office to operate more directly upon our understanding, while it is the office of the Holy Spirit, as the Divine heat, to act more directly upon our own willpower, moving us to action, as it is the heat of the sun that in the Spring stirs all vegetation into action.

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Love Me and Let Me Go—Trudy Harvey Tait

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I say nothing. It’s all too sad, too unbelievable. “Allie was so demanding,” Paul goes on. I nod understandingly. “Everything had to be perfection—from clothes to husband. And when I would object just a little, she would chide me for not loving her as I had loved Madeline.” It was hard for him to get the last word out. “So her mom is blaming me for her death, well, blaming Dad even more so.”
I listen in silence, light dawning on me gradually. I begin to see the big picture and it scares me. I’m going home to face a father I do not know—a scared, frightened, disillusioned father, who seems to be the victim of his own sanctity.

Our Own God—Chapter 1, G.D. Watson

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1. We know God, and appropriate Him to ourselves, pre-eminently in our spiritual nature, in our love nature. God is love. The substance of His character is pure love, including every perfection which the Bible reveals of Him in an infinite degree, and doubtless there are may perfections in God of which we have no conception in our present state. It is because God is love, that it is through our love nature we know Him, and go deeper down into a blessed acquaintance with His person, and life, and ways, than through any other part of our nature.


It is through the organs and delicate senses of the body that we know the marvelous beauties and wonders of the material world, with its thousand-fold harmonies, and adaptations, its overawing grandeurs, its bewitching beauties, and beneficent utilities.
It is through our intellects that we become acquainted with the vast, radiant worlds of science, of mathematics, of the connection between causes and effects, of time, motion, numbers, poetry, and philosophy, that constitute an immense silent choir that fills creation with voiceless intellectual music. But creation with all its splendors is not our God, and the whole realm of mental knowledge is not our God, and these things are but the outer fringes of His presence, the first steps to an acquaintance with Him.
It is only through love, not mere natural affection, but through Divine love imparted to our heart nature, that we pass through the outer veil of creation, and know God through His beloved Son, Jesus, with a swiftness, a certainty and a personal communion, that surpasses all the boasted knowledge of science, and furnishes the only true interpretation of creation and providence.—G.D. Watson

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Lillias Trotter / Frederic Lucian Hosner / Alan Redpath

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Royal Insignia—Blog. no.4.

Royal Insignia, compiled by Edwin and Lillian Harvey, has been a blessing to pastors and Christian workers in various parts the world. It stresses the need for humility. It contains exhortations and testimonies from men and women down through the centuries who have proved the blessings and the necessity of a humble walk before God. Here are quotations from several of these saints:


Lillias Trotter:
“The water begins by grooving that trench at the lowest
level it can find, and it seeks all the time to make that level
lower still, carving for itself at last a veritable ravine till it has
reached the mission that was the meaning of the lonely path,
of the stripping bare of the ever-deepening emptiness. For the
last sweep of its ravine has sent it forth into the glory of its
mission. Away beyond stretched thousands upon thousands
of palm trees, waiting for the treasure that the water course has
brought down. The power of the water and the laying low of
the channel—between them they have opened this great gateway.
‘Thou didst cleave the earth with Thy rivers.’
“So with ourselves, instead of a life of conscious power,
ours will probably, if He is going to do any deep work in us, be
a path of humiliation, of stripping, of emptiness, where no
flesh may glory in His presence.
“The way goes downward and downward into the valley
of humiliation as the self-life stands gradually revealed by
God’s presence! On and on, instead of the sense of power,
there comes only more and more the overwhelming sense of
insufficiency—for in the spiritual, as in the natural world, if
you want to seek water, look in the very lowest place that you
can find. Whatever the ministry may be, it is the same story,
the stream-bed going lower and lower, with nothing to glory
in but the wonderful glory of bearing the life-giving water.
‘Death worketh in us, but life in you,’ the water courses say.
“Yes, the way ‘goes downward and downward,’ while
natural man’s whole tendency is to raise himself in arrogant
pride.” (p. 34).

Frederic Lucian Hosner:
“ By failure and defeat made wise,
We come to know, at length,
What strength within our weakness lies,
What weakness in our strength.
What inward peace is born of strife;
What power of being spent;
What wings unto our upward life
Is noble discontent.
O Lord, we need Thy shaming look
That burns all low desire;
The discipline of Thy rebuke
Shall be refining fire!”
— (p. 30)

Alan Redpath:
I tell you, my friend, if you are a Christian leader, or in the
pulpit, or singing, or teaching a Sunday School class, or if you
are doing anything for the Lord—it isn’t the big shot, the big
man that God wants—it’s the broken man. God uses the man
whom He has crushed until he is nothing but a door mat for
people to walk on in order that they might come to Jesus. . . .
I honestly believe that one of the curses of twentieth
century evangelical Christianity is that we are not destitute.
We’ve become desperately self-sufficient. Indeed, so great is
the craze for higher education that we train young people
today to be self-sufficient, to major in the things in which they
will succeed—to be a big shot.
I’m not saying anything about education. Get the very
best you can, but I want to remind you of what Paul said about
self-sufficiency. Paul was a man of outstanding education, the
brilliant theologian of his day, and he said, “Our sufficiency is
of God.” Two thousand years have gone by and the situation
is no different. Our sufficiency, our help, our hope is not in
programs, not in a theological degree—not in anything but the
Lord! (p. 38).
Royal Insignia is published by Harvey Christian Publishers and is available in their Online Christian Bookstore.

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Fénelon / Patricia St. John

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Royal Insignia—Blog No. 2
Royal Insignia by E. & L. Harvey focuses on the theme of humility Here is what several saints of the past had to say on this subject:

Archbishop Fénelon: “He who is conscious,” he said, “that he is lowering himself has not yet reached his true place, which is below all lowering. Such as these are very proud in their humility, which, indeed, is often but a subtle spirit of vain glory. And this is not the humility which will enter into Heaven, unless it acquires pure charity, which alone is worthy of God, and which He delights to fill with Himself.


“They who are really thus filled never feel either humbled or lowered, for they count themselves as below all humiliation. Before they could humble themselves, they must rise from whence they are, and they would not leave that place to which
God has called them. They are not humbled by men’s contempt or condemnation, neither do they triumph in any applause, for neither concerns them. They think that One only, in taking upon Him the nature of man, humbled Himself.” (p. 10).

Patricia St. John:

“My Master has an elixir that turns
All base and worthless substances to gold.
From rubble stones He fashions palaces
Most beautiful and stately to behold.
He garners with a craftsman’s skilful care
All that we break, and weeping cast away.
His eyes see uncut opals in the rock
And shapely vessels in our trampled clay.
The sum of life’s lost opportunities,
The broken friendships, and the wasted years,
These are His raw materials; His hands
Rest on the fragments, weld them with His tears.

“A patient Alchemist!—He bides His time,
Broods while the South winds breathe, the North winds blow,
And weary self, at enmity with self,
Works out its own destruction, bitter slow.
Then when our dreams have dwindled into smoke,
Our gallant highways petered out in mire,
Our airy castles crumbled into dust,
Leaving us stripped of all save fierce desire,
He comes, with feet deliberate and slow,
Who counts a contrite heart His sacrifice.

“(No other bidders rise to stake their claims
He only on our ruins sets a price).
And stooping very low engraves with care
His Name, indelible, upon our dust;
And from the ashes of our self-despair
Kindles a flame of hope and humble trust.
He seeks no second site on which to build,
But on the old foundation, stone by stone,
Cementing sad experience with grace,
Fashions a stronger temple of His own.”
—Used by permission. (p. 18).

Royal Insignia is published by Harvey Christian Publishers and is available in their Online Christian Bookstore.

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Thomas Kelly / Martin Luther

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Royal Insignia—Blog No. 3
Royal Insignia by E. & L. Harvey, in its very title, focuses on the role of humility in the Christian’s life. It is indeed, as many past saints have witnessed, both by their lifestyle as well as by word and pen, the badge of every true follower of the lowly Jesus. Here are several quotations from this book, revealing what past saints have had to say on the subject:

Thomas Kelly: “Growth in humility is a measure of our growth in the habit of the Godward-directed mind. And he only is near to God who is exceedingly humble. The last depths of holy and voluntary poverty are not in financial poverty, important as that is: they are in poverty of spirit, in meekness and lowliness of soul. . . .“Humility does not rest, in final count, upon bafflement and discouragement and self-disgust at our shabby lives, a brow-beaten, dog- slinking attitude. It rests upon the disclosure of the consummate wonder of God, upon finding that only God counts, that all our own self-originated intentions are works of straw. And so in lowly humility we must stick close to the Root and count our own powers as nothing except as they are enslaved in His power. (pp. 23-24).

Martin Luther: “I pray you leave my name alone, and not call yourselves Lutherans, but Christians. Who is Luther? My doctrine is not mine. I have not been crucified for anyone. Paul would not that anyone should call himself of Paul or of Peter, but of Christ. How then does it befit me, a miserable bag of dust and ashes, to give my name to the children of Christ? Leave, my dear friends, these party names and distinctions. Away with them all and let us call ourselves only Christians after Him from Whom our salvation comes.” (p. 28).

Royal Insignia is published by Harvey Christian Publishers and is available in their Online Christian Bookstore.

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Books by authors other than Harvey published by Harvey Christian Publishers.

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Harvey Christian Publishers derives its name from the authors of at least thirty of the books which they publish: Edwin and/or Lillian Harvey. However, it has always been their aim to make available to the reading public, the lives and writings of Christians of the past, whose devotion still inspire and provoke us to follow more closely the Master we profess to serve. And so, in addition to the compilations and biographies compiled and written by Edwin and Lillian Harvey, they have also reprinted books by other authors whose lives and writings urge the reader to get to know our Lord more intimately.


The books of G. D. Watson, who has been sometimes termed “The Apostle to the Sanctified,” falls into this category. The first book printed by Harvey Christian Publishers was Our Own God which is considered by many to be Watson’s best book. Then followed Soul Food, Pot of Oil, Bridehood Saints, Steps to the Throne, White Robes, God’s First Words, Pure Gold, and Tribulation Worketh—a compilation from Watson’s writings on the subject of the suffering and the blessings it can bring to the Christian.
The life and letters of Gerhardt Tersteegen, a German reformed writer who greatly influenced the pietism of his day, is also among the reprints published by Harvey Christian Publishers. The Sermons and Hymns of Tersteegen have also been published.
Other biographies are the lives of Amanda Smith, Count Zinzendorf, Henry Breeden (Striking Incidents of Saving Grace), and William Carvosso.
Harvey Christian Publishers have also reprinted the Letters of John Fletcher, the godly Vicar of Madeley, England, who worked closely with John Wesley and might well have become his successor had he not died before Wesley. The book written for boys, Eric by F. W. Farrar has also been reprinted.
Then there are a few books by more contemporary authors. Eyes Opened is a book by Emil Kremer, founder of the French branch of the Faith Mission of Scotland. This book deals with dangers of the occult and its influence even on the lives of Christians. Heart Breathings by Leonard Ravenhill, well known author of Why Revival Tarries, is also among the books published by Harvey Christian Publishers. It was given in manuscript form to Lillian Harvey before Leonard’s death and is a collection of his poems and short sayings. We also carry several other books by Ravenhill which are published by other publishers.
Other publications are: Elisha, written by Robert Cox, a Welsh evangelist and personal friend of the Harveys; Missing the Way by Patricia St. John; Jessica’s First Prayer by Hesba Stretton; Bloomhardt’s Battle, by Frank Boshold; and several other booklets written by a variety of authors.
All the books mentioned above are available in Harvey Christian Publishers’ Online Christian Bookstore.

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Royal Insignia, Edwin and Lillian Harvey

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Royal Insignia by E. & L. Harvey focuses on the theme of humility which is in effect, the insignia or badge of every true follower of Christ. This book is a compilation of testimonies and exhortations from past saints who discovered that the way down is always the way up. Here is what John Milton had to say in the first reading:

“It had been a small mastery for Him to have drawn out His legions into array, and flank them with His thunder; therefore He sent foolishness to confute wisdom, weakness to bind strength, despisedness to vanquish pride; and this is the great mystery of the Gospel, made good in Christ Himself, Who, as He testifies, came not to be ministered to but to minister; and must be fulfilled in all His ministers till His second coming.—(p. 8)

In the second reading entitled “The infallible Proof,” Andrew Murray puts it this way: “The chief mark of counterfeit holiness is the lack of humility. Every seeker after holiness needs to be on his guard, lest unconsciously what was begun in the Spirit is perfected in the flesh, and pride creep in where its presence is least expected.” P. 9.

And here is Charles Spurgeon: “It seems that Jehovah’s way is to lower those whom He means to raise and to strip those whom He intends to clothe. If it is His way, it is the wisest and best way. If I am now enduring the bringing low, I may well rejoice, because I see in it the preface to the lifting up. The more we are humbled by grace, the more we shall be exalted in glory. That impoverishment which will be overruled for our enrichment is to be welcomed. “Oh, Lord, Thou hast taken me down of late, and made me feel my insignificance and sin. It is not a pleasant experience, but I pray Thee make it a profitable one to me. Oh, that Thou wouldst thus fit me to bear a greater weight of delight and of usefulness, and when I am ready for it, then grant it to me, for Christ’s sake! Amen.” (p. 14).

“Royal Insignia” is published by Harvey Christian Publishers and is available in their Online Christian Bookstore

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George Herbert and Marguerite Estaver

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“Since then, these three wait on Thy throne,
Ease, Power, and Love, I value prayer so,
That were I to leave but one,
Wealth, fame, endowments, virtues,–all should go;
I and dear prayer would together dwell,
And quickly gain, for each inch lost, an hell.”
–George Herbert. How They Prayed Vol. 2, p. 104.

“God’s goodness
Came to me just now on a friend’s prayer.
I clearly knew them both.
Strange!
A [prayer (that priceless gift); given me,
Arrives, laden with God.
‘Are prayers I wonder,
Empty dishes we present to God
For conveyance of His great goodness?
Why, then, aren’t more prayers given?
Why are we stingy with a prayer
When we need prayer so much ourselves?”
–Marguerite Estaver. (How They Prayed Vol. 2, p. 49. Used by permission as published in the Wesleyan Methodist).

How They Prayed Volume Two is the second in a three volume series which are published by Harvey Christian Publishers and is available in their Online Christian Bookstore.

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