You may turn a flood into your millrace, but until it sweeps away
the logs and brushwood and dirt that obstruct the course, you
cannot get power to turn the wheels of your mill. The flood first
washes out the obstructions, and then you have power.

The great hindrance in the hearts of God's children to the power
of the Holy Ghost is inbred sin--that dark, defiant, evil
something within that struggles for the mastery of the soul, and
will not submit to be meek and lowly, and patient and forbearing
and holy, as was Jesus; and when the Holy Spirit comes, His first
work is to sweep away that something, that carnal principle, and
make free and clean all the channels of the soul.

Peter was filled with power on the day of Pentecost; but
evidently the purifying effect of the baptism made a deeper and
more lasting impression upon his mind than the empowering effect;
for years after, in that first Council in Jerusalem, recorded in
the fifteenth chapter of Acts, he stood up and told about the
spiritual baptism of Cornelius, the Roman centurion, and his
household, and he said: "And God, which knoweth the hearts, bare
them witness, giving them the Holy Ghost, even as He did unto us;
and put no difference between us and them, purifying their hearts
by faith." Here he calls attention not to power, but to purity,
as the effect of the baptism. When the Holy Ghost comes in to
abide, "the old man" goes out. Praise the Lord!

This destruction of inbred sin is made perfectly plain in that
wonderful Old Testament type of the baptism with the Holy Ghost
and fire recorded in the sixth chapter of Isaiah. The prophet was
a most earnest preacher of righteousness (see Isaiah i. 10-20),