Finding God -- A Book Toward That End for Maria

I have written some posts regarding "finding God" and have suggested books and videos toward that end. Well, finding God really isn't an end, it is the beginning. I remember Maria asked for a list of books which have framed my view. I think one I overlooked was Freedom From A Self-Centered Life / Dying To Self: Selections From The Writings Of William Law, edited by Andrew Murray (1977; Minneapolis, MN: Dimension Books, Bethany Fellowship, Inc.).

Those "writings" of William Law are his book Spirit of Love. Law lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, so his writing is bit difficult to read. Dying To Self is worth the effort of wrestling through the archaic phrasing, grammar, and syntax. Law presents the search for God in Spirit of Love as pupilage between a spiritually mature teacher and his students. Murray focuses on the practical end of this "seeking after a life in which the Spirit of Love really fills and rules the soul." This would be the fruit of one's baptism in the Holy Spirit.

Some excerpts:

"...as he expounds the truth, and shows how in the humility of the Lamb of God lay the secret of the work He did, and the salvation He gives, and how the sinking down before God in humility, meekness, patience, and resignation to God is the very perfection of faith in Christ, and the one only condition of God’s doing His work in us, we are compelled to acknowledge that here is indeed the place of blessing." (Note the phrase, “sinking down before God in humility, meekness, patience, and resignation to God." That is the lesson being driven home.)

"He (Law) begins with God as the origin of all love, because He is an eternal and immutable will to all goodness. Let the reader hold fast this definition of the nature of God. It is one of Law’s axioms from which he makes two important deductions: that in virtue of His very nature, God delights to give all goodness, happiness, and blessing, and can give nothing else; and that there can be no possible good in any creature but what God gives...a will to all goodness toward others at all times and on all occasions."

"For were there nothing but this divine love alive in you, your befallen flesh and blood would be in danger of being quite burnt up by it. What you have said of yourself, you have spoken in great sincerity, but in a total ignorance of yourself, and the true nature of the Spirit of divine Love. You are as yet only charmed with the sight, or rather the sound, of it; its real birth is as yet unfelt and unfound in you."

"14.The One True and Immediate Way of Dying to Self
"Theophilus.—If you ask what this one, true, simple, plain, immediate, and unerring way is, it is the way of patience, meekness, humility, and resignation to God."

"Commentary
"In the first sentence of the above passage you have a straight answer to the question, What is the true way of dying to self? How can a man be led to understand and desire and find what the death to sin and self in Christ gives him? It is the way of patience, meekness, humility, resignation to God. Dying to self, turning away and ceasing from it, refusing to be led by it, can be effected in no other way but just bowing low before God in the confession of sin and impotence and the patient waiting for His work in us. The whole of the remainder of this dialogue is devoted to the exposition and enforcing of this one lesson. He never wearies of repeating the expression: patience, meekness, humility, and resignation to God; in what remains of the dialogue it occurs some thirty times.

"Here you have the truth and perfection of dying to self; it is in this state of heart alone that it is to be found."