The Heart-Cry of Jesus

The longing this book addresses will feel familiar to anyone who has finished a church service still feeling empty. Rees wrote for Christians who had crossed the threshold of conversion but sensed there was more, something deeper, something holier, something that transformed not just their standing before God but their actual living. He names what many feel but cannot articulate: that believing the right things has not necessarily made them the people they long to become. This is not a systematic theology text. It is a passionate argument for what Rees calls "entire sanctification", the belief that beyond the moment of salvation lies another grace, a purifying work of the Holy Spirit that empties the heart of its remaining self-will and fills it with the very nature of Christ. Rees distinguishes sharply between being converted and being sanctified, between forgiveness and holiness, between starting the Christian life and living it with power. Written in the Wesley tradition with urgent, revivalistic prose, the book reads less like a treatise than an impassioned letter from one Christian to another, pleading that the deeper life is not merely for the unusually devoted but for all who will seek it.