Our Own God

Book excerpt: Because of his clear understanding of the workings and ways of God in the soul, G. D. Watson has been called “the apostle to the sanctified.” Our Own God is a great example of the way in which Watson was able to pass on this understanding to his readers with great ease and clarity. Here is a paragraph from the first chapter: “God is our own in a peculiar, individual way, privately and personally, so as to thrill us with a joy with which no stranger can intermeddle. God can never be to any other creature in all the universe just exactly what he is to us. Have we ever thought for five minutes of the grandeur of being created with a unique, individual personality all to ourselves, with a private nature, a great soul world in ourselves, a distinct orb of conscious, immortal existence, and walled in from all other creatures, with a deep privacy of nature into which no one in all the universe can enter except the Lord our God, our loving Creator? Probably this is the greatest glory of our creation, that each of us has in our personality a sacred sanctuary in the ocean depths of our souls, with a door that never opens except to the touch of that eternal, blessed one who created us out of his love, and then redeemed us from an awful fall out of what seems even a greater love than creation.”