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Selected Messages Book 2
To Respect and Honor the Pioneers
A few of the old standard-bearers are still living. I am intensely
desirous that our brethren and sisters shall respect and honor these
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pioneers. We present them before you as men who know what trials
are. I am instructed to say, Let every believer respect the men who
acted a prominent part during the early days of the message, and who
have borne trials and hardships and many privations. These men have
grown gray in service. Not long hence they will receive their reward....
The Lord desires His servants who have grown gray in the advo-
cacy of truth to stand faithful and true, bearing their testimony in favor
of the law.
God’s tried servants must not be put in hard places. Those who
served their Master when the work went hard, those who endured
poverty and remained faithful in the love of the truth when our numbers
were small, are ever to be honored and respected. Let those who have
come into the truth in later years take heed to these words. God desires
all to heed this caution.—
Letter 47, 1902
.
Aged Workers to Be Teachers and Counselors
God calls upon His aged servants to act as counselors, to teach the
young men what to do in cases of emergency. Aged workers are to
bear, as did John, a living testimony of real experience. And when
these faithful workers are laid away to rest, with the words, “Blessed
are the dead which die in the Lord” (
Revelation 14:13
), there should
be found in our schools men and women who can take the standard
and raise it in new places.
While the aged standard-bearers are in the field, let those who
have been benefited by their labors care for and respect them. Do not
load them down with burdens. Appreciate their advice, their words of
counsel. Treat them as fathers and mothers who have borne the burden
of the work. The workers who have in the past anticipated the needs
of the cause do a noble work when, in the place of carrying all the
burdens themselves, they lay them upon the shoulders of younger men
and women, and educate them as Elijah educated Elisha.
David offered to God a tribute of gratitude for the divine teaching
and guidance he had received. “O God, thou hast taught me from my
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youth” (
Psalm 71:17
), he declared. Those who in the history of the