Chapter 37—Ministers of the Gospel
Brother A,
I have been shown that you are not prepared to labor successfully
in the ministry. At one time a measure of success attended your
efforts; but while this should have inspired you with greater earnestness
and zeal, the effect was the opposite. A sense of the goodness of
God should have led you to continue to labor in humility and to be
distrustful of self. But after your ordination, especially, you began
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to feel that you were a full-grown minister, capable of presenting the
truth in large places; and you became indolent, feeling no burden for
souls, and your labor since that time has been of but little value to
the cause of God. Possessing physical strength, you do not realize
that you are as responsible for the use you make of it as the man of
means is for the use of his money. You do not love manual labor; yet
you have a constitution which requires severe physical taxation for
the preservation of health as well as for the quickening of the mental
powers. So far as health is concerned, physical exercise would be
of the greatest value to all our ministers; and whenever they can be
released from active service in the ministry they should feel it a duty
to engage in physical labor for the support of their families.
Brother A, you have idled away time in sleep that instead of being
essential to your health has been detrimental to it. The precious hours
you have lost, doing no good to yourself or to anyone else, stand
against you in the Ledger of Heaven. Your name was shown me under
the heading: “Slothful Servants.” Your work will not bear the test of
the judgment. You have spent so much precious time in sleep that all
your powers seem paralyzed. Health may be earned by proper habits
of life and may be made to yield interest and compound interest. But
this capital, more precious than any bank deposit, may be sacrificed
by intemperance in eating and drinking, or by leaving the organs to
rust from inaction. Pet indulgences must be given up; laziness must be
overcome.
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