Interest-Holding Features
Truth Should Charm—Let not your efforts be to follow the
world’s way but to follow God’s way. Outward display will not do
the work the Lord desires to have done to arouse the higher classes
to a conviction that they have heard the truth. Do not divest the truth
of its dignity and impressiveness by preliminaries that are more after
the order of the world than after the order of heaven. Let your hearers
understand that you do not hold Sunday evening meetings to charm
their senses with music and other things, but to preach the truth in all
its solemnity, that it may come to them as a warning, arousing them
from their deathlike sleep of self-indulgence. It is the naked truth that,
like a sharp, two-edged sword, cuts both ways....
Those who in their work for God depend on worldly plans for
gaining success will make a failure. The Lord calls for a change in
your manner of labor. He desires you to practice the lessons taught
in the life of Christ. Then the mold of Christ will be seen on all the
meetings that you hold.—
Letter 48, 1902
.
Creative Teaching—The Prince of teachers sought access to the
people by the pathway of their most familiar associations. He presented
the truth in such a way that ever after it was to His hearers intertwined
with their most hallowed recollections and sympathies. He taught
in a way that made them feel the completeness of His identification
with their interests and happiness. His instruction was so simple, His
illustrations so appropriate, His words so sympathetic and so cheerful,
that His hearers were charmed.
Christ drew many of his illustrations and lessons from the great
treasure house of nature. He plucked a lily and pointed His hearers
[149]
to its simplicity and marvelous beauty. He pointed to the grass of the
field, saying, “If God so clothe the grass of the field, which today is,
and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall He not much more clothe
you?” He desires us to see that the things of nature are an expression of
the love of God, and that, though marred by sin, they still speak to us
of the Eden home in which Adam and Eve were placed. He desires us
136