True Motive in Service
71
through their capabilities. Their will must be submitted to His will;
they must act with His Spirit. Then it is no more they that live, but
Christ that lives in them. He who does not give himself wholly to God
is under the control of another power, listening to another voice, whose
suggestions are of an entirely different character. Half-and-half service
places the human agent on the side of the enemy as a successful ally
of the hosts of darkness. When men who claim to be soldiers of Christ
engage with the confederacy of Satan, and help along his side, they
prove themselves enemies of Christ. They betray sacred trusts. They
form a link between Satan and the true soldiers, so that through these
agencies the enemy is constantly working to steal away the hearts of
Christ’s soldiers.
The strongest bulwark of vice in our world is not the iniquitous life
of the abandoned sinner or the degraded outcast; it is that life which
otherwise appears virtuous, honorable, and noble, but in which one sin
is fostered, one vice indulged. To the soul that is struggling in secret
against some giant temptation, trembling upon the very verge of the
precipice, such an example is one of the most powerful enticements
to sin. He who, endowed with high conceptions of life and truth and
honor, does yet willfully transgress one precept of God’s holy law, has
perverted His noble gifts into a lure to sin. Genius, talent, sympathy,
even generous and kindly deeds, may become decoys of Satan to entice
[95]
other souls over the precipice of ruin for this life and the life to come.
“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any
man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that
is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the
pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world.”
1 John 2:15, 16
.
“Be not anxious.”—Matthew 6:25, R. V.
He who has given you life knows your need of food to sustain it.
He who created the body is not unmindful of your need of raiment.
Will not He who has bestowed the greater gift bestow also what is
needed to make it complete?
Jesus pointed His hearers to the birds as they warbled their carols
of praise, unencumbered with thoughts of care, for “they sow not,
neither do they reap;” and yet the great Father provides for their needs.
And He asks, “Are not ye of much more value than they?” R.V.