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Messages to Young People
intelligent piety. If they give to pleasure and amusement the precious
mind that should be strengthened by high and noble purposes, they
degrade the powers that God has given them, and are guilty before
Him, because they fail to improve their talents by wise use.
Their dwarfed spirituality is an offense to God. They taint and
corrupt the minds of those with whom they associate. By their words
and actions they encourage a careless inattention to sacred things. Not
only do they imperil their own souls, but their example is detrimental
to all with whom they come in contact. They are utterly incompetent
to represent Christ. Servants of sin, careless, reckless, and foolish,
they scatter away from Him.
Those who are satisfied with low attainments fail of being workers
together with God. To those who let the mind drift where it will drift
if not guarded, Satan makes suggestions which so fill the mind that
they are trained in his army to decoy other souls. They may make a
profession of religion, they may have a form of godliness; but they are
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lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.
Cleverness not Piety
There are youth who have a certain kind of cleverness, which is
acknowledged and admired by their associates, but their ability is not
sanctified. It is not strengthened and solidified by the graces and trials
of experience, and God cannot use it to benefit humanity and glorify
His name. Under the guise of godliness, their powers are being used
to erect false standards, and the unconverted look to them as an excuse
for their wrong course of action. Satan leads them to amuse their
associates by their nonsense and so-called wit. Everything that they
undertake is cheapening; for they are under the control of the tempter,
who directs and fashions their characters, that they may do his work.
They have ability, but it is untrained; they have capacity, but it
is unimproved. Talents have been given them; but they misuse and
degrade them by folly, and drag others down to their own low level.
Christ paid the ransom for their souls by self-denial, self-sacrifice,
humiliation, by the shame and reproach He endured. This He did that
He might rescue them from the bondage of sin, from the slavery of a
master who cares for them only as he can use them to ruin souls. But