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Overcoming Bad Habits, August 9
Keep thyself pure.
1 Timothy 5:22
.
To know what constitutes purity of mind, soul, and body is an important
part of education.
When the character is lacking in purity, when sin has become a part of
the character, it has a bewitching power that is equal to the intoxicating glass
of liquor. The power of self-control and reason is overborne by practices
that defile the whole being; and if these sinful practices are continued, the
brain is enfeebled and diseased, and loses its balance. Such ones are a curse
to themselves and to all who have any connection with them....
Bad habits are more easily formed than good habits, and the bad habits
are given up with more difficulty. The natural depravity of the heart accounts
for this well-known fact—that it takes far less labor to demoralize the youth,
to corrupt their ideas of moral and religious character, than to engraft upon
their character the enduring, pure, and uncorrupted habits of righteousness
and truth. Self-indulgence, love of pleasure, enmity, pride, self-esteem,
envy, jealousy, will grow spontaneously, without example and teaching. In
our present fallen state all that is needed is to give up the mind and character
to its natural tendencies. In the natural world, give up a field to itself and
you will see it covered with briers and thorns; but if it yields precious grain
or beautiful flowers, care and unremitting labor must be applied.
Now we present before you the necessity of constant resistance to evil.
All heaven is interested in men and women whom God has valued so much
as to give His beloved Son to die to redeem them. No other creature that
God has made is capable of such improvement, such refinement, such
nobility as man. Then when men become blunted by their own debasing
passions, sunken in vice, what a specimen for God to look upon! Man
cannot conceive what he may be and what he may become. Through the
grace of Christ he is capable of constant mental progress. Let the light of
truth shine into his mind and the love of God be shed abroad in his heart
and he may, through the grace Christ has died to impart to him, be a man of
power—a child of earth but an heir of immortality.
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