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Selected Messages Book 1
order and perfect righteousness, after God’s own similitude. On these
grounds alone will our works bear the test of the judgment....
Christianity is the revealing of the tenderest affection for one an-
other. The Christian life is made up of Christian duties and Christian
privileges. Christ in His wisdom gave to His church in its infancy
a system of sacrifices and offerings, of which He Himself was the
foundation, and by which His death was prefigured. Every sacrifice
pointed to Him as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world,
that all might understand that the wages of sin is death. In Him was
no sin, yet He died for our sins.
The symbolic system of ceremonies worked to one end—the vin-
dication of the law of God, that all who believe in Christ might come
“in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God,
unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness
of Christ” (
Ephesians 4:13
). In Christian work there is ample room
for the activity of all the gifts God has given. All are to be united in
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carrying out God’s requirements, revealing at every advance step that
faith which works by love and purifies the soul.
Christ is to receive supreme love from the beings He has created.
And He requires also that man shall cherish a sacred regard for his
fellow beings. Every soul saved will be saved through love, which
begins with God. True conversion is a change from selfishness to
sanctified affection for God and for one another. Will Seventh-day
Adventists now make a thorough reformation, that their sin-stained
souls may be cleansed from the leprosy of selfishness?
I must speak the truth to all. Those who have accepted the light
from God’s Word are never, never to leave an impression upon human
minds that God will serve with their sins. His Word defines sin as the
transgression of the law.—
Manuscript 16, 1901
.
In Hard Places
Often God’s soldiers find themselves brought into hard and difficult
places, they know not why. But are they to relax their hold because
difficulties arise? Is their faith to diminish because they cannot see
their way through the darkness? God forbid. They are to cherish an
abiding sense of God’s power to uphold them in their work. They