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Everyday Religion
77
The Lord is ready to help all who need help and feel that need.
If you see your poverty and wretchedness before God, and earnestly
take hold of His strength, He will help, and bless, and impart to you
strength, that by your good works you may lead others to glorify our
Father who is in heaven. Will you see yourself? Will you submit
your will and ways to God? Will you seek for pure and undefiled
religion before God? Oh, what will it avail you to pass along in this
wretched condition! You have no happiness yourself in this way
of living, and those around you have no happiness in your society.
Surely you make for yourself a great amount of misery; and such a
life as you have led is not worth much. Why not, then, be reconciled
to God? Die to self and be converted, that Jesus may heal you. He
wants to save you, if you will consent to be saved in His appointed
way. May the Lord help you to see and correct every error is my
prayer.
Brother L, you should be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to
wrath. Be careful of your words. Let not Satan make you a stumbling
block to others. There is a failure in your business transactions. You
slight your work. You get through with it as soon as you can, thinking
that it will do, when it is not well done. You lack thoroughness. You
should cultivate taste and order in all you do. That which is worth
doing at all is worth doing well. If you lack faithfulness in your
business life you will lack in your religious life, and in the day of
God the balances of the sanctuary will reveal the fact that you are
wanting. This lack is a reproach to your faith. Unbelievers charge
it to dishonesty, and say: “If it is such men that keep the Sabbath, I
don’t choose to be of that sort.”
As men prove your work and find it deficient in durability, nicety,
and order, they say you are a cheat, and many hard speeches have
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been made over it. Many oaths have been uttered over your work,
and God has been blasphemed. You do not mean to be dishonest,
but there is a slackness in your jobs. You think your employers are
too particular, that you know what will answer as well as they; and
hence this slack, loose, unfinished style attends your labor to a great
extent. You should improve in this matter. You should be honorable
in all your labor, and close up your work in a manner that will bear
the inspection of God. Scorn to slight any job. Be faithful in that
which is least.