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Testimonies for the Church Volume 3
with His church, that your confidence might be less in yourself and
greater in others whom He is leading out to advance His work.
God hears every sincere prayer. He would place you in connection
with His work that He might bring you more directly to the light.
And unless you should seal your vision against evidence and light
you would be persuaded that if you were more distrustful of yourself
and less distrustful of your brethren you would be more prosperous
in God. It is God who has led you through strait places. He had
a purpose in this, that tribulation might work in you patience, and
patience experience, and experience hope. He permitted trials to come
upon you, that, through them, you might experience the peaceable
fruits of righteousness.
Peter denied the Man of Sorrows in His acquaintance with grief
in the hour of His humiliation. But he afterward repented and was
reconverted. He had true contrition of soul and gave himself afresh to
his Saviour. With blinding tears he makes his way to the solitudes of
the Garden of Gethsemane and there prostrates himself where he saw
his Saviour’s prostrate form when the bloody sweat was forced from
His pores by His great agony. Peter remembers with remorse that he
was asleep when Jesus prayed during those fearful hours. His proud
heart breaks, and penitential tears moisten the sods so recently stained
with the bloody sweat drops of God’s dear Son. He left that garden
a converted man. He was ready then to pity the tempted. He was
humbled and could sympathize with the weak and erring. He could
caution and warn the presumptuous, and was fully fitted to strengthen
his brethren.
God led you through affliction and trials that you might have more
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perfect trust and confidence in Him, and that you might think less of
your own judgment. You can bear adversity better than prosperity.
The all-seeing eye of Jehovah detected in you much dross that you
considered gold and too valuable to throw away. The enemy’s power
over you had at times been direct and very strong. The delusions of
spiritualism had entangled your faith, perverted your judgment, and
confused your experience. God in His providence would try you, to
purify you, as the sons of Levi, that you might offer to Him an offering
in righteousness.
Self is mingled too much with all your labors. Your will must be
molded by God’s will, or you will fall into grievous temptations. I saw