Intimate Friendship With Worldlings
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The lack of firmness and self-denial in your characters is a serious
drawback in obtaining a genuine religious experience that will not be
sliding sand. Firmness and integrity of purpose should be cultivated.
These qualities are positively necessary to a successful Christian life.
If you have integrity of soul you will not be swayed from the right. No
motive will be sufficient to move you from the straight line of duty;
you will be loyal and true to God. The pleadings of affection and love,
the yearnings of friendship, will not move you to turn aside from truth
and duty; you will not sacrifice duty to inclination.
If you, my brother, are allured to unite your life interest with a
young, inexperienced girl, who is really deficient in education in the
common, practical, daily duties of life, you make a mistake; but this
deficiency is small compared with her ignorance in regard to her duty
to God. She has not been destitute of light; she has had religious
privileges, and yet she has not felt her wretched sinfulness without
Christ. If, in your infatuation, you can repeatedly turn from the prayer
meeting, where God meets with His people, in order to enjoy the
society of one who has no love for God and who sees no attractions in
the religious life, how can you expect God to prosper such a union?
Be not in haste. Early marriages should not be encouraged. If either
young women or young men have no respect for the claims of God,
if they fail to heed the claims which bind them to religion, there will
be danger that they will not properly regard the claims of the husband
or of the wife. The habit of frequently being in the society of the one
of your choice, and that, too, at the sacrifice of religious privileges
and of your hours of prayer, is dangerous; you sustain a loss that you
cannot afford. The habit of sitting up late at night is customary; but it
is not pleasing to God, even if you are both Christians. These untimely
hours injure health, unfit the mind for the next day’s duties, and have
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an appearance of evil. My brother, I hope you will have self-respect
enough to shun this form of courtship. If you have an eye single to
the glory of God you will move with deliberate caution. You will not
suffer lovesick sentimentalism to so blind your vision that you cannot
discern the high claims that God has upon you as a Christian.
Dear youth, I address myself to you three. Let it be your aim to
glorify God and attain His moral likeness. Invite the Spirit of God to
mold your characters. Now is your golden opportunity to wash your
robes of character and make them white in the blood of the Lamb. I