Entire Consecration
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involve care; you have not had a willingness to do any work for Christ,
be it ever so humble. God will bring you over the ground again and
again until with humble heart and subdued mind you bear the test that
He inflicts and are wholly sanctified to His service and work. Then
you may win immortal life. You may be a fully developed man in
Christ Jesus, or you may be a spiritual dwarf, gaining no victories. My
brother, which will you choose? Will you live a life of self-denial and
self-sacrifice, doing your work with cheerfulness and joy, perfecting
Christian character, and pressing on for the immortal reward? or will
you live for yourself and lose heaven? God will not be trifled with;
Christ accepts no divided service. He asks for all. It will not do to
withhold anything. He has purchased you with an infinite price, and
He requires that all you have shall be yielded to Him a willing offering.
If you are fully consecrated to Him in heart and life, faith will take the
place of doubts, and confidence the place of distrust and unbelief.
My brother, you are in positive danger through neglecting to carry
out health reform more strictly in your own life and in your family.
Your blood is impure, and you are still corrupting and inflaming it
by the gratification of taste. Never be betrayed into indulging in the
use of stimulants; for this will result not only in reaction and loss
of physical strength, but in a benumbed intellect. Strictly temperate
habits in eating and drinking, with firm trust in God, will improve
your physical, mental, and moral health. You are of a highly excitable
temperament. You have but little self-control and under excitement
frequently say and do things which you afterward regret. You should
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call a determined will to your aid in the warfare against your own
inclinations and propensities. You need to keep the avenues of your
soul open to the reception of light and truth. But when something
occurs to test and prove you, prejudice frequently comes in, and you
rise at once against what you deem a restriction of your liberty or an
infringement upon your rights.
The word of God plainly presents before us this truth, that our
physical natures will be brought into warfare with the spiritual. The
apostle charges us to abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against
the soul. Every perverted appetite becomes a warring lust. Appetite
indulged to the injury of physical strength causes disease of the soul.
The lust which the apostle mentions is not confined to the violation
of the seventh commandment, but every indulgence of the taste which