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Testimonies for the Church Volume 4
expect the power of God to work with our efforts when we have so
little consecration to the work?
My brother, I was shown that your standard of piety is not high.
You need to have a deeper sense of your responsibility to God and to
society. Then you will not feel satisfied with yourself, nor will you
try to excuse yourself by pointing to the deficiencies of others. You
have not so thorough a knowledge of the truth that you should relax
your efforts to qualify yourself to instruct others. You need to have a
new conversion in order to become an able, devoted minister of the
gospel, a man of piety and holiness. If you should devote all your
energies to the cause of God, you would give none too much. It is a
lame offering at best that any of us can make. If you are continually
reaching out after God, and seeking a deeper consecration to Him, you
will be gathering new ideas from searching the Scriptures for yourself.
In order to comprehend the truth, you should discipline and train
the mind, and seek continually to possess the graces of genuine piety.
You scarcely know what this is now. When Christ is in you, you will
have something more than a theory of the truth. You will not only be
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repeating the lessons Christ gave when upon the earth, but you will be
educating others by your life of self-denial and devotion to the cause
of God. Your life will be a living sermon, possessing greater power
than any discourse given in the desk.
You need to cultivate in yourself that unselfish spirit, that self-
denying grace and pure devotion, which you wish to see others carry
out in their lives. In order to continually increase in spiritual intelli-
gence, and to become more and more efficient, you need to cultivate
habits of usefulness in the minor duties lying in your pathway. You
must not wait for opportunities to do a great work, but seize the first
chance to prove yourself faithful in that which is least, and you may
thus work your way up from one position of trust to another. You will
be apt to think you are not deficient in knowledge, and will be inclined
to neglect secret prayer, watchfulness, and a careful study of the Scrip-
tures, and will in consequence be overcome by the enemy. Your ways
may appear perfect in your own eyes, while in reality you may be
very defective. You have no time to parley with the adversary of souls.
Now is the time to take your stand and disappoint the enemy. You
need to criticize yourself closely and jealously. You will be inclined
to set up your opinion as a standard, irrespective of the opinions and