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Testimonies for the Church Volume 5
cultivating heartfelt piety. You have had a feverish desire to obtain
means. You have talked to many about the financial advantages to
be gained by investing in lands in-----. Again and again you have
been engaged in picturing the advantages of these enterprises; and this
while you were an ordained minister of Christ, pledged to give your
soul, body, and spirit to the work of the salvation of souls. At the same
time you were receiving money from the treasury to support yourself
and your family. Your talk was calculated to draw the attention and
money of our people away from our institutions and from the business
of promoting the Redeemer’s kingdom on the earth. Its tendency was
to beget in them a desire to invest their means where you assured them
that it would be doubled in a short time, and to flatter them with the
prospect that they could help the cause a great deal more by so doing.
You may not knowingly have advised them to withdraw their means
from the cause of God; but some had no money to handle except that
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invested in our institutions, and it has been withdrawn from them to
invest according to your suggestions.
We are in a certain sense our brother’s keeper. We are individually
related to souls who may, through the merits of Jesus Christ, seek for
glory, honor, and immortality. Their purity, sincerity, zeal, consistency,
and piety are affected by our words, our works, our deportment, our
prayers, and our faithful discharge of duty. Christ said to His disciples:
“Ye are the light of the world.” The ministers of Jesus Christ must
teach, both in the church and to individuals, the fact that a profession
of faith, even by Seventh-day Adventists, unless it proceeds from
heartfelt piety, is powerless for good. Religious light is to shine forth
from the church, and especially from the ministers, in clear, steady
rays. It is not to flame up on special occasions, and then grow dim,
and flicker, as if about to go out. The excellence of Jesus Christ will
ever shine in the character of true believers, and they will adorn the
doctrine of our Saviour. Thus the excellency and the power of the
gospel are revealed. Each member of the church is required to be in
living connection with the Source of all light, and to be a spiritual
worker, doing his part by good works to reflect light to the world.
Especially should the minister keep himself from every worldly
entanglement and bind himself to the Source of all power, that he may
represent correctly what it means to be a Christian. He should cut
loose from everything that would in any way divert his mind from God