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Testimonies for the Church Volume 5
contemplation of these themes, when the soul feasts upon the blessed
assurances of God, the apostle represents as tasting “the powers of the
world to come.”
[746]
Just before us is the closing struggle of the great controversy when,
with “all power and signs and lying wonders, and with all deceiv-
ableness of unrighteousness,” Satan is to work to misrepresent the
character of God, that he may “seduce, if it were possible, even the
elect.” If there was ever a people in need of constantly increasing light
from heaven, it is the people that, in this time of peril, God has called
to be the depositaries of His holy law and to vindicate His character
before the world. Those to whom has been committed a trust so sacred
must be spiritualized, elevated, vitalized, by the truths they profess
to believe. Never did the church more sorely need, and never was
God more solicitous that she should enjoy, the experience described
in Paul’s letter to the Colossians when he wrote: We “do not cease to
pray for you, and to desire that ye might be filled with the knowledge
of His will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding; that ye might
walk worthy of the Lord unto all pleasing, being fruitful in every good
work, and increasing in the knowledge of God.”
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