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To Win Souls, Forgo Personal Gain, June 18
I know how to be abased, and I know how to abound. Everywhere and in all
things I have learned both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to
suffer need. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.
Philippians 4:12, 13
, NKJV.
In every age Satan has sought to impair the efforts of God’s servants by intro-
ducing into the church a spirit of fanaticism. Thus it was in Paul’s day, and thus it
was in later centuries during the time of the Reformation. Wycliffe, Luther, and
many others who blessed the world by their influence and their faith encountered
the wiles by which the enemy seeks to lead into fanaticism overzealous, unbalanced,
and unsanctified minds.
Misguided souls have taught that the attainment of true holiness carries the mind
above all earthly thoughts and leads men and women to refrain wholly from labor.
Others, taking extreme views of certain texts of Scripture, have taught that it is a sin
to work—that Christians should take no thought concerning the temporal welfare of
themselves or their families, but should devote their lives wholly to spiritual things.
The teaching and example of the apostle Paul are a rebuke to such extreme views....
When Paul first visited Corinth, he found himself among a people who were
suspicious of the motives of strangers. The Greeks on the seacoast were keen traders.
So long had they trained themselves in sharp business practices, that they had come
to believe that gain was godliness, and that to make money, whether by fair means
or foul, was commendable. Paul was acquainted with their characteristics, and he
would give them no occasion for saying that he preached the gospel in order to
enrich himself. He might justly have claimed support from his Corinthian hearers;
but this right he was willing to forgo, lest his usefulness and success as a minister
should be injured by the unjust suspicion that he was preaching the gospel for gain.
He would seek to remove all occasion for misrepresentation, that the force of his
message might not be lost.—
The Acts of the Apostles, 348, 349
.
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