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Jesus Requires Wholehearted Commitment, July 2
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul,
with all your strength, and with all your mind,” and “your neighbor as
yourself.”
Luke 10:27
, NKJV.
The Lord is testing and proving you. He has counseled, admonished, and
entreated. All these solemn admonitions will either make the church better or
decidedly worse. The oftener the Lord speaks to correct or counsel, and you
disregard His voice, the more disposed will you be to reject it again and again, till
God says: “Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand,
and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none
of my reproof.... Then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall
seek me early, but they shall not find me; for that they hated knowledge, and did
not choose the fear of the Lord: they would none of my counsel: they despised all
my reproof. Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with
their own devices.”
Are you not halting between two opinions? Are you not neglecting to heed
the light which God has given you? Take heed lest there be in any of you an evil
heart of unbelief in departing from the living God. You know not the time of your
visitation. The great sin of the Jews was that of neglecting and rejecting present
opportunities. As Jesus views the state of His professed followers today, He sees
base ingratitude, hollow formalism, hypocritical insincerity, pharisaical pride, and
apostasy.
The tears which Christ shed on the crest of Olivet were for the impenitence and
ingratitude of every individual to the close of time. He sees His love despised. The
soul’s temple courts have been converted into places of unholy traffic. Selfishness,
mammon, malice, envy, pride, passion, are all cherished in the human heart. His
warnings are rejected and ridiculed, His ambassadors are treated with indifference,
their words seem as idle tales. Jesus has spoken by mercies, but these mercies have
been unacknowledged; He has spoken by solemn warnings, but these warnings
have been rejected.
I entreat you who have long professed the faith and who still pay outward
homage to Christ: Do not deceive your own souls. It is the whole heart that Jesus
prizes. The loyalty of the soul is alone of value in the sight of God. “If thou hadst
known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace!”
“Thou ... even thou”—Christ is at this moment addressing you personally, stooping
from His throne, yearning with pitying tenderness over those who feel not their
danger, who have no pity for themselves.—
Testimonies for the Church 5:72, 73
.
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