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Holidays Unto God
279
and then shall the righteous shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of
their Father....
I do not recommend pleasure parties where young people assem-
ble together for mere amusement, to engage in cheap, nonsensical
talk, and where loud, boisterous laughter is to be heard. I do not
recommend the kind of gathering where there is a letting down of
dignity and the scene is one of weakness and folly.
Many times young men for whom heavenly intelligences have
been waiting in order to number them as missionaries for God are
drawn into the gatherings for amusement, and are carried away
with Satan’s fascinations. Instead of being afraid to continue their
association with girls whose depth of mind is easily measured, whose
character is of a cheap order, they become enamored of them and
enter into an engagement. Satan knows that if these young men enter
into an engagement with cheap-minded, pleasure-loving, worldly-
minded, irreligious young women, they will bind themselves to
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stumbling blocks. Their usefulness will be largely crippled, if not
utterly destroyed. Even if the young men themselves succeed in
making an unreserved surrender to God, yet they will find that they
are greatly crippled by being bound to an untrained, undisciplined,
un-Christlike wife who is dead to God, dead to piety, and dead to
true holiness. Their lives will prove unsatisfying and unhappy.
Gatherings for amusement confuse faith and make the motive
mixed and uncertain. The Lord accepts no divided heart. He wants
the whole man. He made all there is of man. He offered a complete
sacrifice to redeem the body and soul of man. That which He requires
of those whom He has created and redeemed is summed up in these
words: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with
all thy soul, and with all thy mind.... Thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself.”
Matthew 22:37-39
. God will accept nothing less than
this.—
Special Testimonies On Education, 80-83
.
* * * * *
“Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.”
1
Corinthians 10:12
. There can be no presumption more fatal than that
which leads men to venture upon a course of self-pleasing. In view
of this solemn warning from God, should not fathers and mothers