Words to Students
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the games you play? Have not these amusements in which you have
engaged, absorbed your interest so that you have not been able to put
as much fervor into the learning of your lessons as you should have
done? Which is to have the supremacy—the service of God, or the
service of self? Let every student closely examine the ground on which
he is standing.
Dear youth, you are now deciding your own eternal destiny. You
must put persistent effort into your Christian life if you would perfect
a right character. It will be to your eternal loss if you have a dwarfed,
weakly, babyish religious experience. We are to be “complete in Him.”
“As ye have therefore received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk ye in
Him.” This means that you are to study the life of Christ. You are to
study it with as much more earnestness than you study secular lines
of knowledge, as eternal interests are more important than temporal,
earthly pursuits. If you appreciate the value and sacredness of eternal
things, you will bring your sharpest thoughts, your best energies, to
the solving of the problem that involves your eternal well-being; for
every other interest sinks into nothingness in comparison with that.
You have the Pattern, Christ Jesus; walk in His footsteps, and
you will be qualified to fill any and every position that you may be
called upon to occupy. You will be “rooted and built up in Him, and
stablished in the faith, as ye have been taught, abounding therein with
thanksgiving.” You are not to feel that you are a bondslave, but a son
of God; that you are highly favored in that you have been regarded of
so great value that God has made you His by paying an infinite ransom
for your freedom. Jesus says, “I call you not servants; ... but I have
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called you friends.” When you appreciate His wondrous love, love and
gratitude will be in your heart as a wellspring of joy.
Do not receive flattery, even in your religious life. Flattery is an
art by which Satan lieth in wait to deceive and to puff up the human
agent with high thoughts of himself. “Beware lest any man spoil you
through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after
the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ.” Flattery has been the
food upon which many of our youth have been nourished; and those
who have praised and flattered have supposed that they were doing
right; but they have been doing wrong. Praise, flattery, and indulgence
have done more toward leading precious souls into false paths, than
any other art that Satan has devised.