Stewardship While Living
67
It will not do for you to depend on making your charity gifts in
testamentary bequests at death. You cannot calculate with the least
degree of surety that the cause will ever be benefited by them. Satan
works with acute skill to stir up the relatives, and every false position
is taken to gain to the world that which was solemnly dedicated to the
cause of God. Much less than the sum willed is always received. Satan
even puts it into the hearts of men and women to protest against their
relatives’ doing what they wish in the bestowment of their property.
They seem to regard everything given to the Lord as robbing the
relatives of the deceased. If you want your means to go to the cause,
appropriate it, or all that you do not really need for a support, while
you live. A few of the brethren are doing this and enjoying the pleasure
of being their own executors. Will the covetousness of men make it
necessary that they shall be deprived of life in order that the property
which God has lent them shall not be useless forever? Let none of you
draw upon yourselves the doom of the unprofitable servant who hid
his Lord’s money on the earth.
Dying charity is a poor substitute for living benevolence. Many
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will to their friends and relatives all except a very small pittance of
their property. This they leave for their supreme Friend, who became
poor for their sakes, who suffered insult, mockery, and death, that they
might become sons and daughters of God. And yet they expect when
the righteous dead shall come forth to immortal life that this Friend
will take them into His everlasting habitations.
The cause of Christ is robbed, not by a mere passing thought, not
by an unpremeditated act. No. By your own deliberate act you made
your will, placing your property at the disposal of unbelievers. After
having robbed God during your lifetime, you continue to rob Him after
your death, and you do this with the full consent of all your powers of
mind, in a document called your will. What do you think will be your
Master’s will toward you for thus appropriating His goods? What will
you say when an account is demanded of your stewardship?
Brethren, awake from your life of selfishness, and act like con-
sistent Christians. The Lord requires you to economize your means
and let every dollar not needed for your comfort flow into the treasury.
Sisters, take that ten cents, that twenty cents, that dollar which you
were about to spend for candies, for ruffles, or for ribbons, and donate