Influential Minister
167
and labors broadened, you have been growing less and less efficient as
a worker, because God is not blessing your efforts.
A Crime in God’s Sight—The perversion of our gifts, or their
degradation to unworthy ends, is a crime in the sight of God; and
yet this is constantly prevailing. The man who has capabilities for
usefulness, and employs all that is winning and attractive to destroy
others, to lead them astray, to bring them to a brackish, poison fountain
to quench their thirst, rather than bringing them to Christ, is doing
the devil’s work. There are many who profess to believe the truth
who are corrupt in morals and who tarnish the purity in thoughts and
impulses of others, who ruin souls under the pretense of saving souls,
who utter words to the unwary, Satan speaking through them, as he
spoke through the serpent when he tempted Eve.
For all such there is a terrible retribution. They will reap that which
they have sown. It is a terrible thing to use God’s entrusted gifts, lent
[198]
to bless the world, and perverted in their use, leaving a blight, a woe,
a curse, instead of a blessing. But I have written largely upon this, as
you have seen, in different forms.
Total Life Control Possible—And again I say, “Seek ye the Lord
while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near: Let the
wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts, and
let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him; and
to our God, for He will abundantly pardon” (
Isaiah 55:6, 7
). Go to
work and confess your sins before God; seek God, for you know but
very little of this kind of work. Put your thoughts to work upon pure,
holy subjects; tax your powers; send your supplications to heaven
in earnest contrition of soul; let your conversation, your thoughts,
your deportment, be in harmony with the holy faith you claim to be
defending.
And when all like yourself shall repent and find the pardoning love
of God, we shall see that God will work in a wonderful manner with
His people. Sinners will be converted; backsliders will be reclaimed.
The Necessity for a Cleansing of Moral Defilement—I leave
these lines with you. I had hoped that the great light shining from the
Word of God would have been accepted, brought into your religious
life, and [that] you [would] become a true, sincere Christian, doing
the will of God from the heart. But I have been urged by the Spirit of
the Lord to write you. The work must go forward. Everything impure