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Testimony Studies on Diet and Foods
at, and base passions control the mind, until general corruption roots
out good principles and impulses, and God is blasphemed. All this is
the result of eating and drinking to excess. This is the very condition
of things which He declares will exist at His second coming.
Will men and women be warned? Will they cherish the light,
or will they become slaves to appetite and base passions? Christ
presents to us something higher to toil for than merely what we shall
eat, and what we shall drink, and wherewithal we shall be clothed.
Eating, drinking, and dressing are carried to such excess that they
become crimes, and are among the marked sins of the last days, and
constitute a sign of Christ’s soon coming. Time, money, and strength,
which are the Lord’s, but which He has intrusted to us, are wasted in
needless superfluities of dress, and luxuries for the perverted appetite,
which lessen vitality and bring suffering and decay. It is impossible to
present our bodies a living sacrifice to God, when they are filled with
corruption and disease by our own sinful indulgence.
Knowledge must be gained in regard to how to eat, and drink, and
dress so as to preserve health. Sickness is caused by violating the
laws of health; it is the result of violating nature’s law. Our first duty,
one which we owe to God, to ourselves, and to our fellow-men, is
to obey the laws of God, which include the laws of health. If we are
sick, we impose a weary tax upon our friends, and unfit ourselves
for discharging our duties to our families and to our neighbors. And
when premature death is the result of our violation of nature’s law,
we bring sorrow and suffering to others; we deprive our neighbors of
the help we ought to render them in living; we rob our families of the
comfort and help we might render them, and rob God of the service
He claims of us to advance His glory. Then, are we not, in the worst
sense, transgressors of God’s law?
But God is all-pitiful, gracious, and tender, and when light comes
to those who have injured their health by sinful indulgences, and they
are convinced of sin, and repent and seek pardon, He accepts the poor
offering rendered to Him, and receives them. Oh, what tender mercy
that He does not refuse the remnant of the abused life of the suffering,
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repenting sinner! In His gracious mercy, He saves these souls as by
fire. But what an inferior, pitiful sacrifice at best, to offer to a pure
and holy God! Noble faculties have been paralyzed by wrong habits