Selected Messages, volume 1

[Appeared in Notebook Leaflets, Christian Experience, No. 8.]

Christ was the great Medical Missionary to our world. He calls for volunteers who will cooperate with Him in the great work of sowing the world with truth. God’s workers are to plant the standards of truth in every place to which they can gain access. The world needs restoring. It is lying in wickedness and the greatest peril. God’s work for those out of Christ should broaden and extend. God calls upon His people to labor diligently for Him, so that Christian efficiency shall become widespread. His kingdom is to be enlarged. Memorials for Him are to be raised in America and in foreign countries.

The work of health reform connected with the present truth for this time, is a power for good. It is the right hand of the gospel, and often opens fields for the entrance of the gospel. But let it ever be remembered that the work must move solidly and in complete harmony with God’s plan of organization. Churches are to be organized, and in no case are these churches to divorce themselves from the medical missionary work. Neither is the medical missionary work to be divorced from the gospel ministry. When this is done, both are one-sided. Neither is a complete whole.

The work for this time is to appeal to the Christian’s mind as the most important work that can be done. It is the question of cultivating the Lord’s vineyard. In this vineyard every man has a lot and a place, which the Lord has assigned him. And the success of each depends on his individual relationship to the one Divine Head.

The grace and love of our Lord Jesus Christ and His tender relationship to His church on earth are to be revealed by the growth of His work and the evangelization of people in many places. The heavenly principles of truth and righteousness are to be seen more and still more plainly in the lives of Christ’s followers. More unselfishness and uncovetousness is to be seen in business transactions than has been seen in the churches since the pouring out of the Holy Spirit on the day of Pentecost. Not a vestige of the influence of selfish, worldly monopolies is to make the slightest impression on the people who are watching and working and praying for the second coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory.

As a people we are not ready for the Lord’s appearing. If we would close the windows of the soul earthward and open them heavenward, every institution established would be a bright and shining light in the world. Each member of the church, if he lived the great, elevated, ennobling truths for this time, would be a bright, shining light. God’s people cannot please Him unless they are surcharged with the Holy Spirit’s efficiency. So pure and true is to be their relationship to one another that by their words, their affections, their attributes, they will show that they are one with Christ. They are to be as signs and wonders in our world, carrying forward intelligently every line of the work. And the different parts of the work are to be so harmoniously related to one another that all will move like well-regulated machinery. Then will the joy of Christ’s salvation be understood. There will then be none of the representation now made by those who have been given the light of truth to communicate, but who have not revealed the principles of truth in their association with one another, who have not done the Lord’s work in a way that glorifies Him....

After Christ rose from the dead, He proclaimed over the sepulcher, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Christ, the risen Saviour, is our life. As Christ becomes the life of the soul, the change is felt, but language cannot describe it. All claims to knowledge, to influence, to power, are worthless without the perfume of Christ’s character. Christ must be the very life of the soul, as the blood is the life of the body....

Cleansed From All Selfishness

Those who are connected with the service of God must be purified from every thread of selfishness. All is to be done in accordance with the injunction, “Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all” (Colossians 3:17) “to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). God’s laws of justice and equity must be strictly obeyed in the transactions between neighbor and neighbor, brother and brother. We are to seek for perfect order and perfect righteousness, after God’s own similitude. On these grounds alone will our works bear the test of the judgment....

Christianity is the revealing of the tenderest affection for one another. The Christian life is made up of Christian duties and Christian privileges. Christ in His wisdom gave to His church in its infancy a system of sacrifices and offerings, of which He Himself was the foundation, and by which His death was prefigured. Every sacrifice pointed to Him as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, that all might understand that the wages of sin is death. In Him was no sin, yet He died for our sins.

The symbolic system of ceremonies worked to one end—the vindication of the law of God, that all who believe in Christ might come “in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ” (Ephesians 4:13). In Christian work there is ample room for the activity of all the gifts God has given. All are to be united in carrying out God’s requirements, revealing at every advance step that faith which works by love and purifies the soul.

Christ is to receive supreme love from the beings He has created. And He requires also that man shall cherish a sacred regard for his fellow beings. Every soul saved will be saved through love, which begins with God. True conversion is a change from selfishness to sanctified affection for God and for one another. Will Seventh-day Adventists now make a thorough reformation, that their sin-stained souls may be cleansed from the leprosy of selfishness?

I must speak the truth to all. Those who have accepted the light from God’s Word are never, never to leave an impression upon human minds that God will serve with their sins. His Word defines sin as the transgression of the law.—Manuscript 16, 1901.

In Hard Places

Often God’s soldiers find themselves brought into hard and difficult places, they know not why. But are they to relax their hold because difficulties arise? Is their faith to diminish because they cannot see their way through the darkness? God forbid. They are to cherish an abiding sense of God’s power to uphold them in their work. They cannot perish, neither can they lose their way if they will follow His guidance, and strive to uphold His law.—Undated Manuscript 145.