p. 51 | Giving, Losing by Editor

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 16, 1866

Giving, Losing.

By Editor

"I SHOULD have been a thousand dollars better off to-day, if I had pledged last winter or spring to give five hundred dollars for your free church in St. Louis." So said a brother not long since. "How so?" we replied. "Because we should have been obliged to sell our farm products to pay it, but having no immediate use for money, we neglected to market our grain, wool, etc., and now they will not bring as much into fifteen hundred dollars as they would then."

This brother who made this statement, is in the habit of giving. But he is not the only one who has failed to give as large an amount as would have been pleasing to the Lord, and who has suffered in consequence. We know of a man who was convicted to give us two hundred dollars for the Free Church in Buffalo. He had the money on hand and could pay it. But he endeavored to hold on to it. But he could not keep the Devil out of his pocket as easily as he could the Lord. Going to a neighboring city, his pocket was picked, and this money that he ought to have paid for the church was irrecoverably stolen. He grieved the Holy Spirit by refusing to give, and so was left without his wonted strength to struggle against temptation. He had formerly been in the habit of drinking, and grief for the loss of his money, and the loss of grace already sustained, led him to taste again the intoxicating cup, and he never, that we heard of, recovered out of the snare of the Devil. Men may rob God with apparent impunity, but the curse is certain to follow. Mal. iii, 8-11. If there is hope of saving their souls by taking their property to which they cling, then will God, by some of the numberless agencies at his command, sweep away the false supports upon which they lean, and call upon them in thunder tones to "set their affections on things above, and not on things on the earth." If a person prospers temporally while continuing to keep back from God the offerings for which he calls, it is at a still greater deprivation of the grace that saves, and should be regarded as a warning that he is about to lapse into that fearful state in which God will say, He is joined to his idols, let him alone. He may hold on to the form of religion, but he will be worldly or fretful at home; and at religious meetings when the dews of grace are falling all around, his soul will be dry, like Gideon's fleece, and from his unblessed lips there will never escape any expression of holy triumph. Let men of means employ their money where it will be really doing good, and neither lay up for themselves treasures on earth, nor use their money in building fine churches which have a tendency to make the proud prouder, and to shut out the poor from the means of grace, and they will see that they have as great a capacity for spiritual blessings as those of a lowly condition of life. You need not pray and cry for a blessing until you are hoarse, and then go away with only its semblance; try the method that God ordains; bring your tithes and your offerings into his storehouse, and prove him herewith; if He will not open the windows of Heaven and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.

Thousands in this land have lost their grace, and are now on their way to hell, because they did not use their means as God commands; and many who have kept their grace, are in comparatively destitute circumstances, because they failed to honor God with their substance, and with the first fruits of all their increase. "There is that scattereth, and yet increaseth; there is that withholdeth more than is meet, and it tendeth to poverty."