Untitled article | AdventAI

The Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · December 17, 1867

FRETTING.

This is a petty fault, but one which has much influence upon character and happiness. There have been men of strong and cultivated intellects, whose minds have been sadly weakened, and their acquirements made utterly useless by their subjection to this miserable habit. We have seen Christians, also, otherwise highly furnished for extensive usefulness, whose influence has been completely nullified by it; while on the other hand, the power of the religion of Christ has never been more distinctly or healthfully manifested than by its rescue of many from its dominion, and their return to a cheerful submission. In the serenity of his declining years, John Wesley was enabled to say, “I feel, I grieve, but by the grace of God, I fret at nothing.” His words are to us a sure sign, both of the ripe wisdom of age, and of the thoroughness of the work of grace in his heart.

Fretting is unfortunately regarded by many Christians as only a foible, an unpleasant foible, indeed, but only a foible. We think it might more justly be called a sin. If the words “be careful for nothing,” are a divine law, fretfulness is certainly not obedience to it. If patience is a Christian grace, the impatience which is constantly breaking forth into petty complaints about trivial things can not be regarded but as its opposite, and what is the opposite of a Christian grace but a sin? Let Christians look at it. If we are to be judged for idle words, and condemned because of them, shall we not be judged for impatient words, and for those querulous complaints which come from a heart ill at ease itself, and ready to murmur against all the appointments of God?

But it is as a bar to usefulness that we feel how evil a thing this petty foible may become. It spoils a thousand other good qualities. Who loves and honors a fretful minister, learned and laborious though he may be? Where is the school class that can be long retained or largely benefited by one who shows himself a prey to discontent, and seems to have confined his study of the Bible very much to the Lamentations? What wife or mother can keep her place as the center of the household affections, when day after day there is a perpetual dropping of complaining words, and when the face has always a worn and weary look? Can poverty be cheered, or the sick chamber enlivened, by one who has no heart but for his own sorrow, and loves to rehearse the tale of his fancied miseries? No. To be thoroughly and largely useful, one must work with a free and genial heart. Good humor helps vastly in the accomplishment of good works. A cheerful countenance, the exponent of a cheerful heart, will remove many difficulties, and assist us to meet those that are immovable. Fretting will only make difficulties larger and more formidable, and will create some itself. It will weaken our own power, and deter others from coming to our side. Its influence is evil, and only evil, and that continually.—Sunday School Times.