Paying the Price

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Aug 3, 1916

THERE are many in the world today who desire advancement, or profit, or accomplishment, but who are unwilling to pay the price to secure the desire of their hearts. Men are unwilling to toil, as their fathers used to do, for long years in securing a competence. They are endeavoring to seek some royal road to wealth, to find some method whereby they may achieve riches in a day. This is true also of many Christians. They pray for deliverance from some sin; for endurance, for patience, for resignation, but are unwilling to pay the price which the acquirement of these graces involves.

How few realize that when they pray for patience, they pray for tribulation, for, says the apostle, “tribulation worketh patience.” We pray for the grace of meekness in the home, for sweetness of disposition, for kindness of spirit, and then chafe because we cannot have our own way. O if we could only see in life’s trials God’s means of purifying us and of molding us into his own divine image, how differently we should regard them! When brought into strait places, instead of chafing over personal discomfort, we should rejoice that God has taken us by a hard way, in order to develop in us the graces of his Spirit.

Had Israel of old, instead of murmuring at the bitter waters of Marah, waited patiently for God to work their deliverance, how much pleasure they might have taken in watching the ways and means by which this deliverance should be wrought for them.

The man in the parable who found the pearl of great price sold all that he had and bought the field. It will take the consecration of our all to obtain the pearl of Christian character.