p. 99 | Do What Is before You

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 14, 1871

Do What Is before You.

DO WHATEVER there is to be done without questioning and without calculation. Make progress in things moral. If need be, utter stammering words. Would you console the troubled if you only had a ready tongue? Take the tongue that you have. Ring the bell that hangs in your steeple, if you can do no better. Do as well as you can; that is all that God requires of you. Would you pray with the needy and tempted if you had eminent gifts of prayer? Use the gifts that you have. Do not measure yourself according to the pattern of somebody else. Do not say to yourself, “If I had his skill,” or, “If I had his experience.” Take your own skill and your own experience, and make the most of them. Do you stand over against trouble and suffering, and marvel that men whom God hath blessed with such means do so little? Do you say to yourself: “If I had money I know what I would do with it”? No; you do not. God does; and so he does not trust you with it. “If I had something different from what I have, I would work,” says many a man. No; if you would work in other circumstances, you would work just where you are. A man that will not work just where he is, with just what he has, and for the love of God, and for the love of man, will not work anywhere in such a way as to make his work valuable.—Beecher.