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Our Great Need

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Nov 7, 1912

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 89, No. 45.

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Our Great Need

By Editor

Editorial

Our Great Need

Our great need to-day is more of God. In our religion we depend too much upon form and ceremony and machinery. The forms of worship, the machinery of the church, will never bring us the saving power of God. Christ in you the hope of glory, the Spirit of God filling the heart and operating the life,—this is Christianity. Anything short of this experience is a wretched sham.
We should remember others in prayer, we should minister to the poor and needy, we should send the gospel to the heathen, we should render to God his own in tithe and offerings, we should sacredly regard his holy day, but over and above all this and back of all this there needs to be a living, personal experience in Christ. There needs to be a union with him of heart and life so close that, like Enoch of old, we shall walk with God; that like Elijah, we shall stand before him as in his personal presence; that like Moses, we shall endure as seeing him who is invisible. This knowledge of sins forgiven, this consciousness of divine acceptance, this personal daily leading of the Spirit of truth in the life, will give point and power to Christian service; but without it Christian service, however good of itself, will sink to the level of dead formalism and mere human effort.
With this live, active experience in the life of every believer, the church as a whole will be spiritualized, and motive power will be added to the church machinery. O, it is for this experience that we need to pray! We are in danger to-day of forgetting God. Even while engaged in the prosecution of worthy enterprises, we may backslide. In the midst of Christian activity we may grow inert. We may lose our contact with Jesus even while laboring to bring others to him. We need by prayer and surrender and consecration, by daily study of his Word, to keep our own personal faith fresh and strong. Only as we do this can we truly represent God to the world. The great need of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to-day, and of every member in that church, is more of the presence and power of God in the heart and life. Let us make it our first business to obtain this necessary experience.