p. 5 | The Best Investment by W. A. S.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 16, 1902

The Best Investment

By W. A. S.

An energetic life-insurance man called the other day to inquire the reason why Seventh-day Adventists were so difficult to approach in his business.

He was apparently a Christian man, who acknowledged that it was good to trust in the Lord, who says, “Leave thy fatherless children, I will preserve them alive; and let thy widows trust in me.”

However, it seemed to him, as a practical man of the world, that the father was wise who invested his surplus in a policy, making provision, say, for his little son, so that, when grown to manhood, the boy would find something laid up with which to establish a business, or take a college course. I asked him what he would think, as a practical business man, of a people who invested their all in the gospel commission, and who taught their children that the best of all investments was to devote life and means and all to carrying the gospel to the world, so that the end might come, and death and misfortune forever cease.

This seemed ideal to my friend, but altogether impossible and impractical. He expected the end to come some time, surely, but not in our day. Pressed to the Scriptures, however, he was forced to admit that if the Christian church would throw itself without reserve into the work of evangelizing the world, it might hope to do it within a very few years; and it seemed to him possible that the church did not desire the Lord to come, else the work would be accomplished.

Then I asked him if Seventh-day Adventists, who believe that they are called out to bear a final message to all the world within one generation, might not reasonably be expected, as a practical, and their children as well, in the divine commission, rather than in life policies for the next generation. It was strong doctrine for a life-insurance agent, but is it not good doctrine for the believer in the soon coming of Jesus?

The Lord is coming in this generation. Some must now enter in. The very stones would cry out, the angels would carry the message, if Seventh-day Adventists held their peace. The surest and grandest investment in all the world is the third angel’s message. Even the mites multiply rapidly in these pressing times if given quickly. As “Testimony,” No. 33, says: “One dollar now is of more value to the work than ten dollars will be at some future period.” No investment company can offer such high interest as that.

We do not live in a heroic age. Somehow the world expects to hear the church talk about the coming of the Lord and about going to heaven, and then to see it planning as though to live indefinitely in the world. But nothing so arrests the attention of practical men as the spectacle of believers actually investing life and family and all in the promise of the Lord’s second advent in our time, just as the man of the world invests his surplus in securities to make provision for the future.

W. A. S.