More Life by L. A. S.

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Michigan · Apr 8, 1902

More Life

By L. A. S.

“By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin.” Rom. 5:12. In this present world life is everywhere attended by the shadow of death. The seeds of death are lodged within every living structure. In the day that Adam fell, he became subject to the process of decay. Death came into the place of life, and gradually supplanted life until the latter became wholly extinct. The same process took place in the animal and vegetable forms around him. He saw his children growing old, the partakers of his own mortality.

Man has a physical, a mental, and a moral being. It was the Creator’s design that each of these should be filled with abundant, unfailing life. But when death entered into the world, it began its work of extinguishing all the life that man possessed. And nowhere was the touch of death more ruinously imprinted than upon man’s moral nature. The moral being lost its life much more quickly than did the physical or the mental being. Love to God and to man, the manifestation of the life given by him who is love, gave place to selfishness, the token of death. The first descendant of Adam was a murderer. He loved not his brother, and abode in death; he was morally dead; one third of his being—the highest and most important part—had been extinguished. He was followed by many others like himself. Moral life was less and less seen in the human family, until at length the whole world, with the exception of the family of Noah, became dead in trespasses and sins.

But God sent his Son into the world that men might have life, “and that they might have it more abundantly.” He came to restore that which was lost, to bring back the life that had been lost by sin. By him all men live, for without the sacrifice on the cross this world would have been altogether the prey of death from the beginning. But he came also to impart to men new life, to give them life in its fullness, to bring back to perfect health every part of man’s being upon which sin had placed the touch of death. He came to remove all sin, and thus to destroy every avenue through which death finds access to its victims. He came that men might have life “more abundantly.” He is the healer of body, soul, and spirit.

God would have man now, as was Adam at his creation, full of life in every part of his being. He would have the moral nature as full of life, as active in the things with which it is concerned, as is the physical or the intellectual nature. With the great majority of people, Seventh-day Adventists not excepted, this condition is far from the reality. God would have those who are dead—morally dead—hear the voice of his Son, and live. He would have them possess more life. He would have them know that man doth not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God. Deprived of the word of God, an essential part of man’s being loses its life. He becomes actually and literally deprived of a large portion of the life he should rightfully possess, and that the highest and most essential portion of all.

How many there are who need to have life given them “more abundantly.” And why will any person refuse life, and cling to death as though it were a desirable thing?—It can only be because of moral blindness. We all want life, more life, all the life that we can possibly obtain. We speak of and seek after the “blessings of life,” but the real blessing of life is life itself; not life so linked with death as to make existence miserable, but life that can grasp and appropriate every gift of God, life untrammeled by disease or disability. Mere existence ought to be a pleasure, and the more life an individual possesses, the more enjoyable must existence become. In God’s presence is fullness of joy; let us obtain it by opening our hearts to him and the more abundant life.

L. A. S.