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UNITY AND LOVE

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 30, 1901

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 78, No. 18.

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UNITY AND LOVE

By H. I. White

H. I. WHITE (Columbia, O. T.)
OUR SAVIOUR was very anxious that His followers should be bound together with the bands of love. As I have been among our people in different places, I have often been pained to see the lack of love that too often exists. It has ever been the work of the enemy of souls to bring contention into the Church, that there may be coldness among the followers of the Lord; for he knows that by so doing he can deprive us of the power we should otherwise have. We are too ready to listen to some real, or more often supposed, wrong, and let him magnify it until we are in a state of mind where he can impart a spirit of hatred in our hearts; or perhaps we may see or hear something about our brother or sister that we think is not right. Then the devil puts it into our hearts to go and talk it over with some other brother or sister, until, before we know it, we have lost the love we had for that brother, and have put ourselves where Satan can use us to keep up contention.
Surely, the Lord is not well pleased with that kind of work, and I fear that if there is not a change, and that soon, many of us will not be prepared for translation when the Lord comes to take His people home. Let each of us carefully study, and apply to our own lives, Matt. 7: 3-5, and then we shall be better prepared to have compassion on our brother.
The Saviour prayed that we might become one even as He and the Father are one. John 17: 20-24. He had a purpose in that prayer, a purpose which I fear many of us do not see—that because of our love one for another the world might believe in our Saviour. Do you see, then, that we are standing in the way of the conversion of sinners, and are keeping our children away from the Saviour by not being perfectly bound together in love?
As a people we can never enjoy the full measure of the Spirit, and be clothed with the power that the Lord wants us to have, until the Saviour’s prayer has been answered. May the Lord hasten the day when we shall see eye to eye.