What Is It For?

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Mar 17, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 11.

Settle first of all, dear reader, if you are a professor of religion, what your religion is for. For what purpose do you hold it? Is it a sort of soothing syrup to ease a conscience which convicts you of sin? Do you profess it in order to be fashionable, or “respectable,” or to enlarge your circle of acquaintance, or to win trade? Is it a matter of commercialism? Is it like your best suit, which you put on once a week or occasionally? If your religion is any or all of these, it will profit nothing. It may make a temporal gain of professed godliness, but it will profit nothing in the most important of all things—character building. If your religion does not include that, it is not the religion of Christ Jesus. If it does not enter into every day and hour of time, into every transaction of business, into every motive which actuates you, into your choice of companionship in books and people, into your work or calling, into your home and secret life, you have not a religion which is of any worth. The religion of Jesus Christ takes in the whole man—spiritually, mentally, morally, and physically. Set aside as unworthy of consideration any religion which falls short of this. God wants to make men.