Who Is the Owner?

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 5, 1902

Who Is the Owner?

“You use tobacco?” said one man to another. “No,” was the answer, “tobacco uses me.” And a great many men might say, “Tobacco uses me, and is fast using me up.”

It is written that they who use this world, should use it as not abusing it. It is also desirable that this world be kept under control, so that it will not abuse the men who do abuse it. It is well to drive business, it is ill to have business drive you. Prosperity is good, but sometimes a prosperous business venture, a fruitful season, or a great wheat crop, has hindered the work of the Lord, excited people to extravagance, and has caused them to forget God and duty to his cause.

God has given man the earth that he may till the soil and earn his daily bread; but many men have added farm to farm and acre to acre, till they have worked themselves to death, and worked their wives to death, and worked their children till they were dead, or sick, or discouraged, and ready to curse the farm on which they had toiled as under a taskmaster, and to go anywhere to escape from such a house of bondage as their home had been.

Many a man wearies his life out “taking care of things,” which are of no earthly use to him or his.

When a man becomes thus entangled in this world’s gearing, there seems to be no stopping the machine. Thus a farmer takes his money and buys land, and raises corn, and feeds hogs, and makes pork, and sells it to get more money, to buy more land, to raise more corn, to feed more hogs, to make more pork, and get more money to buy more land for the same purpose; and so he goes on, until by and by it becomes a question whether the man owns the hogs, or the hogs own the man. Many a man works like a galley slave to tend and care for hogs, cattle, horses, mules, and donkeys,—being himself the biggest donkey of them all, a beast of burden, a servant of dumb brutes. He thinks he is their owner; in fact he is their slave.

Let men who have been bought with

blood, learn to whom they belong; let them sell and give alms, and sunder the fetters that bind them; let them break away from their beggarly bondage, and be no longer like the prodigal, feeding swine in a far-off land, but let them arise and go to their Father’s house, and live no longer as the bond-slaves of a passing and perishing world, but as the children of the King, heirs of God, and joint heirs with Jesus Christ,—as they who use this world without abusing it.—The Christian.