p. 7 | Be in Earnest

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 15, 1871

Be in Earnest.

PAUL, whose career was so wonderful—whose life has proved a fund of exhaustless interest and instruction to the church and to the world, who was so signally marked as a favorite of Heaven—is a type of the men we most need. It is earnest men that we want in this world—not wilful men who are earnest in gratifying a caprice, or their own wills, or in accomplishing their own selfish ends—but we want men who are always in earnest respecting the truth which they do possess, who are sincere in the sense in which St. Paul was sincere through his whole life; simply desiring to apprehend truth, and then laboring for it with the whole soul.

Such men, open to the influence of divine truth, may meet with some wonderful changes of opinion and action. But they are the only men who are entitled to have confidence that they will be led by the hand of God. We want earnest Christians, and we want earnest unbelievers also—men who will be always able to say truly that they “verily think” they are doing God service in the lives which they are leading. The trouble is, not that men like Saul of Tarsus persecute the church of Christ, but that indifference to truth prevails. Men are not longing for it; and when they think they have found it, devoting themselves to its service with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength. Indifference to truth and her interests broods like the spell of death over the minds of men. God in his providence carries home the truth of his gospel to the heart and conscience; but there is not the remotest idea of going on to the discharge of duty. Men draw it in with every breath they breathe. But as with the air, so with the truth. They learn its value only when God takes it from them. Amid all the conflict of opinion whose din and noise fill the earth, men eagerly seizing whatever makes for themselves, bolsters them up in their chosen position, thrusting from them all considerations which make against them, present the spectacle of men fighting for a victory, as if any victory will stand at the day of Judgment but that which truth shall win.

Men who are thinking most of everything else but the truth of God, are not the men to whom he will, in any special manner, by any special act, make his truth known. Saul was ready, the moment the true light of Heaven broke in upon his soul, for any service. He was not the man to ask, “Lord, what wilt thou have me to do?” with a mental reservation to do that will, or not, according to his inclination or fancied interests. He would take the consequences of an answer to his prayer. He would aim to be equal to the responsibilities which it imposed. In like manner, only as any one, in full purpose of heart, turns his steps heavenward, to follow where God shall lead, will be a glorious announcement when, as of Saul, it shall be said of him, “Behold, he prayeth!”—Sel.