Your ShelfYour Projects

Take Time to Think,

6%

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 1, 1875

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 45, No. 14.

Read the full edition

Take Time to Think,

By A. C. S.

In America, especially, most people seem to be in a great hurry. How great the bustle and commotion! What intense strife in the effort to reach some good! Why this universal hurry? Why such headlong, rushing haste!
O fellow-traveler, stop and think a moment! Take time to think. Think calmly. Whence are you? and whither tending? What is to be the result of all this thoughtless haste? Are you intently seeking the highest good? May you not miss it for want of careful thought and sober inquiry? Are you seeking the world’s greatest interest—its eternal salvation? May you not mistake the best ways and means for lack of proper reflection and investigation? Are you seeking Heaven? Think much and prayerfully, lest you miss the direction and wander in the wrong road.
Is the time short? Think the more carefully and run understandingly, lest if you miss the right way, you have not time to find it again. Are the elements already on fire? Prayerfully, with calm caution, study your guide-book, lest you miss the narrow path, and in rushing from fires behind plunge into hotter elements before! “Think on these things.” Take time to think. Be in earnest. Be zealous. Be vigilant and very active. But make haste deliberately, thoughtfully, slowly.
Thousands of persons have professed Christ and assumed the church relation, moved, no doubt, by proper religious emotions and sympathies, and praiseworthy sentiments, incited by some true and real religious experiences, induced by an apprehension of truth then present and applicable to them, and have ever since run with great haste in the light of the first experiences. But they have rested their doctrine, belief, faith, hope, and prospects, entirely upon the little truth at first perceived, and hence have failed to advance from faith to faith, from light to light, from joy to joy (2 Pet. 1:5–12), and have entirely failed to apprehend the truths applicable to them in the different stages and periods of life’s development and history. Hence, such persons are no stronger, no wiser, no better, as Christians, than when first born to grace.
Thousands of well-meaning, sincere persons seem never to have had a conception that anything beyond first impressions, first apprehensions, and first experiences, were possible in Christian life, or that it was possible to discover new truths; and hence, though ever zealously hurrying to and fro, remain relatively stationary in faith and hope.
Other thousands seem equally ready to run after any and all lights, and any and all calls, whether they be lights from above or from below, or whether the calls be the voice of God or the voice of the deceiver, seeming intent only to run in haste.
There are others still who started in the Christian course with sincere, honest purposes, who are pursuing with great zeal, not even the one light or truth first perceived, but prejudice, ambition, or some other selfish interest, blindly. And, oh! what agitations in the church, what commotions, what asperities and strifes result! Calamities all the more disastrous because of the intense zeal and haste of pursuit!
Thousands of persons of honest purposes, sincere intentions, actuated by religious emotions and moral sentiments entirely praiseworthy, are following the lead of poor—not to say blind—guides to religious faith and doctrines, just because they do not take time to think with sufficient care to apprehend the truth.
The writer of these lines, having been led to adopt the high spiritualistic or figurative interpretations and renderings of scriptures—though sincerely desiring to walk in the light of truth in all good conscience—for a period of thirty years, in the midst of an intensely busy and hurried life—has failed to apprehend correctly some of the most important truths of revelation, especially the present truths, applicable to our day and age, and as a logical consequence of the teaching of the schools, has, for a quarter of a century, denied the literal second coming of Christ, the literal resurrection of the body, the literal Judgment, and the literal destruction of the world by fire, &c., until an enforced leisure has recently given him time for quiet re-reading and calm thinking.
Now, it seems marvelously strange that any sincere, intelligent mind should fail to apprehend such plain truths. Now, my prayer is that the “present truth” apprehended may not only make me “wise unto salvation,” and “established,” but a better man. This is the criterion by which to try ourselves as to whether we have sincerely accepted any truth apprehended. Does it make us wiser, stronger, and better?
Hurrying pilgrim traveler, stop and think! “Think on these things.” Have not you, too, made some mistakes? Oh! take time to think! May not you, too, be blindly following error—the false logic of blind teachers? May not you be actuated by mere prejudice or a false ambition? Mere unconsciousness of error, or blindness, or prejudice against truth, will not suffice. Mere sincerity of anxious pursuit in the Christian race is not all that is required. We need to run in the light of truth. God’s will is that we should be wholly right. Nor will merely great zeal in the Master’s cause suffice for the Christian soldier. The efficient weapons of our warfare must be burnished truths.
Nor of truths will the old ones always suffice. Some things which are true at one time are not at another. The preaching of a coming flood was at one time present truth, but has ceased to be such now. Not every truth most important at any one time is most important at all times. Some truths are absolute and universal; some are relative—applicable at particular periods of time, for special purposes to combat special errors, and achieve special victories. The efficient soldier must use the most improved and sharpest instruments—those adapted to his time. And he who shall attempt to achieve the victories demanded in this “time of the end” by the use of the old-time truths, is as unwise as he who should attempt to capture the fortress of Gibraltar to-day by the use of the sling, the war club, and other primeval weapons.
Not even the old tried and absolute truths are sufficient. But God has prepared us weapons for this special age, this “day of his preparation.” Let us apprehend them, and learn to wield them with directness and power; then shall victory be ours, and the laurels and crowns ours in the day of triumph.
“Think on these things.” Friend, no longer willingly or thoughtlessly walk in darkness and inefficient weakness, while the means of strength and efficiency are within your reach, means which in your great hurry you pass by; but stop and think, and grasp them; wield them deliberately, striking—not at random, too hurriedly, but with direct aim and straight, strong blows, and God will give you great victories!
“Think on these things.” Take time to think, that you may apprehend the true light—the present truth, in these last days revealed of God, that you may do effective service in proclaiming the soon coming of our Lord. A. C. S.