Spiritual Crises | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Oct 7, 1875

Spiritual Crises.

There are moments in some men's lives when all the forces of good and evil seem battling together for the dominion of their wills, and as the one or the other conquers they date from that moment all their peace or pain. But in reality God never yet gave over any soul to the determining conditions of a single great adventure. Even if these crises, as we call them, were final, if these once past, there was “no place for repentance” for the sinful man, no chance of lapse for the righteous, the divine wisdom and fairness would still approve itself. For these crises are but culminations, as are the crises when hostile armies meet in the tug of battle. Victory or defeat has been prepared for in a thousand antecedent acts. So with the moral defeat and victories of the individual. They are never absolutely unique. They are effects of previous courses. It is drill that tells in this case as in the other. And, praise God, for the individual there can be no defeat which may not be repaired, even as there can be no victory which may not be thrown away without eternal vigilance. Again, the case is parallel between the nation and the individual, and as with the first the most crushing and apparently ruinous defeat may be the means of rousing dormant energies which, once aroused, will put a new face upon affairs and match all previous defeats with glorious victories, so with the second, by God's providence, the humiliating moral failures may, by the very power of their self-revelation, be the beginning of a new career of virtue and of happiness. —Sel.