COME UNTO ME | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Feb 27, 1907

'COME UNTO ME.'

IT is the call of the Christ of God to all the hungry, weary, thirsty souls perishing in the Desert of Sin. How many there are! How they long for the water of life! How they are deceived by the devil's substitutes! How many there are who quaff from the bowl of pleasure and lust, and grow mad of thirst while they drink! The poison saps their life and fevers heart and brain.

Others drink from the sparkling contents of Ambition's cup, from the goblets of the Circes of Mammon and Power and Fame, and the heavy draughts of coarser Greed; but the drinking of all these creates a fiercer thirst than they relieve, and leaves the poor victim at last to die, longing for a cool, fever-assuaging draught which they can never brew.

On the parched and burning sands of the Desert of Sin lie many souls longing for the waters of life. How fearfully Mr. Maybell has pictured the awful condition on the opposite page. As the once strong man sees the banks and clusters of cloud overhead, all big with promises of great things to dying mortals, his last despairing effort is to hold out his little cup for a few drops of promised refreshment, but all in vain. They are, in the striking words of Holy Writ, 'clouds without water.'

We need not enumerate or segregate these clouds. None of them promise any other salvation than self-salvation—the salvation of the human. All the good there is in any of them has been borrowed from the living truth of God and perverted and poisoned by the intermixture of error. Man may quaff from their poisoned cisterns for centuries, as have the people of the lands of the Orient, and constantly sink into deeper degradation, into destruction of the human will, into the enslavement of intellect, the endwarment of mind, to the destruction of all moral standards. 'There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.' That way which seems right is self-salvation, and develops into all the 'clouds without water' shown in our picture, which promise much, but perform nothing save to curse with a deception which lures to death.

O soul, dying out on the Desert of Sin, there is One who can help you, and that is Jesus Christ. He is the Fountain of Life.

By faith dig thru the burning sands and tap the artesian streams of living water. They will come to meet you and strength will be given for the digging. Look up beyond the low-hung clouds of human smoke and 'ask ye of Jehovah rain in the time of the latter rain, even of Jehovah that maketh lightnings; and He will give them showers of rain, to every one grass in the field.' For all the devotees of the false 'have spoken vanity, and the diviners have seen a lie; and have told false dreams, they comfort in vain.' But Christ 'will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and streams upon the dry ground.' O soul, turn from the counterfeit clouds and come to the simple, comforting, assuaging Fountain of the word of life. God's invitation is: 'Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, . . . without money and without price.' 'Whosoever will, let him take the water of life freely.'