When ye come to appear before me, who hath required this at your hand, to tread my courts?
To tread His courts is to come to appear before God in outward temple attendance and worship, which He disowns as something He never commanded or authorized when it is empty service. It was spoken to apostate Judah and Jerusalem, laden with iniquity with words and deeds against the Lord, whom God calls rulers of Sodom and people of Gomorrah, and it also marks the traders and priests Christ drove from the temple and the leaders and teachers in Christ's day whose hindrances to the kingdom were of their own making. God does not require or accept multitude of sacrifices, burnt offerings, vain oblations, incense, new moons, sabbaths, assemblies, solemn meetings, appointed feasts, and many prayers when joined with rebellion, iniquity, and disobedience to His holy law, counting heartless, insincere, hypocritical worship as iniquity, abomination, trouble, and weariness from which He hides His eyes and will not hear. Such gifts cannot cover hands full of blood and exploitation, sacrifices without faith, contrition, humility, and repentance cannot win favor as a substitute for obedience, and worship that rejects His law for human authority, as in exalting Sunday in place of the seventh-day Sabbath, affronts Him and aids the enemy's design to break His law. Instead He calls worshipers to wash, be clean, cease to do evil, and come with genuine repentance and a broken and contrite heart, learning to do well by seeking justice, relieving the oppressed, and caring for the fatherless and widows in a life changed by His power and conformed to His character. Coming to appear before Him brings accountability in the day when judgment sits and books are opened, when He will call each to answer for what was done at his hand, including harsh domineering work in His name, leading others away from obedience to His law, resisting His messengers, and carrying on ambitious enterprises and burdens of human devising that He never appointed.
Words and Ancient Setting
To tread the courts is to come to appear before God in outward temple attendance and worship, keeping up the forms of divine service with sacrifices and offerings while the life remains unchanged. Such coming is mere outward observance, an empty treading that is separated from obedience and just conduct and that persists in evil while neglecting the needy and oppressed. Its presence in God's courts does not please Him and does not make conduct acceptable, for rebellion shows that worshipful approach without obedience is to no purpose.
The question who required this at the hand is God's disowning of that coming, declaring He never commanded or authorized such empty service. He did not require attendance in His courts with multiplied sacrifices, burnt offerings, vain oblations, incense, new moons, sabbaths, assemblies, solemn meetings, appointed feasts, and many prayers when joined with sin, hypocrisy, and bloodstained hands. Appearing before Him and performing religious rites while continuing in evil and refusing repentance and obedience cannot please Him, and worship He has not commanded, such as exalting a day He did not sanctify, falls under the same rebuke.
The word was spoken to apostate Judah and Jerusalem, laden with iniquity, whose words and deeds were against the Lord and whose rebellion brought ruin and ripened them for utter destruction. They are called rulers of Sodom and people of Gomorrah, claiming to be righteous and to lean upon the Lord and to be numbered among His people while transgressing His holy law and building up Zion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity. The same condition delineates the traders and priests whom Christ drove from the temple courts, whose sacrifices and temple attendance were rejected when joined with rebellion. It applies to the leaders and teachers of the Jewish nation in Christ's day, whose obstacles to the kingdom were of their own making through insincere and hypocritical religion and resistance to conviction.
Worship God Rejects
God does not require or accept the treading of His courts by those who claim righteousness while transgressing His holy law, and their multitude of sacrifices, burnt offerings, vain oblations, incense, new moons, sabbaths, assemblies, solemn meetings, appointed feasts, and many prayers with spread hands are to no purpose when joined with rebellion and iniquity. He disowns that mere outward coming to His temple and asks who ever commanded such empty service, counting it iniquity, abomination, trouble, and weariness. He hates those forms kept up while men claim to lean upon Him and to be numbered among His people yet build up Zion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity, calling such rulers the rulers of Sodom and the people of Gomorrah. Worship attendance and offerings separated from obedience and just conduct are unacceptable while the needy and oppressed are neglected and evil is persisted in, for sin rather than any unwillingness on His part to forgive keeps the transgressor from receiving saving help. His rejection falls on ancient Judah and Jerusalem as apostate, laden with iniquity and ripe for ruin, and the same condition marked the traders and priests driven from the temple courts and the leaders and teachers whose self-made obstacles shut them from the kingdom.
Appearing in His courts and multiplying offerings do not please Him while worship is a heartless practice that leaves sin and evil unchanged. Religious life that is insincere and hypocritical, resisting conviction and refusing obedience, turns religious rites into a substitute for obedience rather than its expression. He therefore hides His eyes and will not hear, treating such worship as iniquity, abomination, trouble, and weariness. Multiplied animal sacrifices cannot win His favor in place of turning from evil, learning to do good, seeking justice, and caring for the oppressed, fatherless, and widows. The assumption that He required those multiplied offerings is challenged, for true worship calls for repentance and obedience rather than ritual used to cover selfishness or gain.
Worship is unacceptable when the worshiper's hands are full of blood, and religious gifts and conduct bound up with bloodshed and guilt cannot cover exploitation or make worship pleasing. Profession of devotion joined with disobedience leaves blood on the hands and renders sacrifices, assemblies, and prayers hypocritical. Gifts from the liquor traffic are condemned in particular, because wealth drawn from that trade is stained by the harm and bloodshed it causes to others.
Sacrifices given to keep Christ's sacrifice in mind become valueless and even abomination when offered without faith, contrition, humility, and repentance. A broken and contrite heart is worth more to Him than many offerings made without sorrow for sin, and religious acts cannot remove guilt while the heart remains unrepentant. Multiplied sacrifices cannot replace obedience, and acknowledgment of sin as transgression of His law with genuine humility is required. Outward sanctity that conceals love of sin and selfish gain is therefore rejected, for heartless ritual without humble repentance never pleased Him.
God does not require worship offered in defiance of His commands or that affronts Him by rejecting His law and substituting human authority for His word. That challenge falls on those who zealously promote Sunday in place of the seventh-day Sabbath, exalting a day He did not sanctify and serving the enemy's design to break His law. Treating Sunday as holy in honor of the resurrection is not commanded, for the resurrection accounts do not call it the Sabbath, the Lord's day, or a sacred day, nor say it replaces the Sabbath. In the judgment those who oppose His government, reject His creation memorial the Sabbath, and help undermine it by replacing it will face their error and have no excuse for their part in breaking His law.
Worship God Requires
Instead of empty treading of the courts, what is required is to wash, to be clean, and to cease to do evil. Sin must be acknowledged as transgression of the law, and coming before God must be with genuine repentance rather than heartless ritual that leaves evil unchanged. Multiplied animal sacrifices cannot win favor as a substitute for obedience, for offerings made without humble repentance are not pleasing. Sacrifices appointed to keep Christ's sacrifice in mind become valueless and even abomination when offered without faith, contrition, and humility. A broken and contrite heart is worth more than many offerings.
True worship learns to do well, seeks justice, relieves the oppressed, and defends and cares for the fatherless and the widows. Outward attendance and offerings are unacceptable while the needy and oppressed are neglected and evil is persisted in. Outward sanctity that conceals love of sin must give place to devotion marked by zeal for God's glory with judgment, mercy, and faith. Lives unchanged by His power do not please Him, however regular the religious forms.
Religious service cannot excuse a character lacking mercy, goodness, compassion, and love, and such a character is unfit for heaven. What is required is a life changed by His power and conformed to His character, not profession that acts unlike His life. Even while rebuking hypocritical worship, His hand is still held out to bring Israel to self-denial and sonship if they will turn, wash, be clean, cease evil, and do well.
Accountability in Judgment
To appear before God is to stand accountable before Him, for in the great day when judgment sits and the books are opened the great Judge calls each person to answer for what was done at his hand. His question who required this disowns work done on human terms and by human methods and plans that violate His principles and that He has condemned, as if He had required it. It is spoken then to those who undertook such unauthorized work, asking who authorized their actions and calling them to account for the harm done to souls. Those who have caused souls to be lost will answer for the blood upon their garments.
The same reckoning falls on harsh, bitter, domineering work done in His name by those who think themselves Christians while lacking self-control and Christlike pity. Such workers thrust with side and shoulder and push the diseased till they are scattered, driving the weak onto Satan's battleground to be tempted and fall, treating others harshly and driving them away from the church. No self-appointed leadership authorizes that course, and its harm is answerable to God, who calls its doers to repent and who will make them see they did a work He never required.
Appearing in worship does not please Him when the worshiper leads others away from obedience to His law, undermines its commandments, and turns people from them into transgression. The great Judge challenges that course and requires answer for the harm done to those led astray and for the blood of lost souls. The question likewise warns those who approach Him while opposing His will by resisting the message and messengers sent to bring light and mercy, blocking that message, rejecting accumulated evidence, and refusing to humble themselves and repent, for they will answer to God for it. Nor does appearing before Him excuse rebellion against His government, and in the judgment those who reject His creation memorial the Sabbath, exalt another day He did not sanctify, and cooperate with the enemy to break and undermine His law will face their error with no excuse for their part.
Work God Never Appointed
God asks who required work He never appointed when His people carry on ambitious, never-ending enterprises of their own devising that consume His money without producing results for His cause. Such work proceeds by human methods and plans He has condemned, instead of by His authority and principles, and in the great day He will call men to account for undertaking it as though He had required it. Elaborate, expensive preparations and theatrical display do not make a meeting faithful or give strength to its message, and workers must examine whether their methods bear divine approval rather than relying on outward appearance.
He did not require workers to load themselves with a hundred responsibilities beyond what can be carried, and if the burdens crush them it is because they loaded themselves down. Taking on that ambitious extra line of so-called medical missionary work endangers the general prosperity of the cause, unfits men to do thoroughly their appointed part, and leaves the special solemn testing work for this time nearly put out of work while the living oracles are made little of. The chief physician under God is to carry only the responsibility appointed him for suffering humanity, and leaving the special work of standing at the post of duty in the Sanitarium to make it a memorial of truth, in order to dip deeply into slum work to lift up the most degraded, is not gathering with Christ though supposed to be. Such unappointed expansion wears away physical, mental, and spiritual efficiency, binds up money and laborers, and spends much means unnecessarily while the appointed work is left undone.
He disowns establishments created to absorb funds so largely that His warning message is hindered for want of funds to carry it to the world. He rejects multiplying advantages, buildings, and enterprises in America and Battle Creek where facilities already abound, gathering workers and means from every possible resource and centralizing in selfishness while needy fields stand ready to be worked. This includes funding projects such as the Gospel Wagon, which gives a hurtful, unsanctified, unhumble example that spoils young workers and through them spoils others, even when paid for from personal money and done in the name of medical missionary work. He requires binding about spreading interests, doing less planning and devising for buildings in favored centers, and sharing abundant facilities and means with needy portions of the vineyard such as Australia, so that medical missionary work does not stand between Him and the work to be established there. True, genuine medical missionary work must be carried on in a different mold in connection with the gospel in the last message of mercy to the world, with money from sanitarium funds appropriated properly and wisely instead of being spent on labor He has not told men to do.
Such unappointed work robs His whole vineyard to build up work in one great wicked city such as Chicago, misappropriates means that should have supplied foreign and destitute fields, replenished His treasury, translated books, and supported missionaries, and closes human senses to great need in order to create things of human devising. It leaves His cause all over the world suffering for need and robs workers in new and untried fields of relief, while the Sanitarium ordained to give character to the third angel's message by its impression on the world is turned aside from that purpose. God did not require John to establish and support his own ambitious enterprises in Chicago, diverting money and talent from the appointed gospel ministry of preparing a people and proclaiming the third angel's message to work that carries another banner and deprives His cause of support.
He asks who required men to take it upon themselves to be conscience for others, to decide what may be brought before His people or what His servants may do. Those who assume this authority obstruct His own work, intrude on others' consciences, restrict religious liberty, and take authority over work He has not assigned them, and He will call them to account. The responsibility to speak His instructions specially entrusted to Moses was not delegated to them, and they have no authority to control what His servants may do or what His people may hear.
He will not accept missionary work from a wrong, unconverted, selfish heart still in darkness under temptation and full of sin. While a person stays in Satan's cave of darkness under the storm of temptation, He asks who can accept such work at that person's hand. To be fitted to do others good, the person must come out, fall upon the Rock and be broken, die to self, be crucified, and become free from selfishness and sin.
He does not require religious effort that is excessive and harmful, such as overlong sermons that exhaust speakers and hearers, weaken the closing influence and decision, and may lead to impatience and damage the speaker's witness. Ministers should conserve their strength, keep their talks brief and fresh, and use varied methods and personal effort to help people reach a decision, for such overwork is not service He has asked for. He did not require missionaries to take on family responsibilities that add burdens and divert attention from the work He had given them, a choice presented as contrary to His counsel and will.
To tread His courts is to come to appear before God in outward temple attendance and worship, which He disowns as something He never commanded or authorized when it is empty service. It was spoken to apostate Judah and Jerusalem, laden with iniquity with words and deeds against the Lord, whom God calls rulers of Sodom and people of Gomorrah, and it also marks the traders and priests Christ drove from the temple and the leaders and teachers in Christ's day whose hindrances to the kingdom were of their own making. God does not require or accept multitude of sacrifices, burnt offerings, vain oblations, incense, new moons, sabbaths, assemblies, solemn meetings, appointed feasts, and many prayers when joined with rebellion, iniquity, and disobedience to His holy law, counting heartless, insincere, hypocritical worship as iniquity, abomination, trouble, and weariness from which He hides His eyes and will not hear. Such gifts cannot cover hands full of blood and exploitation, sacrifices without faith, contrition, humility, and repentance cannot win favor as a substitute for obedience, and worship that rejects His law for human authority, as in exalting Sunday in place of the seventh-day Sabbath, affronts Him and aids the enemy's design to break His law. Instead He calls worshipers to wash, be clean, cease to do evil, and come with genuine repentance and a broken and contrite heart, learning to do well by seeking justice, relieving the oppressed, and caring for the fatherless and widows in a life changed by His power and conformed to His character. Coming to appear before Him brings accountability in the day when judgment sits and books are opened, when He will call each to answer for what was done at his hand, including harsh domineering work in His name, leading others away from obedience to His law, resisting His messengers, and carrying on ambitious enterprises and burdens of human devising that He never appointed.
Words and Ancient Setting
To tread the courts is to come to appear before God in outward temple attendance and worship, keeping up the forms of divine service with sacrifices and offerings while the life remains unchanged. Such coming is mere outward observance, an empty treading that is separated from obedience and just conduct and that persists in evil while neglecting the needy and oppressed. Its presence in God's courts does not please Him and does not make conduct acceptable, for rebellion shows that worshipful approach without obedience is to no purpose.
The question who required this at the hand is God's disowning of that coming, declaring He never commanded or authorized such empty service. He did not require attendance in His courts with multiplied sacrifices, burnt offerings, vain oblations, incense, new moons, sabbaths, assemblies, solemn meetings, appointed feasts, and many prayers when joined with sin, hypocrisy, and bloodstained hands. Appearing before Him and performing religious rites while continuing in evil and refusing repentance and obedience cannot please Him, and worship He has not commanded, such as exalting a day He did not sanctify, falls under the same rebuke.
The word was spoken to apostate Judah and Jerusalem, laden with iniquity, whose words and deeds were against the Lord and whose rebellion brought ruin and ripened them for utter destruction. They are called rulers of Sodom and people of Gomorrah, claiming to be righteous and to lean upon the Lord and to be numbered among His people while transgressing His holy law and building up Zion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity. The same condition delineates the traders and priests whom Christ drove from the temple courts, whose sacrifices and temple attendance were rejected when joined with rebellion. It applies to the leaders and teachers of the Jewish nation in Christ's day, whose obstacles to the kingdom were of their own making through insincere and hypocritical religion and resistance to conviction.
Worship God Rejects
God does not require or accept the treading of His courts by those who claim righteousness while transgressing His holy law, and their multitude of sacrifices, burnt offerings, vain oblations, incense, new moons, sabbaths, assemblies, solemn meetings, appointed feasts, and many prayers with spread hands are to no purpose when joined with rebellion and iniquity. He disowns that mere outward coming to His temple and asks who ever commanded such empty service, counting it iniquity, abomination, trouble, and weariness. He hates those forms kept up while men claim to lean upon Him and to be numbered among His people yet build up Zion with blood and Jerusalem with iniquity, calling such rulers the rulers of Sodom and the people of Gomorrah. Worship attendance and offerings separated from obedience and just conduct are unacceptable while the needy and oppressed are neglected and evil is persisted in, for sin rather than any unwillingness on His part to forgive keeps the transgressor from receiving saving help. His rejection falls on ancient Judah and Jerusalem as apostate, laden with iniquity and ripe for ruin, and the same condition marked the traders and priests driven from the temple courts and the leaders and teachers whose self-made obstacles shut them from the kingdom.
Appearing in His courts and multiplying offerings do not please Him while worship is a heartless practice that leaves sin and evil unchanged. Religious life that is insincere and hypocritical, resisting conviction and refusing obedience, turns religious rites into a substitute for obedience rather than its expression. He therefore hides His eyes and will not hear, treating such worship as iniquity, abomination, trouble, and weariness. Multiplied animal sacrifices cannot win His favor in place of turning from evil, learning to do good, seeking justice, and caring for the oppressed, fatherless, and widows. The assumption that He required those multiplied offerings is challenged, for true worship calls for repentance and obedience rather than ritual used to cover selfishness or gain.
Worship is unacceptable when the worshiper's hands are full of blood, and religious gifts and conduct bound up with bloodshed and guilt cannot cover exploitation or make worship pleasing. Profession of devotion joined with disobedience leaves blood on the hands and renders sacrifices, assemblies, and prayers hypocritical. Gifts from the liquor traffic are condemned in particular, because wealth drawn from that trade is stained by the harm and bloodshed it causes to others.
Sacrifices given to keep Christ's sacrifice in mind become valueless and even abomination when offered without faith, contrition, humility, and repentance. A broken and contrite heart is worth more to Him than many offerings made without sorrow for sin, and religious acts cannot remove guilt while the heart remains unrepentant. Multiplied sacrifices cannot replace obedience, and acknowledgment of sin as transgression of His law with genuine humility is required. Outward sanctity that conceals love of sin and selfish gain is therefore rejected, for heartless ritual without humble repentance never pleased Him.
God does not require worship offered in defiance of His commands or that affronts Him by rejecting His law and substituting human authority for His word. That challenge falls on those who zealously promote Sunday in place of the seventh-day Sabbath, exalting a day He did not sanctify and serving the enemy's design to break His law. Treating Sunday as holy in honor of the resurrection is not commanded, for the resurrection accounts do not call it the Sabbath, the Lord's day, or a sacred day, nor say it replaces the Sabbath. In the judgment those who oppose His government, reject His creation memorial the Sabbath, and help undermine it by replacing it will face their error and have no excuse for their part in breaking His law.
Worship God Requires
Instead of empty treading of the courts, what is required is to wash, to be clean, and to cease to do evil. Sin must be acknowledged as transgression of the law, and coming before God must be with genuine repentance rather than heartless ritual that leaves evil unchanged. Multiplied animal sacrifices cannot win favor as a substitute for obedience, for offerings made without humble repentance are not pleasing. Sacrifices appointed to keep Christ's sacrifice in mind become valueless and even abomination when offered without faith, contrition, and humility. A broken and contrite heart is worth more than many offerings.
True worship learns to do well, seeks justice, relieves the oppressed, and defends and cares for the fatherless and the widows. Outward attendance and offerings are unacceptable while the needy and oppressed are neglected and evil is persisted in. Outward sanctity that conceals love of sin must give place to devotion marked by zeal for God's glory with judgment, mercy, and faith. Lives unchanged by His power do not please Him, however regular the religious forms.
Religious service cannot excuse a character lacking mercy, goodness, compassion, and love, and such a character is unfit for heaven. What is required is a life changed by His power and conformed to His character, not profession that acts unlike His life. Even while rebuking hypocritical worship, His hand is still held out to bring Israel to self-denial and sonship if they will turn, wash, be clean, cease evil, and do well.
Accountability in Judgment
To appear before God is to stand accountable before Him, for in the great day when judgment sits and the books are opened the great Judge calls each person to answer for what was done at his hand. His question who required this disowns work done on human terms and by human methods and plans that violate His principles and that He has condemned, as if He had required it. It is spoken then to those who undertook such unauthorized work, asking who authorized their actions and calling them to account for the harm done to souls. Those who have caused souls to be lost will answer for the blood upon their garments.
The same reckoning falls on harsh, bitter, domineering work done in His name by those who think themselves Christians while lacking self-control and Christlike pity. Such workers thrust with side and shoulder and push the diseased till they are scattered, driving the weak onto Satan's battleground to be tempted and fall, treating others harshly and driving them away from the church. No self-appointed leadership authorizes that course, and its harm is answerable to God, who calls its doers to repent and who will make them see they did a work He never required.
Appearing in worship does not please Him when the worshiper leads others away from obedience to His law, undermines its commandments, and turns people from them into transgression. The great Judge challenges that course and requires answer for the harm done to those led astray and for the blood of lost souls. The question likewise warns those who approach Him while opposing His will by resisting the message and messengers sent to bring light and mercy, blocking that message, rejecting accumulated evidence, and refusing to humble themselves and repent, for they will answer to God for it. Nor does appearing before Him excuse rebellion against His government, and in the judgment those who reject His creation memorial the Sabbath, exalt another day He did not sanctify, and cooperate with the enemy to break and undermine His law will face their error with no excuse for their part.
Work God Never Appointed
God asks who required work He never appointed when His people carry on ambitious, never-ending enterprises of their own devising that consume His money without producing results for His cause. Such work proceeds by human methods and plans He has condemned, instead of by His authority and principles, and in the great day He will call men to account for undertaking it as though He had required it. Elaborate, expensive preparations and theatrical display do not make a meeting faithful or give strength to its message, and workers must examine whether their methods bear divine approval rather than relying on outward appearance.
He did not require workers to load themselves with a hundred responsibilities beyond what can be carried, and if the burdens crush them it is because they loaded themselves down. Taking on that ambitious extra line of so-called medical missionary work endangers the general prosperity of the cause, unfits men to do thoroughly their appointed part, and leaves the special solemn testing work for this time nearly put out of work while the living oracles are made little of. The chief physician under God is to carry only the responsibility appointed him for suffering humanity, and leaving the special work of standing at the post of duty in the Sanitarium to make it a memorial of truth, in order to dip deeply into slum work to lift up the most degraded, is not gathering with Christ though supposed to be. Such unappointed expansion wears away physical, mental, and spiritual efficiency, binds up money and laborers, and spends much means unnecessarily while the appointed work is left undone.
He disowns establishments created to absorb funds so largely that His warning message is hindered for want of funds to carry it to the world. He rejects multiplying advantages, buildings, and enterprises in America and Battle Creek where facilities already abound, gathering workers and means from every possible resource and centralizing in selfishness while needy fields stand ready to be worked. This includes funding projects such as the Gospel Wagon, which gives a hurtful, unsanctified, unhumble example that spoils young workers and through them spoils others, even when paid for from personal money and done in the name of medical missionary work. He requires binding about spreading interests, doing less planning and devising for buildings in favored centers, and sharing abundant facilities and means with needy portions of the vineyard such as Australia, so that medical missionary work does not stand between Him and the work to be established there. True, genuine medical missionary work must be carried on in a different mold in connection with the gospel in the last message of mercy to the world, with money from sanitarium funds appropriated properly and wisely instead of being spent on labor He has not told men to do.
Such unappointed work robs His whole vineyard to build up work in one great wicked city such as Chicago, misappropriates means that should have supplied foreign and destitute fields, replenished His treasury, translated books, and supported missionaries, and closes human senses to great need in order to create things of human devising. It leaves His cause all over the world suffering for need and robs workers in new and untried fields of relief, while the Sanitarium ordained to give character to the third angel's message by its impression on the world is turned aside from that purpose. God did not require John to establish and support his own ambitious enterprises in Chicago, diverting money and talent from the appointed gospel ministry of preparing a people and proclaiming the third angel's message to work that carries another banner and deprives His cause of support.
He asks who required men to take it upon themselves to be conscience for others, to decide what may be brought before His people or what His servants may do. Those who assume this authority obstruct His own work, intrude on others' consciences, restrict religious liberty, and take authority over work He has not assigned them, and He will call them to account. The responsibility to speak His instructions specially entrusted to Moses was not delegated to them, and they have no authority to control what His servants may do or what His people may hear.
He will not accept missionary work from a wrong, unconverted, selfish heart still in darkness under temptation and full of sin. While a person stays in Satan's cave of darkness under the storm of temptation, He asks who can accept such work at that person's hand. To be fitted to do others good, the person must come out, fall upon the Rock and be broken, die to self, be crucified, and become free from selfishness and sin.
He does not require religious effort that is excessive and harmful, such as overlong sermons that exhaust speakers and hearers, weaken the closing influence and decision, and may lead to impatience and damage the speaker's witness. Ministers should conserve their strength, keep their talks brief and fresh, and use varied methods and personal effort to help people reach a decision, for such overwork is not service He has asked for. He did not require missionaries to take on family responsibilities that add burdens and divert attention from the work He had given them, a choice presented as contrary to His counsel and will.