Letters and Manuscripts — Volume 14 (1899)

Lt 115, 1899

Wessels, Peter

“Sunnyside,” Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia

August 8, 1899

Previously unpublished.

Dear Brother Peter Wessels:

You have not moved wisely. You have acted unadvisedly in engaging and in investing your means in worldly business. Is this the work you are to do? No, I answer, no. If you continue in this work you will soon lose your interest in present truth. Is it not a time now when we should be preparing our souls to do work for the Master? Is it not a time when your whole mind and soul and heart and strength should be employed in trading on the talents entrusted to you, a time to seek the Lord with heart, soul, mind, and strength? 14LtMs, Lt 115, 1899, par. 1

Make a full surrender to God. Place yourself in right relation to Him, and be ready to do anything that He would have you do. The work you are now engaged in will bind up the means that should be used to bring souls to a knowledge of the truth. Look at Philip. What has he to show for all his labor, all his work? The Lord has not prospered him. How much better would it have been for him to have humbled his heart before God and worked out God’s plans. My brother, you are not working out God’s plans, but are following your own wisdom. 14LtMs, Lt 115, 1899, par. 2

Now is the time for us to do our appointed work. Now is the time for us to reveal living faith. I ask you to prepare for what is coming upon the earth—plagues, war, and confusion of nations. I pray that the Lord may hold the four winds until the servants of God are sealed in their foreheads. We have no time to halt between two opinions. Let us do the work that must be done in these last days—set our own hearts in order, that they may be purified, refined, elevated, and ennobled. 14LtMs, Lt 115, 1899, par. 3

The Lord would have you review your own experience. In some things you have been greatly out of the way. I have longed so much to hear from you that you had despised and abhorred your own course of actions and cleansed yourself from all impurity of the flesh and of the spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of the Lord. Your lips must be touched with a live coal from off the altar. You must, if you answer the last call to the supper, be clothed with the white robe of the righteousness of Christ. How sorrowfully have the angels of God looked upon you, a man who could do good as the Lord’s messenger, but who could not be trusted; for temptation in a certain line so mastered your senses that it has had all the attraction for you of a gambling hell, the worst and deepest deception that could come upon the human mind. 14LtMs, Lt 115, 1899, par. 4

Has this spell been broken? Have you a pure heart and clean hands? Have you washed your robes of character in the blood of the Lamb? Have you purified your moral taste, so that you behold Jesus, and, by beholding, are becoming changed into His likeness? God help you, is my prayer. 14LtMs, Lt 115, 1899, par. 5