Special Testimonies Concerning the Work and Workers in the Pacific Press

Losing the First Love

9. Many of you have lost your first love, and you are not preparing yourselves by gaining an experience in true devotion and service to God, to stand in the great day of God. It is essential that you become so rooted and grounded in the faith that you will be able to stand when deception and error as a thick cloud will cover the inhabitants of the earth. While good works will not buy your salvation, yet good works are essential for salvation; for they are an evidence of genuine faith which works by love and purifies the soul. PH152 31.1

10. Unless your heart is stayed upon God, and you are a coworker with Christ Jesus, you will be filled with self-confidence, pride, self-sufficiency, and you will be given to the indulgence of self and the sin of unbelief, which so easily besets the soul, and thus you will become the captive of the enemy. You are to work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God that worketh in you, both to will and to do of his own good-pleasure. As God works man must cooperate in order that the result designed may be accomplished. But how long have the heavenly intelligences waited in vain for your cooperation, who ought to have been engaged most earnestly in the work of God for this time! PH152 31.2

11. Many of you do not feel the need of a daily and hourly connection with Christ. You do not feel the need of prayer, that you may draw from Christ that which is essential for the maintenance of spiritual life. You have failed to appreciate the privilege of associating together in the capacity of believers. You are not to come together simply as a matter of form and ceremony, but for the interchange of thought, for the relation of your daily experiences, for the expression of thanksgiving, for the utterance of your sincere desire for divine enlightenment, that you may know God and Jesus Christ, whom he hath sent. Communing together in regard to Christ will strengthen the soul for the conflicts and trials that will come upon you. Never entertain the idea that you can be Christians and still withdraw yourselves within yourselves. Each one is a part of the great web of humanity, and the nature and quality of your experience will be largely determined by the character of the experience of those with whom you associate. Jesus says, “Where two or three are met together in my name, there am I in the midst.” Then do not forsake the assembling of yourselves “together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another; and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.” PH152 32.1