Selections from Testimonies to the Managers and Workers in our Institutions

Losing the First Love

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. PH149 54.3

Unless your heart is stayed upon God, and you are 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! PH149 55.1

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.... PH149 55.2