Letters and Manuscripts — Volume 15 (1900)

Lt 185, 1900

Kellogg, Brother and Sister [J. H.]

Sunnyside, Cooranbong, New South Wales, Australia

January 1, 1900

Previously unpublished.

My Dear Brother and Sister Kellogg:

I wish you a most blessed, happy New Year. May the Lord help you, my brother, to see all things clearly. The Lord has taken special care to instruct you, and I hope you will both heed His voice and help one another to heed the words of Christ, “Take my yoke upon you and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:29, 30. Said David, “I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Psalm 139:14. 15LtMs, Lt 185, 1900, par. 1

I was speaking to you last night, saying, Brother John Kellogg, you must call a halt. You are doing the work God has not set you to do. Our God gave to you your work. It was for you to unite with yourself the very best men to stand side by side with you. He has not appointed you to educate students to engage in the work you call medical missionary work—to obtain an experience in the slums of the cities—and to create sanitariums so abundantly in America, without lifting up your eyes and their eyes to see the fields afar off all white unto the harvest. You are, my brother, to consider that you cannot carry on the work as you have been doing. You are wearing a yoke you have fitted for your own neck. You have been gathering to yourself one responsibility after another, creating orphans asylums and homes for working men, and taking from the world and nominal churches the work they would now do if called upon to do it. But they will not do the work that God has called you to do. 15LtMs, Lt 185, 1900, par. 2

These many responsibilities are wearing upon the strength that God would have you use, with care, to do your appointed work—to educate the physicians to do the very work you are doing; and to do for those who come to the Sanitarium the critical, delicate work which you are prepared to do and others under your supervision have not been educated to do. The freshness and the power are going out of you. You are nervous and you will soon be broken down. God has not appointed you and your brother physicians and workers to do this class of work you have been doing. These men are to be God’s witnesses. 15LtMs, Lt 185, 1900, par. 3

Scene after scene was presented before me where Satan in his councils was planning his schemes to so enthuse and control your mind that your mind would act on mind, and that you would take upon you a work into which he would weave himself and prepare to keep you in a work to absorb all the Sanitarium resources. He has created various schemes for a class of labor God has not told you to do, in order that other parts of the Lord’s great field should be deprived of the establishment of plants that would be working forces in the great vineyard of the Lord. 15LtMs, Lt 185, 1900, par. 4

And the Lord said, Who has required this at your hands? The establishments created to absorb funds so largely that the Lord’s message of warning shall not come to the world but be hindered for want of funds—who has required this work at your hands? All the true, genuine medical missionary work is to be carried on in connection with the gospel in the last message of mercy to be given to the world. The work must have a different mold than you are giving it. The much money expended from the sanitarium funds is not properly and wisely appropriated. You are deceived, my brother, and being deceived with the favorable reports brought to you. 15LtMs, Lt 185, 1900, par. 5