Is the eye single to the glory of God in these games? I know that this is not so. There is a losing sight of God’s way and His purpose. The employment of intelligent beings, in probationary time, is superseding God’s revealed will and substituting for it the speculations and inventions of the human agent, with Satan by his side to imbue with his spirit…. The Lord God of heaven protests against the burning passion cultivated for supremacy in the games that are so engrossing.
In early ages, with the people who were under God’s direction, life was simple. They lived close to the heart of nature. Their children shared in the labor of the parents and studied the beauties and mysteries of nature’s treasure house. And in the quiet of field and wood they pondered those mighty truths handed down as a sacred trust from generation to generation. Such training produced strong men.
Christ taught His disciples how to conduct themselves when in the company of those who were not religious and those who were. He taught them by example that when attending any public gathering, they need not want for something to say. But His conversation differed most decidedly from that which had been listened to at feasts in the past. Every word He uttered was a savor of life unto life to His hearers, and they listened with subdued attention as though desirous of hearing to a purpose.
In no time in your life have you been more critically placed than you are while prosecuting your medical studies in Ann Arbor. Satan is watching every avenue whereby he can take advantage to enter with his specious temptations to spoil the soul. You will meet with infidel sentiments in very intelligent men who call themselves Christians. Cling to the wisdom which is revealed to you in the Word of God, for it will bind you, if you obey its teachings, to the throne of God.
I am fearful now, more than at any other period of time, that Christians, as individuals, may separate from God because they lose sight of the Pattern, Jesus Christ, and think it is safe to walk in the sparks of their own kindling, deceiving the soul with thinking it is the way of the Lord.
We must have that faith that works by love and purifies the soul. Here, my dear friends, is where you can work for others’ good. The precious revelation of God’s will in the Scriptures with all their unfolding of glorious truth is only a means to an end. The death of Jesus Christ was a means to an end. The most powerful and efficacious provision that He could give to our world was the means; the end was the glory of God in the uplifting, refining, ennobling of the human agent.
The moral development of man is conformity to the image of Jesus Christ. And the end requires that the truth, employed as a means, should itself be capable of constant expansion, that it may be seen in new development, but close study and earnest prayer being brought into the practical life; the human and the divine co-operating, that man may become a partaker of the divine nature, having escaped the corruptions that are in the world through lust. As the truth is studied with humble heart, the will subjected to the divine operations of the Spirit of God, the truth brightens, like its divine Author, while beholding it, and while aspiring through the grace of Christ to reach it. In this way, the human agent is elevated to attain to the standard of perfection of human character.