Connect With God
Ministers of Christ, you may be connected with God if you will watch and pray. Let your words be seasoned with salt, and let Christian courtesy and true elevation pervade your demeanor. If the peace of God is ruling within, its power will not only strengthen, but soften your hearts, and you will be living representatives of Christ. The people who profess the truth are backsliding from God. Jesus is soon to come, and they are not ready. The minister must reach a higher standard himself, a faith marked with greater firmness, an experience that is living and vivid, not dull and commonplace, like that of the nominal professors. The word of God sets a high mark before you. Will you, through fasting and prayerful effort, attain to the completeness and consistency of Christian character? You should make straight paths for your feet, lest the lame be turned out of the way. A close connection with God will bring to you, in your labor, that vital power which arouses the conscience, and convicts the sinner of sin, leading him to cry, “What shall I do to be saved?”
The commission which Christ gave to the disciples, just prior to his ascension to heaven, was, “Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost: teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and, lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world.” “Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word.” [Matthew 28:19, 20; John 17:20.] The commission reaches those who shall believe on his word through his disciples. And all who are called of God to stand as ambassadors for him, should take the lessons upon practical godliness given them by Christ in his word, and teach them to the people.
Christ opened the Scriptures to his disciples, beginning at Moses and the prophets, and instructed them in all things concerning himself, and also explained to them the prophecies. The apostles, in their preaching, went back to Adam's day, and brought their hearers down through prophetic history, and ended with Christ and him crucified, calling upon sinners to repent and turn from their sins to God. The representatives of Christ in our day should follow their example, and in every discourse magnify Christ as the Exalted One, as all and in all.
GW92 19, 20