Living On The Financial Edge

April 5  Living On The Financial Edge

 


I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Ro. 12:1, RSV.

It's easier to be a dead sacrifice than a living one. At least in the death the sacrifice is over, but in life it goes on and on. So it was for the founders of Adventism.

Bates, as we noted earlier, had had a fair portion of wealth. But having given everything to Millerism except his home, he spent the rest of his life on the thin edge of financial reality.

But he wasn't the only one. In April 1848 James White was able to write of himself and Ellen that "all we have including clothes, bedding, and household furniture we have with us in a three-foot trunk, and that is but half full. We have nothing else to do but to serve God and go where God opens the way for us."

But travel wasn't always easy in those days, especially if a person was broke. Bates for example, felt deeply impressed in early 1849 that it was his duty to preach the message in Vermont. Having no money, he decided to walk from sourthern Massachusetts.

However, he wasn't the only one under conviction regarding that missionary tour. Ellen White's sister Sarah, impressed that she should help him, requested advance pay from her employer and worked for $1. 25 per week as a hired girl to pay his way.

But the trip was fruitful. James White wrote that Bates "had a hard time, but God was with him and much good was done. He found or left quite a number on the Sabbath."

For those of us living in more prosperous times, it is difficult to grasp the privations that the early Adventists underwent in accomplishing their mission. James White later commented that "the few that taught the truth traveled on foot, in second-class cars, or on steamsboat decks, for want of means." Such travel, his wife noted, exposed them to "the smoke of tobacco, besides the swearing and vulgar conversation of the ship that hands and the baser portion of the traveling public"(1T 77). At night they often sletp on the floor, carge boxes, or grain sacks with their suitcase for a pillow and overcoat for a covering. In winter they walked the deck to keep warm.

And we imagine that we have it hard, that we have lived a sacrificial life. Think again. Most of us haven't got the foggiest idea of the sacrifeces it took to establish our church.

        

In your association with others, put yourself in their place. Enter into their feelings, their difficulties, their disappointments, their joys, and their sorrows. Identify yourself with them, and then do to them as, were you to exchange places with them, you would wish them to deal with you. This is the true rule of honesty. It is another expression of the law. "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." Matthew 22:39. And it is the substance of the teaching of the prophets. It is a principle of heaven, and will be developed in all who are fitted for its holy companionship(TFMB, 135).

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