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Is This Treasure for You?The Watchtower—1956 | March 15
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faithfully serving Jehovah. They allowed nothing to interfere with that. There are persons today, however, who once possessed the treasure of full-time service as pioneers but failed to have this mental attitude. They allowed their part-time secular work to entice them into laying aside pioneering in order to take up full-time secular work. Now, where is their heart? Is it in doing God’s will or in doing their own will? Is their treasure in material riches or in full-time service? Since we know that Satan accuses us of loving ourselves more than God, we never want to give him grounds for that accusation.
22. What searching questions can a person ask himself?
22 If you happen to be one who is a dedicated servant of God and you are free of obligations, or could be free of them, why have you not made the treasure of full-time service yours? Do you serve Jehovah God out of love or for selfish reasons, as Satan charges? If you serve him out of love, then why do you hold back from giving him full-time service since it is possible for you to do so? Is this treasure not for you? Is it only for others? Is the thought of serving the great Life-Giver full time unattractive to you? Do you hold back because you find no delight in doing God’s will all the time?
23. When a person gains the treasure of full-time service, what should he be determined to do?
23 On the other hand, if you decide that this treasure is for you and you reach out to embrace it to make it yours, then make up your mind that you are going to hang on to it with all your strength. Never let it go. Do not quit the full-time service when persecution comes upon you. Do not quit when your spirit becomes low because of discouragement. Do not quit when lured by financial gain. Do not quit because of weariness from long years of service. Instead of quitting, hold on to that treasure of full-time service. Hold on more firmly than you would the crown jewels if they were yours. Never allow your eyes to become dull to its resplendent beauty. Never lose appreciation for it. Rejoice over it as the angels have rejoiced over it, as the patriarchs, the prophets and the apostles rejoiced over it and cherished it. Never forget that its rewards are eternal, its blessings beyond compare.
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Why an AgnosticThe Watchtower—1956 | March 15
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Why an Agnostic
● In giving his Credo of an agnostic in Look magazine, November 3, 1953, Bertrand Russell listed among his reasons for being an agnostic the Bible’s contradictions, claiming that in one place the Bible forbids a childless widow to marry her husband’s brother and in another place commanded it. In this article he did not give any Scriptural citations. However, in his book Human Society in Ethics and Politics, he does cite the two texts, Leviticus 20:21 and Deuteronomy 25:5. And how do they read? “Where a man takes his brother’s wife, it is something abhorrent. It is the nakedness of his brother that he has laid bare. They should become childless.” “In case brothers should dwell together and one of them has died without his having a son, the wife of the dead one should not become a strange man’s outside. Her brother-in-law should go to her and he must take her as his wife and perform brother-in-law marriage with her.” (New World Trans.) It does not take much learning to appreciate that these two texts refer to entirely different situations, the one to adultery and the other to the law of levirate marriage, which applied only in the event of a married man’s dying before he had any offspring. It is all very simple, but apparently not to a learned university professor, scientist and philosopher of more than eighty years, especially when such a one happens also to be an agnostic!
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