Greetings MOL Family!
Thank you for joining our class today! We hope that you have been receiving a blessing from each lesson, and that you remember to invite others to learn more about God’s beautiful way!
Heaven’s First Law
Now, this lesson of order: As was mentioned in our last class, this is the first great law! You will find that in Counsels on Health:
Order is heaven’s first law. – Counsels on Health, pg. 101
And what is order? Order is everything on time and in its place. That is all there is to order. If you have everything on time and in its place, that is order. And if you don’t, then it is disorder. And the way to be beautiful is to have order. That means to have everything in its place, on time. That is beautiful. That is the first law. Now there may be other things that enter into it, but that is the great thing. That is order, and that is the first law of beauty and everything in God’s order and arrangement.
It is the very essence of all right faith to do the right thing at the right time. – Testimonies for the Church, Volume 6, pg. 24
Isn’t that nice? The right thing at the right time. Take the fourth commandment, the great sign of God’s government in Heaven and earth, it is based upon this very thing of doing the right thing at the right time.
When you wake up in the morning you think, “Oh, what am I going to do today?” The first thing you have to remember is what? What day it is. If you wake up on Thursday morning or Friday morning or Saturday morning, is there something different to do each one of those three mornings, depending on which day it is? Why, yes. Friday is what? The preparation day. And the seventh day is the Sabbath.
It is the essence of right faith to do the right thing at the right time. So, all day long, every day, we are to be looking to God for guidance. And if we will do that, friends, we will be doing the right thing at the right time, and that is beautiful. I like the way it is put here in The Ministry of Healing:
If every moment were valued and rightly employed, we should have time for everything that we need to do for ourselves or for the world. – Ministry of Healing, pg. 208
That is one of those exceedingly great and precious promises that just seems too big to be true. But friends, God means just what He says. We will have time for everything we need to do. Now, notice it does not say, “time for everything we want to do.” Oh, no.
Order & Balance
A friend of mine [several years ago*] visited Florida for the first time. He is a great lover of grapefruit. A friend of his had a grapefruit grove. So, they were out walking in the grove the first day he was there, and he saw a nice, big grapefruit drop from the tree on the ground. He said to his host, “Can I have that?” “Sure,” he said. So, he took his knife and got the grapefruit ready, and was enjoying the nice juice in the grapefruit, and about the time he got through another grapefruit dropped. He said, “Can I have that?” “Yes,” he said, “you can.”
And you know, pretty soon another grapefruit dropped, and another one. It began to dawn on him that he could never keep up with those grapefruits. They were dropping faster than he could eat them.
And, my dear friends, God has provided in rich abundance, books to read, people to get acquainted with, work to do, food to eat, all kinds of things to enjoy, but not to get sick on. Order and balance, the two are closely related (and that is what we are studying today), and they require a sensible mind that will not try to take in everything and do everything and read everything.
Everyday there are issued from the presses of this world thousands of printed pages of new scientific facts. So, if you knew everything that science could teach you today, tomorrow you would have to read several thousand pages just to keep up. What are you going to do about it? “Oh, that’s the trouble. I am always behind.” Were you born late? Is it going to take all your life to catch up?
Ah, my dear friends, this says, if every moment is valued and rightly employed, we will have time for everything we need to do. That is what the wise man said. Now, Solomon tried to get hold of everything and it wore him out. That’s what he wrote this book Ecclesiastes for at the end of his life, to tell people that it is vanity to just try to fill up, tank up on everything until you get surfeited and say, “It just isn’t worth anything.”
The man that is called the greatest man of the 20th century, Winston Churchill, when he died, his last words were, “I am bored with it all.” That is what Solomon said, he was bored with it all. That is not the beautiful life, is it, friends? That is not the beautiful way. That is the rat race. And you can be in it with good things as well as bad things.
Now, let’s have sense enough, my dear friends, to live the beautiful life and walk the beautiful way by understanding that God never intended any of us to compass everything. He would have given us bigger stomachs and eyes, perhaps in the back of the head and the side, as well as in front so we could get in more. No, we will do very well with a moderate amount:
Let your moderation be known unto all men. – Philippians 4:5
Don’t try to take in everything and get everything. Let a lot of things go by. You know, we are told in the Spirit of Prophecy that when we sit down to eat, if our time is limited, instead of trying to eat faster, do what? Eat less and enjoy it. Just take it easy. If you only get half a meal, that’s all right. If you haven’t time for a full one, just enjoy what you have. So with books and reading. Don’t think, oh my, “I have got so much reading to do.” You say, “How am I going to get over all these lessons?” Maybe you won’t get over all of them. Maybe they were not all meant for you. Just ask Jesus to help you get the thing you need, and enjoy that. That is the beautiful life, my dear friends.
Principles & Practices
Now there are a great many applications of these principles of order and balance. In Child Guidance, for example, there is a little chapter on neatness, order, and regularity; having things in their place and on time. There are some wonderful statements there:
Remember that in heaven there is no disorder, and that your home should be a heaven here below. – Child Guidance, pg. 110
It says that children are to feel a satisfaction in keeping their own room in order. They are to have a place to lay their things away. It tells parents that can’t afford a bureau what to do. And then it goes on and tells young people how to get into order, not merely with respect to their things, but their time. It speaks of some young people that are opposed to order and discipline, so they don’t get up in the morning. They lie in bed in the morning because they were up late the night before… Do you like to wake up early in the morning? The birds do. They like it fine.
I want you to see, friends, the picture of the rat race of this world. And I feel so sorry for them:
It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat the bread of sorrows: for so he giveth his beloved sleep. – Psalm 127:2
What does God give to the people He loves? He gives them sleep. I wonder why? Did you ever hear of people taking their beauty sleep? Well, that is what is waiting for you every night – your beauty sleep. That is one of the ways to be beautiful. Let me tell you, my friends; a bleary-eyed, weary-hearted person is not beautiful, no matter how much time they spend at what they call beauty shops. What a strange name, my friends, for what comes out of them?
Sleep is nature’s sweet restorer that knits the raveled sleeve of care. The bright-eyed, the smiling face are to some extent dependent on sleep, and God gives His beloved sleep. But sleep takes what? Time. And I don’t have enough time to sleep. Oh, don’t I? Where was my Lord when my program was planned? He tells me He has given me time to sleep, and He will give me sleep. Isn’t that a wonderful promise? Let’s claim it.
But now, the verse goes right to the practical point. It talks about people who rise up early and do what? Sit up late. And it says it is vain. Well, somebody says, “I thought it was nice to get up early.” This doesn’t say there is anything wrong with getting up early. But it says it is vain to rise up early and sit up late. And as a result, you eat the bread of sorrows. My dear friends, that can give people ulcers, high blood pressure, nervous breakdowns, and all sorts of things. And that is not beautiful.
No, if you are going to get up early you had better do what? Get to bed early. Isn’t that simple? That is a part of the beautiful way – everything on time. Time for sleep, time for rest, time for work, time for everything we need to do. Now, in order to do that, we will need to look to the Lord for guidance and wisdom, won’t we? And in Isaiah, the 50th chapter and the 4th verse, Christ prophetically tells His experience. He says that every morning the Father awoke Him and gave Him wisdom, the tongue of the learned to know how to speak a word – Do you remember the next two words? – in season. That means at the right time. And if you and I will ask the Lord for wisdom day by day as He wakes us up, He will help us to be at the right place at the right time, with the right word to the right man. That is the beautiful way. And we can have that wisdom, day by day, if we will seek the Lord.
The Balanced, Beautiful Life
Balance, of course, is having things in a proper proportion, one with another. We were mentioning, in our last lesson, the fact that the rainbow has various light waves in it. Take another illustration: Have you ever made a cake before? What did you put into it? “Oh,” somebody says, “I made a cake and put just one thing in it.” Did you? I wonder what it was. It wasn’t a cake, was it? No, no. Every cake you ever ate had several ingredients in it.
Suppose somebody says, “I like my cakes sweet, so I am going to put only sugar in my cake.” Would that be a cake? Oh, no. Even if it was brown sugar, even if it was honey, it wouldn’t be a cake. Oh, no! So balance is a proper proportion of ingredients. Is that right? And that is the way with everything in life.
Suppose I had an ear, the right ear, that was twice as big as the left ear. I don’t think it would be beautiful. Do you? No. I don’t think there would be anything handsome, or properly attractive about it. There is such a thing as balance.
Having things exactly the same on one side of a house or a yard as on the other side, is not necessarily the only way for things to be balanced. You will find some very interesting statements in the Spirit of Prophecy on this, in the books The Adventist Home and Child Guidance. But there is such a thing as balance; balance in dress, balance in diet, balance in work, balance in study. Ask God, my dear friends, to give you the balanced life, for that is the beautiful life.
And remember about the grapefruit. You will have to let some of them drop without running after them. The balanced life means that you are going to miss a lot of things, and be happy for it. The balanced life means that from the great abundance that God puts within your reach, instead of grabbing for all of it, you will enjoy what God arranges for you to have, and leave the rest with God and other people. Shall we do that, friends? Oh, let’s be happy in God’s beautiful way, God’s beautiful way of life.
Memory Gem
Now I want you to learn, as a memory gem, that one line, Ecclesiastes 3:11 (from the Revised Standard Version):
He has made everything beautiful in its time. – Ecclesiastes 3:11 [RSV]
Let the beauty of Jesus be seen in me. All His wonderful passion and purity!
O Thou Spirit divine, All my nature refine, Till the beauty of Jesus be seen in me.
In next week’s lesson, we will study the specific way that will lead us to live God’s beautiful way. Invite someone new and join us.
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* This study has been adapted from classes taken by Elder W.D. Frazee.