Page 1611 - Church of God Publications

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BUSY and EXCITED, joining the MOBS in Christmas shopping.
EXCHANGING PRESENTS back and forth with relatives and friends,
that MANY FORGOT ALL ABOUT A GIFT FOR CHRIST!
The receipt of tithes and offerings for God's Work, last
December, was ONLY ABOUT HALF of the income that should be usual
for that month! At the beginning of this year I had to call a
conference in my office of all our division heads, and department
heads, and go carefully over the budget that had been set for this
year of 1968 -- and slash it down in one department after another.
As a result, I have had to pass up several leading radio stations
whose doors the living Christ opened to us. A million or more
people might have heard Christ's dynamic message if we could have
gone on those stations!
I want you to think seriously about that, dear Co-Workers!
TIME IS SHORT. The advance news reports, which we call prophecy,
in the Bible, say flatly that this emerging giant NEW WORLD POWER
IN EUROPE is going to DESTROY OUR CITIES.
Notice what God says: "In all your dwellingplaces THE
CITIES SHALL BE LAID WASTE." (Ezekiel 6:6.) That could be done ONLY
by NUCLEAR destruction! Listen to what God warns us through
Jeremiah! "Wherefore do I see every man with his hands on
his loins, as a woman in travail (childbirth), and all faces are
turned into paleness? Alas! for that day is GREAT, so that none is
like it: it is even the time of Jacob's (UNITED STATES and BRITISH
PEOPLES) trouble." (Jeremiah 30:6-7.)
The time of the GREATEST trouble -- none other so great --
so terrible! It's the SAME TIME Jesus reported to come in OUR
TIME, when He said, "For then shall be GREAT TRIBULATION, such as
was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever
shall be. And except those days should be shortened, there should
no flesh be saved (alive)! But for the elect's sake those days
shall be shortened." (Matthew 24:21-22.)
But God promises, in another Scripture, that all of us,
faithful in HIS WORK, are to have special divine PROTECTION from
this.
Listen, Co-Workers! Time is mighty short, and beginning
to run out on us! Do you know that the living Christ has chosen
YOU and me as HIS Co-Workers, and that through THIS VERY WORK He is
raising up that "ELECT" for whose sake HE WILL INTERVENE AND SAVE
HUMANITY ALIVE? Otherwise the coming NUCLEAR war would erase every
human life from this earth!
Yet Co-Workers, last December -- too many of them --
FORGOT the living CHRIST, and TRADED PRESENTS back and forth,
supposing they were following the wise men who gave their gifts to
Christ. But the wise men did not arrive until MANY DAYS after
Jesus' birth. It WAS NOT HIS BIRTHDAY. They were NOT giving
"birthday presents" but it is always customary to present a gift
when visiting a KING -- and Jesus was born to become KING OF THE
WORLD -- in just a FEW short years from now! But THEY gave
their gifts to CHRIST. They did not exchange them among