We must learn to attack in a new way, if the old ways produce little result. The enemy’s tactics change, and so must ours. – Message to the Messengers
Beware of spending too large a proportion of your time and strength on matters of only secondary importance. Learn to distinguish what is vital from what is merely incidental; and, above all, resolve by God’s help at all cost to keep first things first. – Message to the Messengers
Devotional intercourse. – Cultivate this. Make prayer together in the quarters a real force. Seize the opportunity for conversation on spiritual things whenever you are in the company of comrades. Some of my richest blessings have come to me in this manner. Chats by the wayside, or over the meal table, or during a chance visit, when the talk is finished up by prayer together – these have been means God has used to water my heart’s thirsty ground. – Message to the Messengers
Word have no power to change facts… – Message to the Messengers
Other people’s estimate of your work cannot change its quality. Pronouncing good work bad does not make it bad; nor does calling bad work good make it good; nor have reports on paper, favorable or unfavorable, power to add to or take away one iota of accomplished good. The first question for you, about all your work, must be: Is it good in God’s sight? In other words, whether my talents were two or fifty, did I do my best? Your best will be valued in Heaven because it is your best. – Message to the Messengers
Without the believing and the loving, how impossible all real Salvation Army work is!
Do banish for ever the thought that either God or the world is waiting to see you prove your love by some big sacrifice or outwardly heroic service. Opportunities for such are rare, but the chance to prove our devotion in common everyday things belongs to us all. The world today, perhaps more than ever before, needs apostles of the commonplace… – Message to the Messengers
As Army officers we have always – at least I have found it so – more to do than time in which to do it. The devil knows this, and persistently attempts to thrust the work we love between us and the Source of our strength. Unless, therefore, the care of your soul is to you the first care, and is jealously guarded by you as such, the devil will succeed in putting into that first place the work itself; later, success at the expense of good work; and, at last, purely selfish interest will reign in the once sanctified soul. – Message to the Messengers
How shall it be said to glorify your Lord, if the numbers increase and the band improve and your new songsters develop, unless souls are fed; unless under your ministrations they grow strong in the Lord? Make them feel that their soul’s welfare is your first consideration. Inquire about their experience as being more important to you than anything else. – Message to the Messengers
Stand by your convenant and it shall be God’s responsibility to bring you through. – Message to the Messengers
Your folks are just Peters and Thomases. Humanly, there is little about them to inspire even interest or hope. Below the average, you say; cranky, creepy, crooked! The whole question is whether you see that only, or whether there is enough of the Divine in you to show you the possibilities in them. Are you sent to the whole or to the sick; to the crooked or to the straight; to the bound or to the free? – Message to the Messengers
I understand what you feel when you speak of the ungratefulness of your own people – how they seem to take what you do as a matter of course. But does that not bring us back to the same point? If all is being done for God, then we shall not be hurt by their lack of gratitude… the secret of our joy is that we find it in Christ. If this is so, we shall not be cast down or silenced when we fail to see the results we hoped for in our work, or the response we expected from those we serve, for He will be our ‘exceeding great reward’. – Message to the Messengers
To compromise often looks so reasonable; it seems such a little thing to consider for once how some action will affect your popularity, instead of considering first how it will affect your soul. It is so easy to step aside from what is strictly and wholly true and Christlike for the sake of temporary gain or advancement. A small step aside widens to a gulf when you want to get back; and these are the things that separate the soul from the Savior, who said of Himself, ‘I am the truth,’ and to whose followers it was written, ‘If any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of His.’ – Message to the Messengers
Better, therefore, to go and fetch a convert to the meeting, even if you do less well in your talk, than to prepare the most careful address and not have him there to hear it. Better deal faithfully with a soul when visiting, and lose your tea, than, by staying to tea and chat, miss the opportunity for helping that soul. Make it impossible for any of your people to say of you what a soldier once said to me: ‘The officers never come to my house unless to call for money or to get a meal.’ – Message to the Messengers
His love makes the place He chooses for you the best place. Do not take yourself out of love’s way; but trust the wisdom and the power of the Father to change the course of the stars before He allows a sanctified soul to be in the wrong place. – Message to the Messengers
You are sent to the lost, not the found; to the weak, not the strong; sent to gather them into the Kingdom – the lame, the halt and the blind… you are indeed sent to these people with their gossipings, deceptions, superstitions, and backslidings. Their sin calls for your holiness; their weakness for your strength; their unbelief for your faith; their coldness of heart for your love and zeal. All these claim you. The people’s need cries out in unmistakable accents. I know your heart cries out, too: ‘Who is sufficient for these things?’ – Message to the Messengers