Responding to Discouragement

How did Ellen White respond to weighty discouragement? As she had done many times in the past: “To walk out by faith against all appearances was the very thing that the Lord required me to do.” ^{45Selected Messages 3:385, 386.}MOL 75.7

“To walk out by faith against all appearances.” Such was the counsel she gave herself throughout her life and often expressed in her counsel to others. In a morning talk at the Minneapolis Conference, October 19, 1888, she spoke out of tested experience: “You say, ‘How can I talk faith, how can I have faith, when clouds and darkness and despondency come over my mind? I do not feel as though I could talk faith; I do not feel that I have any faith to talk.’ But why do you feel in this way? It is because you have permitted Satan to cast his dark shadow across your pathway, and you cannot see the light that Jesus sheds upon your pathway. But another says: ‘I am very frank; I say just what I feel, I talk just as I think.’ Is that the best way to do?—No; God wants us to educate ourselves so that we shall speak right words—words that will be a blessing to others, that will shed rays of light upon their souls.” ^{46The Signs of the Times, November 11, 1889. A few months later, at a camp meeting in Ottawa, Kansas, she said: “You have to talk faith, you have to live faith, you have to act faith, that you may have an increase of faith. Exercising that living faith, you will grow to strong men and women in Christ Jesus.” Faith and Works, 78. Note other times when, physically and emotionally exhausted, Ellen White moved out in faith, talking faith and bringing this insight to others; for example, in Australia, 1895, cited in Bio., vol. 4, p. 228.}MOL 75.8

One may wonder whether, after long years of service and trusting God, Christians grow beyond dark moments when they see clouds rather than the sun. Think about Jesus in Gethsemane. Or the lives of saintly people. What they learned through the years is how to battle the devil’s hellish shadows. In Ellen White’s eighty-seventh year, C. C. Crisler, one of her secretaries, wrote to William, her son: “She says she does not wish to make any great noise about having courage continually, although she has; and she adds that the very fact that members of the household are waked up at times hearing her repeating the promises of God and claiming them as her own is proof that she still has battles of her own to fight against Satan.” ^{47Bio., vol. 6, pp. 413, 414.}MOL 76.1