Messages to Young People: Chapter 146—Sowing Wild Oats

 A little time spent in sowing your wild oats, dear young friends, will produce a crop that will embitter your whole life; an hour of thoughtlessness—once yielding to temptation—may turn the whole current of your life in the wrong direction. You can have but one youth; make that useful. When once you have passed over the ground, you can never return to rectify your mistakes. He who refuses to connect with God, and puts himself in the way of temptation, will surely fall.

God is testing every youth. Many have excused their carelessness and irreverence, because of the wrong example given them by more experienced professors. But this should not deter any from right-doing. In the day of final accounts you will plead no such excuses as you plead now. You will be justly condemned, because you knew the way, but did not choose to walk in it.