A Book of Gems, or, Choice selections from the writings of Benjamin FranklinFranklin, Benjamin
Religion
A Book of Gems, or, Choice selections from the writings of Benjamin Franklin
Franklin, Benjamin
Churches of Christ
“I thought you said the preacher should trust to the Lord for his
support,” says one? Certainly he should, just as you trust to the Lord
for his preaching. You trust to the Lord to enable him to perform his
preaching according to arrangements, and he trusts in the Lord that
you will be enabled to support him as promised, the same as your hired
man trusts in the Lord for what you promised him, or as you trust in
the Lord for the products of your farm. Yet the preacher knows not the
ability the Lord may give him, nor what amount of money he may need. It
may be more or less, but it is not his reward for his labor, but merely
his support—or, if you prefer it, his _board_ while he labors for the
Lord. But he does not intend to spend the whole reward of his labor in
this life, but is laying up a good foundation against the time to come.
They are prodigals who run through all their earnings as fast as
earned. The Lord does not intend his servants to do this. He gives them
a subsistence as they pass along, or money for their expenses, but the
main bulk of their wages is laid up in heaven, and can not be estimated
by dollars and cents. May God put it into the hearts of the children
of God to look to the temporal wants of the young men who have entered
this great work.
SELF-LAUDATION.
To see the mere worldling, whether the politician, the lawyer,
physician, or whatsoever, an egotist—full of self-laudation—giving
himself the glory for everything good, and acquitting himself from
everything evil, is contemptible enough in all conscience. Nothing can
sink a man faster in the estimation of sensible men. But in the kingdom
of Christ, where all is purely of the grace of God—where none has
anything that he did not receive, and where all are held responsible in
proportion to the ability that God gives, and where each one has to get
down upon his knees, before his holy and perfect Master, and confess
his weakness, imperfection, shortcomings, and nothingness in the sight
of God, how transcendently ridiculous to see egotism, self-laudation
and an effort to glorify the creature in the place of the Creator! And
how perfectly incompatible, too, such a spirit with the meek and lowly
spirit of Christ and the apostles!
PREACH CHRIST, NOT OURSELVES.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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