Baptists -- Sermons; Sermons, English -- 19th century
Be sure, also, to yield to this subject _your most earnest love_. The
best field in the little estate of manhood is not the head, but the
heart; sow the principal wheat there. Oh, to have true religion in the
heart; to love what we know--intensely to love it; to hold it fast as
with the grip of life and death--never to let it go! The Lord says, "My
son, give me thy heart," and he will not be contented with anything less
than our heart. Oh, when your zeal is most burning, and your love is
most fervent, let the warmth and the fervency all go towards the Lord
your God, and to the service of him who has redeemed you with his
precious blood. Let the principal wheat have the principal part of your
nature. Towards God and his Christ also turn your _most fervent
desires_. When you enlarge your desire, desire Christ; when you become
ambitious let your ambition be all for God. Let your hunger and your
thirst be after righteousness. Let your aspirations and your longings be
all towards holiness, and the things that shall make you like to Christ.
Give to this principal wheat your principal desires.
Then let the Lord have _the attentive respect of your life_. Let the
principal wheat be sown in every action. If we are truly Christians we
must be as much Christians outside the church as in it. We shall try to
make our eating and our drinking, and everything we do, tend to the
glory of God. Draw no line between the secular and the religious part of
your conduct, but let the secular be made religious by a devout desire
to glorify God in the one as much as in the other. Let us worship God
in the commonest duties of life, even as they do who stand before his
throne. So it ought to be. Let us sow the principal wheat in all the
fields of our conversation, in business, in the family, among our
friends, and with our children. May we each one feel, "For me to live is
Christ. I cannot live without Christ, or for anything but Christ." Let
your whole nature yield itself to Jesus, and to none else.
We should give to this principal wheat _our most earnest labors_. We
should spend ourselves for the spread of the gospel. A Christian man
ought to lay himself out to serve Jesus. I hate to see a professing man
zealous in politics and lukewarm in devotion; all on fire at a parish
vestry, and chill as winter when he comes to a prayer-meeting. Some fly
like eagles when they are serving the world, but they have a broken wing
in the service of God. This should not be. If anything could rouse us
up, and make the lion within us roar in his strength, it should be when
we confront the foes of Jesus or fight in his cause. Our Lord's service
is the principal wheat, let us labor most in connection with it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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