Page 12 - word to PDF
P. 12
rest satisfied without it. Their contentedness is the result, not of heart- submission to God,
but in reality of heart-indifference to the salvation of their own souls. Exactly so it is with us
as ministers: when we can rest satisfied with using the means for saving souls without seeing
them really saved, or we ourselves being broken-hearted by it, and at the same time quietly
talk of leaving the event to God's disposal, we make use of a truth to cover and excuse a
falsehood; for our ability to leave the matter thus is not, as we imagine, the result of heart-
submission to God, but of heart- indifference to the salvation of the souls we deal with. No,
truly, if the heart is really set on such an end, it must gain that end or break in losing it."
He that saved our souls has taught us to weep over the unsaved. Lord, let that mind be in us
that was in Thee! Give us thy tears to weep; for, Lord, our hearts are hard toward our
fellows. We can see thousands perish around us, and our sleep never be disturbed; no
vision of their awful doom ever scaring us, no cry from their lost souls ever turning our
peace into bitterness.
It is told of Archbishop Usher that, at one period of his life, he used on Saturday afternoon
to go alone to a river-side, and there sorrowfully recount his sins, and confess and
bewail them to the Lord with floods of tears. Is this not fitting to reprove many, many of us?
And even where we lament our sins, how many of us go apart oftentimes to weep over lost
souls, to cry to the Lord for them, to implore, to beseech, to agonize with him in their behalf?
Where is the water-side beside which our eyes have poured out streams in our intense
compassion for the perishing?
Do we believe there is an everlasting hell!—an everlasting hell for every Christless soul? And
yet we are languid, formal, easy in dealing with and for the multitudes that are near the gate
of that tremendous furnace of wrath! Our families, our schools, our congregations, not to
speak of our cities at large, our land, our world, might well send us daily to our knees; for the
loss of even one soul is terrible beyond conception. Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor has
entered the heart of man, what a soul in hell must suffer forever. Lord, give us bowels of
mercies! "What a mystery! The soul and eternity of one man depends upon the voice of
another!"
CHAPTER 4
Ministerial Confession