Metropolitan Tabernacle Pulpit · Sermon No. 433
“He did it with all his heart and prospered.” 2 Chronicles 31:21. This is no unusual occurrence. In fact, it seems to be the general rule of the moral universe that those men prosper who do their work with all their hearts, while those are almost certain to fail who go to their labor leaving half their hearts behind them. Look around you in business. Who are the young men who rise in the establishment? Not your men who sleep behind the counter, who are glad to avoid a customer. Employers soon discover those who throw energy into their work and they like a young man who has “push” in him. He is sure to be promoted and in time will become a trader on his own account. Who are the merchants that succeed in this busy time of competition? Your lazy sluggards? No. Your men who are diligent in business, do what they do with both their hands, breast the current with all their strength, scorning to be carried down the stream to the cataract of bankruptcy. Who are your men who rise to eminence? Men do not go to bed and wake up in the morning to find themselves famous, at least not until they have encountered many stern labors. God does not at this day give harvests to idle men except harvests of thistles, nor is He pleased to send wealth to the man who will not dig in the field to find its hidden treasure. It is universally confessed that if a man would prosper, he must be diligent in business. For at this day, beyond every preceding age it is true, “In the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread.”
The same thing is true if we leave mercantile pursuits and survey any other of the walks of life. If a man would make discoveries in science, he does not hit upon them by accident. But, being in the way, science meets with him. If a man would become eminent as a physician, he must walk the hospitals. If he would attain position at the bar, he must give days and nights to the folios of law. There is no hope for a man in these times, in anything, unless he proceeds to it with all his heart.
It is the same in religion as it is in other things. I would not have you treat religion as though it were a business. But I would have you put as much force and power and energy and heartiness and earnestness into religion as ever you do into business, and, I might add, that it deserves far more. How is it that false religions have spread? What made Mohammedanism once so mighty in the earth? It was because Mahomet himself, when he preached, was as sincerely deluded as any of his followers—when he was pelted in the streets he still persevered and when assassins dogged his footsteps he counted not his life dear unto him that he might proclaim what he thought to be a revelation from Heaven.
As for his followers, they were not sleepy professors. They drew their scimitars from their scabbards and swore that they would not rest till they had brought men by edge of steel to the faith of their prophet. On they dashed, till their religion, like a mighty rising ocean, swept all before it, nor could its rising wave be driven back till it was met by an equal enthusiasm to withstand its progress.
Look again on Roman Catholic missions. How was it that Romanists did what we have never done and what I fear we never shall do till we have changed our men? How was it that Francis Xavier carried his faith into India, preached in Burma, obtained great influence in China and even entered into the recesses of Japan, till everywhere you might see a Catholic convent or nunnery and a crucifix lifted up, with devotees bowing before it? Because Xavier’s spirit was full of fire. He seemed to be a flash of lightning flaming from one end of Heaven to the other.
Now mark, as it has been with false religions, so must it be with the true. Under God, the Holy Spirit, our only hope for the increase of the Church and for the conversion of the world lies in the development of energy within us, in the bringing out of earnestness in Christian souls. Oh, it was not scholarship that converted the heathen world at first, for on the slabs in the catacombs we have decisive evidence that the first Christians could scarcely spell their own names. It was not the pomp of learning, the pride of philosophy, or the power of eloquence which made the early confessors so mighty. It was their singular earnestness.
The Church was all on fire. She was like a volcano. She might not be high and lofty as some of the surrounding hills, but they had summits clothed with frost, while she sent forth earnest Truths of God like streams of lava, which burned their way and covered all the lands. Christians in those days were Christians, indeed. They believed what they professed. They knew what they spoke. They testified what they had seen. And they spoke with an unconquerable, untamable energy, which smote even the iron power of Rome and dashed it into shivers.
So must it be today, and indeed, so is it. Look around you—who are the most useful men in the Christian Church today? The men who do what they undertake for God with all their hearts. Where is the preacher whom God blesses to the conversion of hundreds in a year? Is he a sleepy, prosaic soul? Does he confine himself within narrow limits? Does he speak sleepy words to a slumbering congregation? We know it is not so, but where God is pleased to give the congregation, it is, whatever it may not be, a proof that there has been earnestness in the preacher.