honour should you esteem it, to be a catcher of souls! We are workers
people, Ps. 110:3. When your discourse, though ever so elaborate, shall be but as a lovely song, O set yourself most for this. When you study, send up ejaculations to your Lord for it. When you write a sermon, or do ruminate on it, then say to God, Lord, this will be altogether weak without your power accompanying it. O, power and life from God in ordinances is sweet. Seek it for yourself, and seek it for your hearers. Acknowledge your own weakness and uselessness without it, and so cry incessantly for it, that the Lord may drive the fish into the net, when you are spreading it out. Have an eye to this power, when you are preaching; and think not you to convert men by the force of reason: If you do, you will be beguiled.
4. What an honourable thing is it to be fishers of men! How great an honour should you esteem it, to be a catcher of souls! We are workers together with God, says the apostle. If God has ever so honoured you, O that you knew it, that you might bless his holy name, that ever made such a poor fool as you to be a co-worker with him. God has owned you to do good to those who were before caught. O my soul, bless you the Lord. Lord, what am I, or what is my father's house, that you have brought me to this?
5. Then see you not here what is the reason you toil so long, and catch nothing? The power comes not along. Men are like Samuel, who, when God was calling him, thought it had been Eli. So when you speak many times, they do not discern God's voice, but thine; and therefore the word goes out as it comes in.
6. Then, O my soul, despair not of the conversion of any, be they ever so profligate. For it is the power of the Spirit that drives any person into the net; and this cannot be resisted. Mockers of religion, yea, blasphemers may be brought into the net; and many times the wind of God's Spirit in the word lays the tall cedars in sin down upon the ground, when they that seem to be as low shrubs in respect of them, stand fast upon their root. Publicans and harlots shall enter the kingdom of heaven before self-righteous Pharisees.