3. Ministerial faithfulness includes ministerial diligence. A
Believe it, sirs, all our reading, studying, and preaching, is but trifling hypocrisy, till the things read, studied, and preached, be felt in some degree upon our own hearts. We tell our people (the Lord help us to tell the same to our own hearts) that there are similar, as well as saving works of the Spirit, by which their (and why not our own) souls may be lost?
3. Ministerial faithfulness includes ministerial diligence. A slothful cannot be a faithful servant. Matth. 25:21. "His Lord said unto him, Well done, thou good and faithful servant," &c. And ver.
26. "His Lord answered, and said unto him, Thou wicked and slothful servant, &c. I may say to him that snatched at the ministry, as Henry
IV. did to his son, that hastily snatched at the crown, He little knows what an heap of cares and toils he snatcheth at.3 'The labours of the ministry will exhaust the very marrow from your bones, hasten old age and death.' They are fitly compared to the toil of men in harvest, to the labours of a woman in travail, and to the agonies of soldiers in the extremity of a battle. We must watch when others sleep.
And indeed it is not so much the expence of our labours, as the loss of them, that kills us. It is not with us, as with other labourers: They find their work as they leave it, so do not we. Sin and Satan unravel almost all we do, the impressions we make on our people's souls in one sermon, vanish before the next. How many truths have we to study! how many wiles of Satan, and mysteries of corruption, to detect! how many cases of conscience to resolve! Yea, we must fight in defence of the truths we preach, as well as study them to paleness, and preach them unto faintness: but well-spent head, heart, lungs,