"It is the creek-swimming men that shake the world—the brier-cutting men who will not allow obstacles to keep them from doing what God wants them to do.
Let a congregation get the idea of their pastor that he is pink of perfection, can beat anybody in town tying a cravat [neck tie], and wears the nicest little shoes, knows how to fasten a nose-gay in his vest, and how to enter a room and entertain company; carries an umbrella so as not to burn his delicate skin, then what will be his power to awaken and save the lost? An umbrella is all right in its place, but what I want to impress is this—that a stalwart man, a real man, will accomplish more of the great things in the work than all of these little fellows. He will not stop to consider a thousand things that absorb the mind of the trivial man, but will go right straightforward to the accomplishment of his great purpose. I have heard these dainty essayists preach. I have gone to their churches hungry and tried to -get something—and failed.
It reminds me of the story of a preacher who tells this of himself: During the civil war he went to a house to get some supper. Army rations were poor, and he was very hungry. They had just a little butter and they all wanted to make it go as far as possible, so each one tried to hurry through in order to get another chance at the butter before it disappeared. He said that he could not get rid of the butter in his plate. He even tried to sop it up with his bread, but it did not have any taste to it. At last he looked up and saw through knot-hole in the roof over his head that the moon was shining down through into his plate, and that all the time he had been sopping moonshine.”
No comments:
Post a Comment