THE KING’S BUSINESS
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to be men of one Book. We are to stay by our blessed business of shep herding of souls for the Eternal Shep herd. The shepherding of souls for the Eternal Shepherd. “We watch for souls as they that must give ac count.” And that is to be our pas sion; that is to be our note; that is to be our spirit forevermore. But before our people we are to be the mighty objectives of the Gospel of the grace of God and to summon them to the programme into which Jesus calls u s ; and we are to go out into our communities after the tallest men in them, and'the sinfulest men in them, and the high and the low and the great and the small, for they are in our parish, and we iwatch for souls as men that must give account. I am closing this month just twenty years as a pastor, first of a village church, then of a modern city church. O, my brothers, you feel as I do. I am persuaded that if I had a thousand lives offered to me this day by my Master and He should say, “You may do as you please with this other thousand,” I should not hesitate one second, I should say, “Let every one of them preach Jesus Christ to a lost world. “Happy, if with my latest breath, I may but preach His name, Preach Him to all, and cry in death Behold, behold, the Lamb.”
unto you any other Gospel than that is preached, let him be accursed.” That is positive. And Jesus was the Prince of dogmatists.' You and I can dogmatize about our Master’s message to a weary world, or it will be beaten and cut into shreds in its weary woe and heartache and sin. O, that calls for such careful study of the „Book Divine, the supreme Book. The text Book for preachers is God’s Book. NO CANNED GOODS. Certainly we are to be clever men in other things. Eyes and ears are to be kept open. We are to know what is going on in the world. We are to search the vast and great deep books of literature, b u t o u r c h ie e BOOK, OUR PR E -EM IN EN T BOOK IS TH E B ook oe G od . And if we do not watch, we shall be giving our people canned goods. We can do better than that. And even the plain peo ple know the difference between a voice and an echo. Men who get their sermons from newspapers and books are echoes. Men who get their messages from the Book of God are voices. “I am the voice of one cry ing in the wilderness.” If we do not watch we shall can our materials—we shall fill up with canned goods and give them out to the people. Some people are sandpapered by books—bedridden by books. We are
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