Chapter 2: False Professors. pocket, should meet a beggar in great distress, and give him six dollars, keeping only one for himself; and the beggar, seeing that he retained one dollar, should return and rob him of that; would not every heart despise his baseness?" You see it embodies this idea that it is very ungrateful to break the Sabbath since God has given to men six days for their own, to serve themselves, and only reserved the Sabbath to himself, and to rob God of the seventh day is base ingratitude.
You that do this do not serve God at all. If you are selfish during the week, you are selfish altogether. To suppose you had any real piety would imply that you were converted every
Sabbath and unconverted every Monday. If a man would serve himself all the week and really posses religion on the Sabbath, he requires to be converted for it. But is this the idea of the Sabbath, that it is a day to serve God in exclusive of other days? Is God in need of your services on the Sabbath to keep his work on?
God requires all your services as much on the six days as on the Sabbath, only he has appropriated the Sabbath to peculiar duties, and required its observance as a day of rest from bodily toil and from those fatiguing cares and labors that concern the present world.
But because God uses means in accomplishing his purposes, and men have bodies as well as souls, and the gospel is to be spread and sustained by the things of this world, therefore
God requires you to work all the six days at your secular employments. But it is all for his service, as much as the worship of the Sabbath. The Sabbath is no more given for the service of God than Monday. You have no more right to serve yourselves on Monday than you have on the Sabbath. If any of you have thus considered the matter, and imagined that the six days of the week were your own time, it shows that you are supremely selfish. I beg of you not to consider that in prayer and on the Sabbath you are serving God at all, if the rest of the time you are considered as serving yourself. You have never known the radical principle of serving the Lord.
5. Those are serving themselves, or their own gods, who will not make any sacrifices of personal ease and comfort in religion.
For instance, there are multitudes who object to free churches on this ground, that they require a sacrifice of personal gratification. They talk like this: "We wish to sit with our families;" or, "We want our seats cushioned," or "We always like to sit in the same place."
They admit that free churches are necessary, in order to make the gospel accessible to the thousands that are going to hell in this city. But they cannot make these little sacrifices, to throw open the doors of God's house to this mass of impenitent sinners.
These little things often indicate most clearly the state of men's hearts. Suppose your servant were to say, "I cannot do this," or "I cannot do that," because it interferes with his personal ease and comfort. He cannot do this because he likes to sit on a cushion and work.
Or he cannot do that because it would separate him from his family an hour and a half.
What! is that doing service? When a man enters into service he gives up his ease and comfort