p. 483 | My Own Vineyard by Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 2, 1882

My Own Vineyard.

By Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage

THE church says in Canticles, "They have made me the keeper of vineyards, but my own vineyard have I not kept." So there are a great many Christians now who spend their chief time in looking after others, while their own vineyard goes to waste. They are raising very fine grapes on the other side of the fence, but the property does not belong to them, nor do the grapes. I know Christians who are lean as skeletons in religious experience, who are running hither and thither looking after Sunday-schools, calling conventions, attending meetings. They are in everlasting anxiety about other people, but have no thought about themselves. They cut the wool off somebody else's sheep, and spin it on somebody else's wheel, and weave it in somebody else's loom for somebody else's back. Meanwhile their own souls are shivering to death.

So there are women busy in collecting money for benevolent institutions, and managing public affairs, while their own children go with faces unwashed, and minds uneducated, and souls unsaved. Busy everywhere but in their own vineyard.

Now the first thing for one to do is to take care of his own heart. How was it that the old saints, with less opportunity than we have, were better men? They took more time for contemplation. Christians now seldom sit down to think. It is drive, and push, and pull. Their only quiet time is when they are on an express train going at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour, watch in hand, wondering why they don't go forty. Just before communion they feel called upon for especial self-examination, and so take the ten minutes in which they are walking to church to think what miserable offenders they have been. Now you have no right to give so much time to your neighbors' crops that you let your own suffer. Besides, if our own piety be thin, our works will be inefficient. If we have been much with Christ, and have deep personal experiences, we will do more good in one month than with a shallow experience we could do in ten years. One-half the Christian effort of to-day is mere talk. The world sees straight through it. While some man who says but little, yet feels much, gets hold of the heart of an audience, and rouses, and melts, and subdues, and agonizes it at will.—Rev. T. DeWitt Talmage.