To Serve God by Parish Kalendar

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Feb 19, 1885

To Serve God.

By Parish Kalendar

WHAT is a servant? Is he one who spends his existence in raptures, in reveries, or in the contemplation of his own emotional life? Is he one who wastes all his days in mere sorrow over his master's frowns, or mere joy at the thought of his master's smiles? Is he the steward who leaves his accounts in confusion, the porter who forsakes his watch, or the workman who sits down in the midst of his unfinished work to indulge in dreamy meditation on his own ecstasies or agonies or apathies? Such, with some, seems to be the perfect standard of a Christian; but is it the true ideal of a servant?

Judged by the laws of common sense, service is a practical, not a sentimental, thing; it consists in doing, not in feeling; and it is a solemn thought for us all, especially for those who have been taught that the mere experience of happy or sorrowful feeling is the sum of all religion, that none are seen in the courts of Heaven but servants, that is, those who are engaged in obedient activity. There, as the Lord's prayer has taught us, the will of God is done. His servants do it perfectly because they love him perfectly. It is in the very essence of love to labor. It never can be still, never can be useless, never can contain itself, never can spare itself, never cease to spend itself for the object to which it is devoted.—Parish Kalendar.