Labouring and not Fainting

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Revelation 2:1-7

To the angel of the church of Ephesus write; These things said he that holds the seven stars in his right hand…

I. THE POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE GOOD HERE COMBINED.

1. "Thou hast laboured." To labour means hard work, vigorous action. Men may work, but yet not labour, and I fear there are many who claim to be working men who do not often trouble themselves with anything approaching to "labour." There are also working Christians who do not approach to labouring; yet a lifetime of such work as theirs would not exhaust a butterfly. Now, when a man works for Christ he should work with all his might. If any master is to be served badly, let it not be our Master who is in heaven: we owe Him too much to wish to be eyeservants towards Him. If anywhere a dilatory servant may be excused, certainly it cannot be in the service of Him who redeemed us with His most precious blood. If I may use the figure, we ought to employ every particle of our steam power: we should drive the engine at high pressure; we have no force that can be allowed to escape in waste. But labour implies not merely strong effort, but a continuance of it, for a man might take up a workman's tool and for a few minutes make a mighty show of effort, and yet be no labourer, unless he kept on working until his task was done. He merely plays at labour, that is all. So have we known too many whose service for God has been occasional; fits and starts of effort they have, but they are soon over; their spasmodic zeal is to-day so hot as to be well nigh fanatical, and to-morrow it will be succeeded by an indifference far more astounding. If the Church is said to labour, it means that she puts forth all her strength as a regular thing. Like the sun and moon she continues in her orbit of duty. She keeps at her life-work; with all her might she continues in well-doing, and is not weary. There is the positive good.

2. The negative crowns the positive — "And hast not fainted." Now, there are different degrees of fainting. Some may be said to faint comparatively when they flag in exertion. They drop from running to walking, from diligence to indolence. They did run well; what did hinder them? Many continue to do as much as ever they did outwardly, yet their heart is not in it, and so they faint. Some flag by growing weak in all they do. They do put forth such force as they have, but they are essentially feeble. The power of God has departed from them, and, though they may not know it, Ichabod is written upon their works. Too many go further than this; they renounce all or a large part of the Christian work they were accustomed to do. Content with the efforts of other days they surrender to the sluggard's vice. And some go even further than that, for after retiring from labour themselves, they cease to have any care about the Lord's work.

II. EXCUSES FOR FAINTING.

1. There are some who faint in the work of God because the work itself has proved very tedious to them. When they first undertook it and the novelty was upon it they did not tire, but now the freshness is gone, and they have come into the real wear and tear of it, they do not enjoy it quite so much as they thought they should. They hoped for an office in which the chief labour should be to gather lilies, or lie upon beds of roses. The service of the Crucified is far less romantic, and far more laborious. There is no royal road to eminence in anything, it is always uphill work and rough climbing; and certainly there is no such road in the service of God.

2. Other excuses, however, will be sure to come, and amongst them this, that we have been disappointed up till now in the success of what we have attempted. We have sown, but the most of the seed has fallen upon the wayside, or upon the rocks. We must not give up the war because we have not conquered yet, but fight on till we can seize the victory. Let us not be weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not.

3. Another set of excuses I must mention. They are little, pettish, pitiful, proud excuses, but they are very common. Here is one. "I shall leave the work, for I am sure I am not appreciated as I ought to be." Do you mean to give way to such pettiness and silliness? If so, I have done with you, for you will never do any good in this world. The slave of such a mean feeling is incapable of being free. "Ah," cries another, "my complaint is more reasonable, for I am discouraged because no one aids me in my work." Oh, my brother, does your life after all depend upon the breath of other men's nostrils? Has it come to this, that you cannot live upon the approbation of your master unless you gain also the smile of your fellow-servants?

III. THE REAL CAUSES OF FAINTING.

1. The first is an actual decline in spiritual strength. It is not merely that you do not do so much, it is that you are not so much; you have not the amount of life in you which you once had. And is not this a sad thing? Oh, to be dead to these spiritual realities in any degree is a dreadful death, and to be callous to holy things is a terrible hardness. May God keep us from spiritual insensibility, and may we be sensitive to the faintest motion of the Holy Spirit.

2. It is to be feared, also, that those who faint have lost their reliance upon Divine power, at least in a degree. Confidence in God makes us strong, but by turning away from our great unseen Helper, we straightway begin to faint.

3. Moreover, I am afraid that we forget that the Lord requires of us an unselfish dedication to His service, and that we do not serve Him at all unless His glory is our chief object. You must feel that you would have the Lord use you just as in His infinite wisdom He sees fit to do. You should be a piece of iron on the Almighty's anvil: to be welded into a sceptre, if He chooses with you to break the potter's vessels; to be beaten into a ploughshare and plunged into the earth, if by you He means to turn up the furrows of the fallow ground; or fashioned into a spear-point, if by you He intends to smite His enemies.

IV. I have A LITTLE MEDICAL BUSINESS to do in closing. Four sorts of persons are very common among us. To each of these four I desire to administer a little medicine.

1. There are some who neither labour nor faint.

2. The next sort of persons to be dealt with are those who faint but do not labour.

3. Our third patient is one who did labour once, but has fainted.

4. But there are some who labour and are ready to faint.

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