A School of Energy
“We are under the impression that the moil and tug of business life are a prison into which a man is thrust, or that it is an unequal strife where unarmed, a man goes forth to contend.
Business life was intended of God for grand and glorious education and discipline. Life at work was intended as a school of energy. God gives us a certain amount of raw material out of which the rasping and collision of everyday life alone can effect. Energy is wrought out only in a fire. After a man has been in business activity ten, twenty, thirty years, his energy is not to be measured by weights, or plummets, or ladders. There is no height it cannot scale, and there is no depth it cannot fathom, and there is no obstacle it cannot thrash.
Now, my brother, why did God put you in that school of energy? Was it merely that you might be a yardstick to measure cloth, or a steelyard to weigh flour? Was it merely that you might be better qualified to chaffer and higgle? No. God placed you in that school of energy that you might be developed for Christian work. If the undeveloped talents in the Christian churches of today were brought out and thoroughly harnessed, I believe the whole earth would be converted to God in a twelvemonth. There are so many skills and efforts that are going unused.
Now, God demands the best lamb out of every flock. He demands the richest sheaf of every harvest. He demands the best men of every generation. A cause in which our forefathers toiled, you and I can afford to toil in. Oh, for fewer idlers in the cause of Christ! For more Christian workers, men who shall take the same energy that from Monday morning to Saturday night they put forth for the achievement of a livelihood, or the gathering of a fortune, and on Sabbath days put it forth to the advantage of Christ’s kingdom, and the bringing of men to the Lord!
-T. DeWitt Talmage
Spiritual Reload 