Labour no Hindrance to Spiritual Progress.
I. Servants may be described as servants of Christ. If the Church is regarded, according to the Scriptural imagery, as a kingdom or household, of which Christ is the Head, we may argue that all the members of which it is composed are the servants of Christ; so that, however different their occupation, they all serve the same Master. You could no more spare the Christian usefulness of the humblest individual, than the manual labour of the tiller of the soil, and would as much unhinge the Church by diffusing infidelity among the lower classes, as a kingdom by diffusing rebellion. The eye of the Master is as much on one servant as on another, and His acquaintance with one as actual as with another; so that when we declare of a man that he serves the Lord Christ we mean a great deal more than when we make the like assertion of the various retainers in an earthly household. We do not merely mean that the duties which the man discharges arc duties by whose performance the cause of Christ is advanced or upheld; we mean that the man is as actually employed by Christ and as actually working for Christ as though he had received directions from His lips and gave unto Him an account of his proceedings.
II. Those whose duties in life are of the meanest description may gain as high a recompense as those who move in the first walks of society. Every lawful employment, inasmuch as it is one department of the service of Christ, has a sacred character; and consequently we may be religiously occupied when occupied with our worldly callings, and it is to close our eyes to an ordinance of God to imagine that in working for the body we cannot also be working for the soul. The distinctions of men in their temporal capacity have no corresponding distinctions in their eternal; but however various the situations which Christians occupy, the reward of the inheritance is promised equally to all.
H. Melvill, Penny Pulpit,No. 2263.
References: Ephesians 6:7; Ephesians 6:8. W. Mercer, Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 347. Ephesians 6:9. J. H. Evans, Thursday Penny Pulpit,vol. xi., p. 197.