Jesus received sinners and ate with them.  He left a command that Christians should invite these to feasts in their homes.  Oh! what a revival of religion there would be if the homes of Christians were opened to the lost and sinful, who are dying for some demonstration of love.  If the Son of God, the lovely, the pure, the blessed ate with sinners, ought it not to be a privilege to follow Him.  We are commanded to “warn, rebuke, and reprove with all long suffering and doctrine.”  People will work in a revival to get sinners saved, and will pass them day after day on the street and not a word of Scripture, do they use to remind them of God’s judgements.  Jesus said:  “The world hateth me because I testify that the works thereof are evil.”  I have had men to swear at me, call me names and threaten to knock me down.  At first this caused me to feel mortified but that passed off.  These very men have afterward told me I was right and they were wrong.  The devil “threw some on the ground and they foamed at the mouth” before he was cast out.  I have often taken cigars and cigarettes out of men’s and boy’s mouths.  I wished to show them the wrong and that I was a friend.  Would you let one you love take a knife to open a vein or cut himself?  Oh! the sweetness and force of that promise:  “Your labor is never in vain in the Lord.”  This covers all cases, if you, for the love of God, do anything.  I often say to myself, after rebuking for sin:  “You made a mistake in the way you did this or that, and are you sure it was done for the love of God and your neighbor?” “Yes.”  Then “your labor is never in vain in the Lord”.  It is not what we do that prospers, but what God blesses..  “He that planteth is nothing and he that watereth is nothing, but it is God that giveth the increase.”  And it matters not how awkward the work, if it be done from love of God, it will prosper.  Like other things, the more you do, the better you can do.

All the Christian work I ever did seemed to meet with severe opposition from church members.  This is a great stumbling-block to some.  The church crucified our blessed Christ, that is, it was the hypocrites; for the church is the light and salt, the body of Christ.  “If I yet please men, I should not be the servant of Christ.”  There is no other organization but the church of Christ that persecutes its own followers.  The hierarchy in the church told Christ “He had a devil,” but they could not meet the argument when He said:  “A kingdom divided against itself will not stand.”  “If I, by the spirit of Beelzebub, cast out devils, by what kind of a spirit do your children cast them out.”  The devil never destroys his own work.  If the saloon is of the devil, the power that destroys it is the opposite.  If a mother should see a gun pointed at her son would she break the law to snatch the gun and smash it?  The gun was not hers.  It may have been worth a thousand dollars.  The saloon is worse than the gun which could only destroy the body.