We are to live blamelessly before men and holily before God.
As pastors we are to shepherd the sheep over whom God has made us to be overseers.
We are to feed the flock, not with the philosophies and fictions of men, but with the truth of God.
We are to restore the wandering, sustain the weak and comfort the sorrowing.
We are to go to the house of mourning and give consolation to those who are Christians and who weep above their Christian dead.
As preachers we are to preach the Word. We are to preach in season and out of season, and to exhort with all long-suffering and doctrine.
We are exhorted to this high, this holy, this exalted and practical Christian living, this reincarnation of Christ in daily experience, this translation of His character, this manifestation of His guiding and ruling presence, not by the fact that we must die and appear before God, but by the fact the Lord Himself is coming, may come at any time, that any moment we may meet Him at His judgment seat.
In all the universe of God there is nothing so impressive as the thought that you, that I, that we must give a personal account to God for the manner in which we have used our time, our talent, our opportunity and substance; and when we are told—as we are told in Holy Scripture—that any moment we may be summoned to give an account of our stewardship, and that without dying, just suddenly, without a moment’s warning, translated bodily and with all the sense of the daily life we have been living upon us into the presence of Him whose name we have been professing—impressiveness has reached its ultimate and exhortation the fullest leverage of appeal.
And he who says the Coming of Christ considered as a doctrine, as a truth or a motive, is not intensely practical and all-compelling to Christian devotion and service, is either blindly and excuselessly ignorant of the Word of God or brutally and perversely guilty of denying a truth that flashes like lightning from one end of the Bible to the other and illuminates every hortative passage in the Word of God.
When thus you are face to face with the indisputable fact that every basic doctrine of the Christian faith, every outshining promise of hope, of comfort, of consolation, of abiding peace, every appeal to the noblest and purest life as a Christian, every demand that the Christian shall unceasingly be the light of heaven in the spiritual darkness of earth is bound up inextricably with the fact of the Second Coming, it carries with it the inevitable corollary that the Second Coming of our Lord Jesus Christ as a certified and imminent event is the very sum and substance of all available motives that can lead to a life of practical service to God and man.