But it is not those who bear the sacred character of the ministry alone who are full of by-ends. We all are. You all are. And there is not one all-reaching, all-exposing, and all-humbling way of salvation appointed for ministers, and another, a more external, superficial, easy, and self- satisfied way for their people. No. Not only must the ambitious and disputing disciples enter into themselves and become witnesses and judges and executioners within themselves before they can be saved or be of any use in the salvation of others--not only they, but the fishermen of the Lake of Tiberias, they also must open their hearts to these stabbing words of Christ, and see how true it is that they had followed Him for loaves and fishes, and not for His grace and His truth. And only when they had seen and submitted to that humiliating self-discovery would their true acquaintance with Christ and their true search after Him begin. Come, then, all my brethren, and not ministers only, waken up to the tremendous importance of that which you have utterly neglected, it may be ostentatiously neglected, up to this hour,--the true nature, the true character, of your motives and your ends. Enter into yourselves. Be not strangers and foreigners to yourselves. Let not the day of judgment be any surprise to you. Witness against, judge, and execute yourselves, and that especially because of your by-aims and by-ends. Take up the touchstone of truth and lay it upon your most secret heart. Do not be afraid to discover how double-minded and deceitful your heart is. Hunt your heart down. Track it to its most secret lair. Put its true name, and continue to put its true name, upon the main motive of your life. Extort an answer by boot and by wheel, only extort an answer from the inner man of the heart, to the torturing question as to what is his treasure, his hope, his deepest wish, his daily dream. Watch not against any outward enemy, keep all your eyes and all your ears to your own thoughts. God keeps His awful eye on your thoughts. His eye goes at every glance to that great depth in you. Even His all-seeing eye can go no deeper into you than to your secret thoughts. Go you as deep as God goes, and you will be a wise man; go as deep and as often as He does, and then you will soon come to see eye to eye with God, not only about your own thoughts, but about His thoughts too, and about everything else. Till you begin to watch your own thoughts, and to watch them especially in their aims and their ends, you will have no idea what that moral and spiritual life is that all God's saints live; that life that Christ lived, and which He this night summons you all to enter henceforth upon.
It is such a happy fact that it cannot be too often told, that in the things of the soul really and truly to know and feel the disease is to have already entered on the remedy. You will not feel, indeed, that you have entered on the remedy; but that does not much matter so long as you really have. And there is nothing more certain among all the certainties of divine things than that he who feels himself to be in death and hell with his heart so full of by-ends is all the time as far from death and hell as any one can be who is still on this side of heaven. When a man's whole will and desire is set on God, as is now and then the case, that man is perilously near a sudden and an abundant entrance into that life and that presence where his heart has for so long been. When a man is half mad with his own heart, as Thomas Shepard for one was, that stranger on the earth is at last within a step of that happy coast where all wishes end. Watch that man. Take a last look at that man. He will soon be taken out of your sight. Ere ever he is himself aware, he will be rapt up into that life where saints and angels seek not their own will, labour not for their own profit or promotion, listen not for their own praises, but find their blessedness, the half of which had not here been told them, in glorifying God and in enjoying Him for ever.