Let us not mistake the nature of earnestness. It is not noise.

Ignorant people imagine

that the minister who makes the greatest noise, roars and raves the most in the pulpit, or
parades his doings most in journals and reports, is the earnest man. “A celebrated
preacher, distinguished for the eloquence of his pulpit preparations, exclaimed on his
death-bed, ‘Speak not to me of my sermons. Alas! I was fiddling whilst Rome was
burning.’”
It is not frightening people. Often he who is the most successful by graphic and
impassioned descriptions of the judgment day and hell fires, in terrifying men, is
considered the most earnest. This is a mistake – a popular and fatal mistake.
It is not bustle. He who is always on the “go,” whose limbs are always on the stretch,
into this house and that house, into this meeting and that, who is never at rest, men are
always disposed to regard as an earnest man. Genuine earnestness is foreign to all these
things. It has nothing in it of the noise and rattle of the fussy brook; it is like the deep
stream rolling its current silently, resistlessly, and without pause.
An earnest ministry is living. It is not mere preaching or service, occasional or even
systematic; it is the influence of the whole man. … It is not a professional service; it is as
regular as the functions of life; it is a thing that is “in season and out of season” – in
shops and in sanctuaries, or hearths as well as in pulpits. Such a ministry is mighty. Men
can stand before the most thunderous words and violent attitudinazations, but they cannot
stand before such a ministry as this; they are before it as snow before the sun.

The Pulpit Commentary, Hosea p.160, Hosea 5:8, (D. Thomas)

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