Proverbs 11:30
If you want to do the work that the Lord Jesus Christ established the Church to do, you will have to get outside your buildings.
Our Lord did not say, “Build a church and wait until the people come to you.” He said, “Go to the people.” From where you live, right from where you sit, there is a high road to every unsaved man and when you want to, you will find it. Remember, Jesus Christ did not send His love to the world; He came and brought His love with Him.
If you go at all for that man to get him to church, you go with a bottle of Febreeze in one hand and a Bible tract in the other. I submit that this is largely how Christian workers on four English speaking continents have been trying to save the man, woman, boy or girl in the street, and they can see through the fraud.
It is time we ceased being hypocritical and began to live our spirituality as Christ would have us do. Our magnificent discourse is no good, our 10 thousand dollar organ is no use and your beautiful high-toned music won’t do. Somebody down there has a broken heart and it needs to be handled and healed by loving, tender, Christ-like hands; it needs the throb of a warm heart, the whispering of a soul that has gone through the same experience.
Do you know that some of the greatest souls have been converted through the agency of unknown people? We would have never heard of Andrew if he had not been Peter’s brother. Andrew immortalized himself by giving to the day of Pentecost its first and mightiest preacher.
Who knows the man’s name that pointed Charles Haddon Spurgeon to Christ? The world does not know the man’s name that pointed Spurgeon to Jesus, yet everybody that knows anything religiously knows Spurgeon’s name. The Lord never saves someone simply to take them to heaven. If He had meant only that, He would have taken you the day He saved you.
“Ye are the light of the world; ye are the salt of the earth.” If those statements mean anything, they mean that we are to help God make His world better. Oh, do not let these waves of joy and these songs of victory evaporate into sentiment which is only emotion! Go to work and do something!
One of the surest evidences of the new birth is the desire to see somebody else saved. There are people you know that nobody else can get at as well as you. The Lord gives you wisdom, love, pathos and the passion which will lead you to their hearts. The passion for souls means paying a tremendous price, but it is worth it. I have no special qualification for the work, but I have said to myself, “I am going to help God get at somebody else.”
If I with no special gift, with no position, a little nobody desires to win souls, what might you accomplish if you have this same desire? Do you desire to win souls? Do you want to see people saved and brought into the Kingdom? Are we keeping the main thing the main thing? Or have we been so busy with the cares and concerns of this world that we have allowed our spiritual life to take the sidelines and allowing the world, the flesh and the devil to be on the main track.
Let me ask it another way, “What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?” (Mark 8:36).
(Lieutenant Charles Smith is commanding officer of the Salvation Army of El Dorado).