Read Ebook: The Art of Soul-Winning by Mahood J W John Wilmot

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FIRST WEEK--THE SOUL-WINNER'S MOTIVE.

"THE LOVE OF CHRIST."

SECOND WEEK--THE SOUL-WINNER'S LIFE.

"YIELD YOURSELVES TO GOD."

THIRD WEEK--THE SOUL-WINNER'S EQUIPMENT.

"COMPLETELY FURNISHED."

FOURTH WEEK--THE SOUL-WINNER'S METHODS.

"BY ALL MEANS."

THE SOUL-WINNER'S MOTIVE.

"FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST."

FOREWORD AND APPEAL.

Memory Verse: "And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever."--

Scripture for Meditation: Matt. vi, 19-23; Rev. iii, 14-22.

THE LORD'S COMMAND.

Memory Verse: "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature."--

Scripture for Meditation: Ezek. xxxiii, 1-11.

"A college professor who was noted among his fellow-teachers for his habit of addressing young men upon their personal relations to Christ, was asked by one of his fellow-professors, 'Do they not resent your appeals as an impertinence?' He replied: 'No! Nothing is of such interest to any man as his own soul and its condition. He will never resent words of warning or comfort if they are prompted by genuine feeling. When I was a young man, I felt as you do. My wife's cousin, a young fellow not yet of age, lived in our house for six months. My dread of meddling was such that I never asked him to be present at family worship, or spoke to him on the subject of religion. He fell into the company of a wild set, and was rapidly going to the bad. When I reasoned with him I spoke of Christ. "Do you call yourself a Christian?" he asked, assuming an astonished look. "I hope so," I replied. "But you are not. If you were, he must be your Best Friend. Yet I have lived in your house for six months, and you have never once named his name to me; no, he is nothing to you!" I have never forgotten the rebuke.'"

BY PERSONAL EFFORT.

Memory Verse: "And he brought him to Jesus."--

Scripture for Meditation: John i, 35-45.

Have you ever noticed that much of the work which the Master and his disciples did was "personal work?" Some of our Lord's greatest sermons were preached to one person. The apostles were all won individually. Turn to your Bible now, and read the account of the visit of Nicodemus to Christ, and of the meeting with the woman of Samaria at the well. If you take the time to follow this theme through the Gospels and through the Acts of the Apostles, you will be sure to see that the work of winning souls for Christ by personal effort is the work of every Christian.

And a conviction of this is the greatest need of the Church to-day. It is the key to the twentieth-century revival. The world would be evangelized in this generation did each professing Christian win only one soul each year for Christ; and the great social and labor problems of the day would be speedily solved were the great Christian Church actively engaged in leading men and women to Jesus of Nazareth. Mightier than the influence of great sermons and fine music and splendid ritual is the influence of a life consecrated to personal effort in seeking the lost.

That remarkable soul-winner, Dr. J.O. Peck, now translated, said: "So great is my conviction of the value of personal effort, as the result of a lifework of winning souls, that I can not emphasize the method too strongly. If it were revealed to me from heaven by the archangel Gabriel that God had given me the certainty of ten years of life, and that as a condition of my eternal salvation I must win a thousand souls to Christ in that time; and if it were further conditioned to this, that I might preach every day for the ten years, but might not personally appeal to the unconverted outside the pulpit; or that I might not enter the pulpit during these ten years, but might exclusively appeal to individuals, I would not hesitate one moment to make the choice of personal effort as the sole means to be used in securing the conversion of one thousand souls necessary to my own salvation."

Dr. Theodore Cuyler once said concerning the three thousand souls he had received into Church fellowship during his ministry, "I have handled every stone."

TROPHIES OF PERSONAL EFFORT.

Memory Verse: "And he that is wise winneth souls."--

Scripture for Meditation: 2 Cor. v, 14-21.

Is it not a suggestive fact that nearly all those men who have shone brightly in the galaxy of martyrs, preachers, and reformers in the Christian Church through the centuries have been won to Christ by the personal effort of some consecrated life? Think of some in our own age.

Dwight L. Moody, when a clerk in a store, was visited by his Sunday-school teacher, who put his hand upon the young man's shoulder and talked to him about Christ; and Mr. Moody says, "I had not felt I had a soul till then."

Colonel H.H. Hadley, who has kneeled and prayed with over thirty-five thousand drunkards, declares that one of the agencies which led him to Christ was a brief interview with Chaplain McCabe on a railway-train in Ohio just after the Civil War.

Lord Shaftesbury, one of the greatest Christian philanthropists of the nineteenth century, was won for Christ in early boyhood by the effort of Maria Willis, a servant-girl in his father's home.

The conversion of Diaz, the great Cuban evangelist, was due to the faithfulness of a consecrated young lady of Brooklyn. She found him in a hospital at the point of death, procured a Spanish New Testament, read to him the words of mercy and invitation, pointed him to Christ; and he went back to his own country, a flaming herald of the gospel.

J. Wilbur Chapman, one of the most successful pastor-evangelists of this generation, says that while in a revival-meeting, when a boy, his Sunday-school teacher touched him on the elbow, and said, "Do you not think you had better stand?" and that one touch, as much as anything else, pushed him into the kingdom.

Joseph F. Berry, whose name is a household word in the Methodist Episcopal Church, was led to Christ by two young friends who took the young printer to his father's barn, and held a prayer-meeting with him, which resulted in a glorious conversion.

THE WORTH OF A SOUL.

Memory Verse: "For what is a man profited, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"--

Scripture for Meditation: Luke xv, 1-10.

What is a life worth? What is your life worth? What is the life of your son or daughter or mother or wife worth? What would you take for a life? But if the life of a dear one be worth so much to you, what must be its value in God's sight, who sees to what depths a soul may plunge and to what heights it may rise? It may be a small matter to you that in yonder saloon is a man dissipated and drunken. But what if he were your father or brother or husband? It may be a very small matter to you that the boy whom you met on the street is puffing a cigarette and wears already upon his face the marks of an evil life. But what if he were your boy or your brother? Yet, in God's sight, his life is as valuable as if he were your boy or your brother; and every soul is of infinite worth.

Jesus Christ set a high estimate upon human life when he left his Father's throne and came into this sin-cursed world to suffer and die that he might redeem us from death.

The Church of to-day needs a new vision of the worth of a soul. We need to stand beside Calvary and see the price that was paid there for human life.

John Keble, the poet-preacher of the English Church, said that the salvation of one soul is worth more than the framing of the Magna Charta of a thousand worlds.

It was meditation upon the words of the memory verse of this study that fired the souls of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier with a holy enthusiasm to rescue the perishing multitudes. Had their successors and disciples been, filled with the same enthusiasm, and kept themselves free from the machinations of politics, they would have long since evangelized the world, and Jesuitism would not have been "the scandal of Christianity."

THE DEATH OF A SOUL.

Memory Verse: "Let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death."--

Scripture for Meditation: Luke xvi, 19-31.

What is death--the death of a soul? What is it to die eternally? In the passage for meditation our Lord gives us a glimpse into the realms of death. Surely the Son of God is not trifling here; nor does he speak to confuse. For a moment the curtain is drawn, and we see what is actually transpiring in the future world. In these days there is a disposition in some quarters to make light of the future punishment of the wicked. Some preachers are dumb upon the awful punishment of sin, or preach only half a gospel, saying, as Bishop Warren puts it, "You must repent, as it were; be converted, in a measure; or you will go to hell, so to speak."

But Christ did not speak with any uncertain sound about the future punishment of the impenitent. He is authority. Take your Bible and read such passages as Matt. xxv, 41, 46; Matt. viii, 12; Luke xvi, 23; John v, 29.

In the light of these words, we must see that the death of a soul means eternal separation from God, from mercy, and from heaven.

And yet how indifferent we are concerning the unsaved multitudes all about us who are drifting into a hopeless eternity. The Church needs a vision like that of the little lad in Olive Schreiner's "Story of a South African Farm," who, waking at midnight, sees multitudes drifting over the precipice into eternal night, and throws himself on his face on the floor, crying out in the agony of his burdened heart to God to have mercy.

Some one tells of a shepherd in the Far West who, on a dark, stormy night, found three sheep missing. Going to the kennel where the faithful shepherd-dog lay with her little family, he bade her go to find the sheep. An hour afterwards she returned with two. When these had been put in the fold, he said, "One sheep is yet missing. Go!" The faithful dog took one mute look of despair at her little family, then was off in the dark and the storm. In two hours she had returned with the lost sheep, but was torn and bleeding, and, as she staggered toward the kennel, fell dead at the door. But if a poor, dumb brute, with no immortal hope, be obedient, even unto death, what shall we say of men and women who know the destiny of the soul, and whom the King of kings has bidden seek the lost, yet are disobedient, indifferent, and thoughtless as to the dying multitudes about them?

THE SUPREME MOTIVE.

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