I want to say to the deacons, stewards, vestrymen, prudential committees, that they should work, and the place to begin is at your own home. Sit down and write the names of five or ten friends, and many of them members of your own church, and two or three of those not members of any church; yet you mingle with these people in the club, in business, in your home in a friendly way. You meet them every week, some of them every day, and you never speak to them on the subject of religion; you never bring it to their attention at all; you should be up and doing something for God and God's truth. There are always opportunities for a Christian to work for God. There is always a chance to speak to some one about God. Where you find one that won't care, you'll find one thousand that will. My Father's Business Be out and out for God. Have a heart-to-heart talk with some people and win them to Christ. The first recorded words of Jesus are these: "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" The trouble is we are too lackadaisical in religion, indifferent and dead and lifeless. That is the spirit of the committees today in the Church. I think the multitude in the Church will have to get converted themselves before they can lead any one else to Christ. It is my firm conviction, after many years of experience in the work, that half the people in the Church have never been converted, have never been born again. I take up a bottle of water, uncork it and take a drink. That is experimental. One sip of water can convince me more of its power to slake thirst than 40,000 books written on the subject. You know quinine is bitter because you have experimented; you know fire will burn because you have experimented; you know ice will freeze; it is cold; you have experimented. A man must experience religion to know God. All you know of God is what you read in some book or what you heard somebody else talk about; you haven't lived so that you could learn first-handed, so most of your religion is second-handed. There is too much second-hand stuff in the Church. It is your privilege to know and to have salvation. Jesus said to Peter: "When you are converted strengthen your brethren." You are not in a position to help anybody else unless you have been helped yourself. So many church members know nothing about the Bible. A preacher will take a text from the Bible and get as far from it as the East is from the West. A young preacher just out of the seminary said: "Must I confine myself in my preaching to the Bible?" Just like a shrimp who would say, "Must I confine my roaming to the Atlantic Ocean?" Imagine a little minnow saying: "Must I confine myself to the Atlantic Ocean?" "Must I confine myself to the Bible?" Just as if his intellect would exhaust it in two or three sermons.