Quiet Talks with World WinnersGordon, S. D. (Samuel Dickey)
Religion
Quiet Talks with World Winners
Gordon, S. D. (Samuel Dickey)
Christian life
Will you please remember that their knocking at our door is a direct
result of our knocking at their door? They are very polite, these far-away
kinsfolk of ours. They are simply returning our call.
The missionary, from Great Britain, and America, and Europe, has been the
West's pathfinder in these foreign-mission lands. He has blazed a way into
these thick woods, and beaten down narrow foot-paths through them. It's
been hard, heroic work. The pathfinder has often gotten his hands and face
badly torn by the thick brambly thorn bushes as he pushed resolutely on.
Then diplomacy entered and broadened the roads. And commerce quickly came
and beat them down into good hard shape for easy travel. And in turn the
missionaries have freely used the broader, better roads.
And now these roads are being trodden by other feet, and in an opposite
direction. Along the pathways made by the Church, and made better by
diplomacy and commerce, these peoples are coming, coming a-running, to ask
us to give them what we have. We received it from Another. He bade us
give it as freely as we received it.
Here they come eagerly knocking at our doors, front door, and back door,
and wherever there is a door. Do you hear them?
Ah! The great question to-day is not a question for the heathen world, but
for the Christian Church--shall we respond to the opportunity they are
flinging in our faces? To-day there are more hands in heathen lands
stretched out <i>for</i> the Gospel of Jesus than there are Christian hands
stretched out <i>with</i> the Gospel. More hearts in those far-away lands are
dumbly praying for the light than there are of us praying that they may
receive the light--far more.
The greatest question for the Church to-day is--shall we enter the open
door? And this is a key-question, too. Its answer includes a full
satisfactory answer to all the other questions we are discussing. All
questions of finance, of uncertain wabbling pulpit voices, of careless and
indifferent or empty pews, and of city evangelization will quickly find an
answer as the Church fully and faithfully answers this. Here is the work
that, if done, and well done, will bring a new circulation of blood into
the whole life of the Church.
Have you noticed the sharp contrast that there is gradually growing up
between the way people at home and these foreign peoples are receiving the
Gospel? Out there there is an openness to the truth, an eager willingness
to believe it simply, and to act upon it, that suggests the way they did
in the Book of Acts. In our home-lands of America and Great Britain and
Germany there seems to be either indifference, or an atmosphere of quibble
and criticism. With questions and doubts naturalistic explanations are
sought that do away with much of the simple force of God's truth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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