Quiet Talks with World WinnersGordon, S. D. (Samuel Dickey)
Religion
Quiet Talks with World Winners
Gordon, S. D. (Samuel Dickey)
Christian life
Only <i>won</i> men can win men, of course. Only the man who has felt the power
of Jesus can tell some one else of that marvellous power. Nobody else
wants to. Nobody else can. For nobody else knows that power. But that man
must. There is something inside that compels him to. The man who realizes
most keenly that he has been saved will be the most intent on getting
others saved, too. The passion for Jesus becomes a passion for telling
others about Jesus.
Jerry McCauley must spend out his life in Water Street because he had been
gripped by the Man who spent out His life for him. The passion is
irresistible. Splendid young Hugh Beaver must win the Pennsylvania
students to Jesus because Jesus had become the magnet of his own life.
Livingstone must plunge into the depths of the African wilds, and Duff
into India's heat, and Hudson Taylor into China's inner provinces because
of the Jesus-passion that gripped them.
Now the thing to mark very keenly is this: that God's chief reliance in
His passionate outreach for His world is <i>men</i>. He is counting on you and
me. The power that actually wins men is the power of God. Only He can so
play upon human wills and hearts as to induce them gladly to open to Him.
That is true. But it is as true that only <i>through</i> the winsome power of
men can He use His winning power fully.
I am not going to take up just now why this is so, though that is full of
helpful suggestion. But simply to have you mark that straight through this
old Book, and through church history, and in actual experience this has
been His way of reaching men. God's pathway to one human heart is through
another human heart.
When men have failed Him God's plan has failed. His sovereignty doesn't
mean that His plan doesn't fail. It means here that with endless patience
He clings to the failed plan until He can get the man through whom it can
be carried out. But meanwhile there has been serious delay and sad
suffering for man.
There is a most striking sentence spoken by Jesus in explaining the
parable of the tares, in Matthew, Chapter thirteen. He said, "The good
seed are the sons of the kingdom." We think of the truth, the Gospel
message, as the good seed that we are to sow, and so it is. But there's a
far better seed. It is men, saved men. We are to sow our saved selves, our
lives, in the soil of men's lives. Our presence among men was meant to be
God's greatest sowing of the seed of life. Upon that seed He sends the dew
and rain and sunlight of His Spirit. And through that sort of sowing He
wins His greatest harvests.
<u>Our Need of a World to Win.</u>
Now I want to turn aside here a bit, and say this: we men need a world to
win. The world needs winning. There's no doubt of that. And just as really
we men need a world to win. We need the impetus and stimulus, the grip and
the swing of having a world to win. The Master's command fits with great
exactness into the need of our lives.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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