winning the world back home. That is the meaning of the birth of the
Church on that great Pentecost day. It is remarkable that the most
perfectly matured bit of organization, in this day of matured and
perfected organizations, is a church. For by common consent of thoughtful
students the most finely adjusted and thoroughly matured bit of human
machinery is the Roman Catholic Church.
If such a masterpiece of organization were controlled by the Spirit that
controls in these early chapters of Acts, what tremendous and thorough and
rapid work would be done in world-winning! And that is the goal toward
which we should be driving. The evangelization of the whole world is <i>an
easy task</i> for the whole Church. It would be a stupendous, if not an
impossible task for the few. It has been a gigantic task for the leaders,
who by dint of great planning and persuasion and earnest pleading have
done as much as has been done. But if the whole Church or half of it were
to go at it as earnestly as men go at other things, it would be an easy
task.
I remember one October morning walking across an old smoke-begrimed bridge
that spans the Ohio at Cincinnati. My eye was caught by a dingy sign in
large plain letters nailed up in a prominent place. It simply, said,
"Processions in crossing this bridge must break step." That was all. But
it was imperative. It was a law. The processions <i>must</i> break step. The
same men might cross the bridge, in as large numbers, at the same time,
but they must not keep step.
The authorities knew perfectly well that for a body of men to march <i>in
step</i>, every left foot set down at once, the impact of every right foot
striking at the same moment, would so--I do not say, <i>add</i> to the force
exerted--would so <i>multiply</i> the force exerted upon the bridge as to
endanger its safety. The power of concerted action is immense beyond any
power of conception. Every bit of power at command can so be brought to
bear at one point with a force beyond any words to express.
Our Master reverses for us the old bridge sign. Out from Pentecost rings
this word: "Let my followers all form in line, close ranks, and move out
to a world conquest, and--<i>keep step</i>." That command of His will make a
winning force so great as to shorten up the world's present calendars, and
shorten up the world's pain, and lengthen out the new life that will come
to untold numbers through Jesus.
<u>"Find My World and Win it Back."</u>
Nearly forty years ago David Livingstone, one of the Church's great
world-winning pioneers, was lost in the depths of equatorial Africa. That
is to say, he had advanced so far ahead of everybody else that the rest of
us lost track of him, and so we called him lost. Perhaps we got the use of
the word twisted, and we were the lost ones because we hadn't kept up. He
had gone where the Church was told to go, but the rest of us had lingered
behind, and so the main column became detached from its leader. Everybody
was talking about the lost leader.
James Gordon Bennett, the owner of the <i>New York Herald,</i> sent a telegram
to one of its correspondents, Henry M. Stanley. Bennett was in Paris, and
Stanley at Gibraltar. The telegram summoned Stanley to come to Paris at
once. Stanley went, reached Paris at midnight, knocked at the great
newspaper-man's door, and asked what was wanted. "Find Livingstone," was
the short, blunt reply. "How much money do you place at my disposal?"
asked Stanley. "Fifty thousand dollars, or a larger sum. Never mind about
the money; find Livingstone."
Stanley went. It took two years' time to get ready. It required a
specially planned campaign and thorough preparation. The planning was
done, and the world was thrilled when the bold missionary leader was
found.
Our Master has sent a message to His Church. It is written down in a Book,
and is being repeated by wireless messages constantly. He says, "Find my
world, and bring it back; never mind about the expense of money and lives.
<i>Find my world and win it back.</i>" And the Church has the winning power to
do it.
Each One of Us
Our Drawing Power.
Sowing Ourselves in Life's Soil.
Our Need of a World to Win.
Living Broad Lives in Narrow Alleys.
Giving God Free Use of Ourselves.
Growing Bigger for Service's Sake.
My Mission-field.
Our Spirit-touch.
Each One of Us
<u>Our Drawing Power.</u>
The greatest human winning force is a man swayed in every bit of his being
by the Spirit of Jesus. Man himself is the most attractive thing on God's
earth. He has the greatest drawing power.
He is attractive to God. He drew out of the creative power of God this
world of beauty and splendor. He drew Jesus down from the throne of God to
the earth, to poverty and hard labor, to the limitations of human life, to
misunderstandings and suffering and pain and death. These were gladly
yielded to because it was all for man. How the crowds used to draw Jesus!
He would give His strength out to them without stint, until those closest
to Him, not understanding, sought to interfere for the sake of his
strength.
One man was a sufficient magnet to draw him away from His rest, and to
draw out of Him the best of love and strength He had. Nicodemus' earnest
presence wooed out of His busy life a whole evening, and drew out the
matchless words that the world has been feeding upon ever since. The woman
of little half-breed Sychar, though an outcast, drew from Him the touch of
power that transformed her life and her village.
Man is attractive to his fellows. There is no power so attractive to a
man as another man. The phenomenal growth of modern cities is one of the
evidences of this. Everywhere men acknowledge the attractiveness that
their fellows have for them. Every friendship, every leadership, every
family circle, and gathering of men for whatever purpose tells of the
winning power that man has for his fellows. It is modified by all sorts of
surrounding conditions, and exists in many different degrees. The great
leader and the great orator have it in unusual measure. Every man has some
of it. Each man is a magnetic north pole. Every man of his spirit-current
is drawn toward him with a steady pull.
Man can win man. That fact at once brings out strikingly his winning
power. For the hardest thing in all this world to win is a man. Of all
luggage man is the hardest to move. He won't move unless he will move.
Only as the string is tied inside to his will can he be persuaded to move.
The heart may help open the door into the will. Most often that is the way
to get in. Sometimes intelligence, the reasoning powers, open the way in,
but rarely; often these two, the heart and the reason, combined. But even
then they go tandem, with the heart in the lead; only man can get that
door open, and tie the tether to the other man's will, and draw him out,
whither he will. He can do it. And only he can. Man yields to the drawing
power of his fellow.
With the deepest reverence be it said that when God would redeem a world
He sent a Man. Aye, He came as a man. And, while Jesus was so much more
than man, we must always insistently remind ourselves that He was truly
and fully a man. He was as really human in every bit of His make-up and
life as though only human. Because of man's power to win his fellow, Jesus
came to the man-level, as a Man, that so He might win men.
<u>Sowing Ourselves in Life's Soil.</u>
Man is winsome, wherever found, just as he is. He may be shackled and
slimed over with sin, as he plainly is. He may have lost much of his
winsomeness, as probably he has, through deeply rooted prejudice and
superstitions, and endless limitations of surroundings and education, but
he still remains a powerful magnet to his fellow.
But he is most winning in his winningness as he returns to the original as
God planned him. His native winning power comes out fully only as sin is
taken out of him, washed out, and burned out; the desire for it removed,
and the hurt of sin upon his bodily and mental powers overcome. Jesus is
the sort of human that God planned. And only as He is allowed to come into
a man's life, and treat the sin trouble at the core, and rule from within,
can man come to his own in his rare winsomeness.
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.
Every man needs a great purpose to grip his life. So he is anchored and
held steady against the world's tidal movements. If he isn't tied to some
great gripping purpose the wash of the sea will send him adrift, or the
fierce undertow will suck him under. And many are adrift. And many are in
the deadly suction of the undertow.
Jesus' command provides the great purpose that every man needs to hold him
steady and to bring out, and bring out best, all the splendid powers with
which we are endowed. When we are not gripped by the great purpose planned
for us we swing off into smaller, meaner purposes.
I mean, of course, those of us who are awake. Many people are habitual
somnambulists. All their walking and moving about is done in a state of
sleep. Some men never wake up. They go through the motions of life so far
as they must. The mechanism of habit keeps certain motions going, but the
real man within is asleep or dozing, with occasional spells of being
sleepily awake.
But men who are awake, and doing something, find a vent for their energy
on some lower level. The God-given energy will move out and stir itself to
action. But, having somehow missed the real purpose planned for them, they
allow the lower purposes to grip them. They organize great affairs, or
less great, industrial, intellectual, political, fraternal, social, and
spend their energy on these. It is the response they make to the call of
their natures for some great gripping purpose. But it looks very much like
another case of meeting a request for bread with cold hard stones.
These things in themselves are right, of course; so far as they are
right. They belong in the scheme of life. They should be given full place
in one's life. But that place is always a distinctly secondary place. They
belong in as number two.
A Christian business man gives most of the day and year to his business,
and gives of the best of his thought and strength to it. But if he have
gotten his bearings straight, his business is not in first place. It is
made to serve something higher. It earns the gold with which to finance
the great purpose of Jesus' life, and of his own life, namely, the purpose
of winning men, and of winning a whole world of them. How it would sweeten
business and fraternal and social contacts and friendships, if the salt of
this great purpose seasoned them!
<u>Living Broad Lives in Narrow Alleys.</u>
We need the <i>bigness</i> of this great purpose. So many lives are dwarfed by
their very littlenesses. We are bothered with being short-sighted. The
eyeglasses of the Master's purpose for us would wondrously widen out our
scope of vision. And through the new eyes would come broader, farther,
clearer views, and changed action. The littleness of our ideas would be
amusing if it were not so distressing.
I recall one day riding on a Fort-Wayne train through Indiana. I chanced
to overhear a bit of conversation. Two men, chance acquaintances, were
talking. One of them had his home in Elkhart. The other asked him where
Elkhart is. By the side of the Elkhart man there sat a little sweet-faced
boy. Instantly, as the question was asked, he looked up with surprised
eyes, and said, "Don't you know where Elkhart is? Why, Elkhart is down
where I live."
The amusing childish words seemed to have a familiar sound. I seem to have
run across a few people whose idea of God's world is about on the level of
the small boy's. The world is where they live. The rest is a hazy, vague
something, or--nothing. It exists for them, if it exists at all in their
thoughts.
"Living for self, for self alone, for self and none beside;
Just as if Jesus had never lived, as if Jesus had never died."
It would be pitiable and pathetic enough if only these people themselves
were concerned in their poor, stunted, narrow-alley living. But it is more
than that; it is tragic, because of the multitude of brothers, here and
abroad, sorely needing the help that was meant to go out to them through
us.
Then most men live narrow lives so far as the daily round is concerned.
The home, or shop, or store, or office is their daily horizon, with
practically the same round of duties day after day, year in and year out.
The very narrowness of the round tends to make narrow people. They get
into as much of a rut in their thinking as their daily action is apt to
become. Their work runs in fixed grooves that are apt to become fixed
ruts. And this makes ruts in their thinking. Their souls seem to grow
small by the very smallness and sameness of the daily tread. That is the
life of the great crowd of men all over the world.
It's an immense relief to see something big Big things always attract. Is
it partly because our daily round is so narrow and small? Jesus plans a
bigness that shall refresh us constantly. We have hearts big enough to
hold a world, and brains able to plan for a planet, even while our feet
tread the same old shut-in path.
A young man may be going a commonplace, treadmill sort of grind, in a
small corner of some great manufacturing concern, and be at the same time
carrying on a bigger enterprise than the president of his concern. For he
may be planning and praying for a world, and actually lifting it up in the
arms of his strong purpose toward the level of God.
The shipping clerk may be hammering in barrel-heads all day long, but each
blow may help emphasize the prayer of his heart for China, or India, or
his Sunday-school class.
"Forenoon, afternoon, and night,
Forenoon, afternoon, and night,
Forenoon, afternoon, and what? no more?
The empty song repeats itself. Yea, that is life.
Make this forenoon sublime, this afternoon a psalm,
This night a prayer, and time is conquered, and thy
crown is won."
The Master's gracious plan is that we shall have the refreshment of doing
big things. We are made for big things. They help us grow into the big
size that belongs to us. World-winning is a great boon to the crowd
compelled by the habit of life to tread a narrow path.
<u>Giving God Free Use of Ourselves.</u>
Now the great question every earnest man asks himself is, How can I be of
most use to God and my fellows? I want to suggest three things that have
helped me in answering that question. It may be that they will help you,
too, in getting your answer to it.
First of all is this: that we let God have the free use of us. Whatever I
am, whatever gifts and opportunities I have--these I will turn over to
God, that He may have the fullest and freest use of them. God asks from
each of us <i>a consecrated personality</i>. And "consecrated" simply means
that I give God the use of myself, and that He makes use of what I have
given to Him. That's the double meaning of the word in the Bible.
My personality, that is, what I am in myself, is the chief thing I have in
life. It is through this personality, which men recognize as I, that the
Spirit of God works in His reaching out for others. My personality is the
make-up of all that I am. My presence is that subtle something that
combines all that I am. It clings to me wherever I go. Men know it by my
name. Out through it goes the power of the man within.
The body, the glance of the eye, the quality and intonation of the voice,
the way the body is carried, and the something more than these that
unites them into one--these go to make up the presence, the outer shell of
the personality. All the power within makes itself felt through this. A
man's mere presence is an immeasurable influence.
There is a subtle, intangible, but very real spirit influence breathing
out of every man's presence. It is proportioned entirely to the strength
of the man living within. With some it is very attractive. Sometimes it is
positively repulsive. It is the expression of the man within. The presence
becomes the mould of the spirit within, large or small, noble or mean,
coarse or fine, as he makes it. The strength of a man's will or its
weakness; the purity of his heart or its lack of purity; the ideals of his
life, high or low; the keenness or slowness of his thinking--all these
express themselves in his presence.
We know the difference between a man of strong presence and one whose
presence is weak; though very few of us are skilled in reading, except in
a very small way, the character it reveals; through our presence each of
us is constantly influencing those with whom we come in contact. Now this
is the chief thing we have for our winning work. This is the thing that
Jesus uses. It is this that the Spirit of God takes possession of, if He
may, and that He uses in His outreach to others. We win most and best
through what we are.
Now, of course, I do not mean that we are to be thinking of it that way
all the time. The thinking that you have a winsome presence would itself
rob you of the most winsome part of it. Winsomeness of presence is
greatest and sweetest when we are wholly unconscious that there is such a
thing about us. As we are absorbed in Jesus, and in our fellows, the
winsomeness that is native to us shines out most attractively. It has been
covered up and hidden away a good bit by sin. Some men seem to have none.
Some have a great deal, in spite of their ignoring of God.
But as He is allowed to play upon us, as we seek to let His Spirit rule
our conduct and control our powers, the original God-image comes out. This
is a return to natural conditions as planned by God. What has been lost
through sin is restored and grown bigger and richer by the Spirit's
presence. I can give God the full use of this precious gift of
personality.
<u>Growing Bigger for Service's Sake.</u>
There's a second thing to do. This consecrated personality can be made <i>a
developed personality</i>. We don't start into life full size. We have to
grow. The greatest task of life, as well as one of the sweetest, is in
growing fine in grain, and big in size, and skilled in action. The highest
achievement of life and the rarest to find is self-mastery, that is, all
that one is in himself grown big and fine-grained, skilfully used and held
steadily to its true use. All other achievements are through this one.
The stronger I can make my body the more I can give God to use. The more
thoroughly I can understand the great, simple laws of my body, and the
more I can get into the habit of obeying them, the more can God use me in
His plans. Such common things as eating and drinking, breathing and
exercising, sleeping and resting and dress, may not be called common any
more, if through thoughtfulness here you and I can be of greater use to
our Master and our fellows.
The keener and clearer and stronger we can make our thinking, by dint of
self-discipline, the greater power have we with other men. The purer the
heart, the loftier the practical ideals that control the personal habits,
the greater is the winning power at command.
We may not be conscious of the difference. We will not be thinking of
that. But the increased power of attraction is there, and is breathing out
of one's presence, and is distinctly felt by others. And, more, it is
making a distinct mark upon others, more than they know. We must set
ourselves to growing bigger and better for service's sake.
<u>My Mission-field.</u>
The third thing is <i>a world-wide vision</i>. That is to say, our thinking and
planning and praying and giving shall be on a world scale. There is
nothing remarkable about this. The strangely remarkable thing is that
there is so little of it. Man was made on the world size. It is natural
to us to grasp the world in our thinking and action. This other thing of
living on a smaller scale is the cramping effect of sin. We were, made
big. We are big. We need a big world. We enjoy bigness. We get this from
God. We are truest to ourselves as we live on the world plan. The world
was given us originally to subdue, and now to win.
This does not mean to neglect anything or anybody nearby. It's a bit of
the cramping of sin that anybody thinks so. The man who spreads a map of
the world beside his open Bible in the morning or evening prayer-hour is
likely to have a warm hand for the fellow next him. We are made that way,
to grasp the globe, <i>and</i> each thing close at hand that needs our care.
That's a bit of the image of God in us. As we allow Him sway, the original
power is restored to us.
One result of this will be that many of us will go in person to some
far-away part of the great world-field. That's a serious thing to do,
requiring some special qualification of body and of training. For the task
out there is a great one. There are trying conditions to be met. The very
best is called for.
If a man may go in person to the foreign field he is greatly favored. Let
nothing hold him back. It is a privilege to serve anywhere. But the
highest privilege of service is out there. Many cannot go; and many may
not go. Some are plainly bidden to stay. The home administration of the
missionary enterprise requires strong men at home.
A second result will be that wherever we are, will be a mission-field to
us. We are, where we are, <i>to give</i>, not to get. Whether in far-off China
or maybe in some disillusioned commonplace home town, we will be winning
men to Jesus all the time <i>by direct touch</i>. The mastering thought will be
to let the wondrous Spirit reach out through us, freely and fully,
unhindered by anything in us, and so touch every one whom we touch.
In any circle, business or social, our hearts will be saying, "I am among
you as he that serveth." Consciously, by direct word, by indirect touch,
with love's rare diplomacy we will win men. Unconsciously, by our
presence, we will as really be winning them.