Soul Winning


Practical theology deals with such subjects as consecration,
prayer, soul winning, the victorious life, the two natures, true
quiet time, etc. These are the studies that are preeminently
practical. These come last in the Studies in Theology because the
scriptures were written primarily not for soul winning, but for
doctrine (2 Tim. 3:16).

The left and right wing emphases we have in America today are
false emphases. The first is that soul winning is the main thing,
which it is not. Doing right is the main thing: God will do
nothing wrong to get you saved, and God would do nothing wrong to
get anybody else saved. If you do something wrong to get somebody
else saved, you are not doing what is right, and you are not
doing the first and main thing, which is doing right. We say this
because many of the so-called Premillennial, soul winning,
independent Fundamentalists today have put the Bible in a
secondary place and have exalted their ministries above the word
of God. Some of the most vicious critics of people like Billy
Graham are right wing fundamentalists who have made a god out of
their church, or their newspaper, or their school. We can spot
these idolators easily when we begin to talk about the authority
of the word of God, because this is always put in a secondary
place. They forget that "all scripture is given by inspiration of
God, and is profitable for doctrine" (2 Tim. 3:16): first for
doctrine.

At the other end of the spectrum we have the teaching that all
you have to do is just doctrinally study the word of God and let
the world go to hell. This is wrong. Bob Jones Sr. used to say,
"Cool head, warm heart." The warm heart for soul winning; the
cool head for doctrinal correctness. There have to be both. Those
on the end of the spectrum, the lunatic fringe and radical
fanatics of Fundamentalism, are off on the deep end doctrinally;
for example, the Bullingerites who follow Stam, Baker, and
O'Hair.

When we talk about soul winning we are talking about a
preeminently practical thing, which is secondary to doctrine,
according to the Bible. Readers of 1 and 2 Timothy will be
careful to notice how the new bibles have changed the word
"doctrine" or removed it from two to ten places in these
epistles. The modern Christian sacrifices the authority of the
word of God in order to get an income or build his ministry, and
the word of God is an afterthought.

Proverbs 11:30 says, "he that winneth souls is wise." Daniel 12:3
says, "they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the
firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars
for ever and ever." In Psalm 126:5-6 we read, "They that sow in
tears shall reap in joy. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing
precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing,
bringing his sheaves with him." The seed can be likened to the
word of God, and the sheaves tot he souls led to Christ. It is
true that all three of these soul winning passages are found in
the Old Testament under the law. However, we can take the
spiritual application. The scriptures were not inspired for soul
winning or to help you "share" the experience of your love or
your good news, and the scriptures were not written for you to
"share the love of God." The scriptures were written primarily
for doctrine (2 Tim. 3:16), according to the Holy Ghost who
inspired the scriptures. The final authority was not "Harris" and
what he thought and said. The final authority is what the Holy
Spirit said Himself about His own work (2 Tim. 3:16). So although
we can make spiritual application, we must never forget that
these three verses are in the Old Testament given to people under
the law.

Few are called to be preachers, but every born again Christian is
called to be a soul winner, an individual, personal witness who
attempts to win people to Jesus Christ. Preachers and
missionaries often get so busy with meetings and classes they
forget the private touch of the personal witness and personal
soul winning. Soul winning is a definite effort to lead a
definite person to accept a definite Saviour at a definite time.
Soul winning is the attempt of a witness to get a person to put
their name on the dotted line.

The people who led Moody, Spurgeon, Torrey, Finney, and Billy
Graham to Christ are unknown to the average Christian. You would
have to look up their names to find Kimball, who led Moody to
Christ. A Methodist preacher led Charles Haddon Spurgeon to
Christ, but nobody knows to this day what his name was. My,
didn't he cash in when he led that fish to the Lord? Billy Graham
was led to Christ by a personal worker named Privett in a meeting
in Charlotte, North Carolina, under Mordecai Ham. Yet you haven't
heard Billy Graham mention Mordecai Ham's name for twenty years.

There is a Fundamentalist newspaper editor in America who
publishes a weekly Christian newspaper in which he brags about
being responsible for revival coming back to America, when he is
really bragging about the subscriptions he gave out in order to
get a place to preach. That fellow I'm speaking of never put a
sermon in that newspaper by J. Frank Norris for thirty years, but
the men connected with J. Frank Norris have put up the largest
number of independent Baptist churches in America.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon said, "If I were utterly selfish and had
no care for anything except my own happiness, I would choose, if
I might under God, to be a soul winner, for never did I know
perfect, overflowing, unutterable happiness of the purest and
most ennobling order till I first heard of one who had sought and
found the Saviour through my means." That is, a soul winner has
great joy. One of the most satisfying things in this world, if
not the most satisfying thing after you are saved, is to know
that you led somebody to Christ and they have straightened up
their life and are living for Christ. That is one of the highest
joys a person can have and far exceeds any gift given to the body
of Christ in 1 Corinthians 12. The people who brag about gifts,
the pseudo-Charismatic people who are like clouds that brag about
rain when they are nothing but wind and hot air (Prov. 25:14),
miss the greatest joy of Christian service. Not one out of ten of
them is a soul winner. What they are is proselytizers: their job
is to take a man who is already saved and talk him out of his
doctrinal position by talking about "experiences." This has
nothing to do with winning souls, but with perverting converts.

The soul winner is one who leads a man to a saving knowledge of
Jesus Christ, and no joy is any higher than that because of the
value of the soul. Christ said it is worth more than the whole
world (Mark 8:36). So when you lead a person to Christ you have
already done more than Rockefeller. When you lead a soul to
Christ you have already done more than Bismarck or Kennedy. When
you lead a soul to Christ you have already done at least ten
thousand times as much as Martin Luther King Jr. ever thought of
doing. When you lead a soul to Jesus Christ you have already
accomplished more than Abraham Lincoln accomplished in his
lifetime. That is something to think about, isn't it? That is, if
a man could gain the whole world and lose his own soul, it would
be on the loss side of the ledger. Therefore, if you led a man to
Christ, when that soul gets saved you have already done more than
the Illuminati, the Council of Foreign Relations, the Congress,
and the United Nations. My, what a rare opportunity for the man
who has what we call in the higher educational circles "a proper
sense of value," or as they say in philosophy "axiology." When
you lead a soul to Jesus Christ you have done more in time and
eternity than most statesmen, senators, ambassadors, premiers,
governors, attaches, and nuncios have done for the world in the
last two thousand years. So, if you want to get in the big time,
that is the big time--winning people to Jesus Christ.

We ought to win people to Jesus Christ because of the fact of
hell. If we really believe that souls are headed for a lost
eternity in a lake of fire where there is torture, blackness,
anger, shame, and torment forever, like the Bible says, we should
surely do all in our power to persuade men to turn from sin and
turn to Jesus Christ. This is a salient truth for the saved child
of God.

If you are one of these saved people who can only talk about your
gifts and your experiences, you have a real problem! Imagine
bragging about your experiences and gifts when the world is going
to hell all around you! Imagine knowing about the free pardon of
sins by the shed blood of Jesus Christ, and all you can talk
about is your gifts. What kind of demon do you suppose has hold
of you? Suppose you saw a car burning on the highway, and a
burning pool of gasoline around the car twenty feet in diameter,
and a woman is screaming, "The children, the children! Get the
children!" What would you do? Share your experience of the love
of God with them? Why, there have been cases like that where
grown men have had to knock each other down to keep from getting
burned to death going into that pool of gasoline to get the kids
out.

In one case a pilot came down hollering, "May day!" and hit a
landing strip. When the emergency units got there and the plane
was going up in flames, they could hear that fellow screaming,
"For God's sake, cut my legs off! Cut my legs off!" because he
didn't want to burn to death in the plane. But he did burn to
death because nobody could get in the cockpit to cut his legs
off. He was caught in the metal under the seat.

If you knew that you were going to hell before you got saved and
know that you are now saved from hell, what are you doing to try
to keep people out of hell? Nobody in Acts 2 even asks what to do
to get saved. What kind of jaded, twisted people quote Acts 2:38
and 1 Corinthians 14 while the world is dying and going to hell
all around them?

Do you know why some people don't spend time winning people to
Christ? Because they have never been saved from hell, and that is
why it is not real to them. We have a funny kind of Christianity
today where a man says, "I've been born again," and when you ask
him what he meant by "born again," he meant goose pimples,
visions, quivers, shivers, hair standing on end, and a desire to
talk about crosses. It's a strange situation. If you are saved
from hell, then you know hell is a reality. There may be somebody
dumb enough to think that hell is the grave, but if you are saved
you have better sense. If you think hell is the grave then I'm
not talking to you because people who have been saved from hell
know perfectly well they weren't saved from the grave. Paul is in
the grave right now, and he was saved from hell. Dwight L. Moody
and R.A. Torrey are in the grave right now, and they were saved
from hell.

The sufferings of Christ on the cross for every sinner should
inspire you to try to win people to Christ. The emptiness,
sorrow, and vanity of this world should make a soul winner out of
you. If you found Jesus Christ, you know you found the remedy for
your problems that you could not find in college. If you found
Jesus Christ as your Saviour, you found a remedy that the world
couldn't find with its science, medicine, and philosophy, or any
other pretty, little, clown tricks. The glories of heaven should
drive the soul winner to try to get others to be saved because he
should remember that he will be judged at the Judgment Seat of
Christ, and there he will be rewarded for his efforts to try to
win people to the Saviour.

If you are going to be a personal worker and try to win people to
Jesus Christ, there are a number of qualifications you are going
to have to meet.

First of all, you must be saved yourself, and you must be sure of
your salvation. The reason why many of the people who brag about
Charismatic gifts make sorry soul winners is that many of them
are worried about committing the unpardonable sin and are never
sure whether they are going to lose it today or tomorrow, or if
they lost it the day before yesterday. If you don't know you are
saved for certain, you will never be a soul winner. You cannot
lead a man to Christ if you don't know you have eternal life,
because you have nothing to offer him. A Pentecostal preacher
once stopped me at the end of a service and tried to convince me
that if I didn't have what he had, certain things were wrong.
Finally I said to him, "Why are you taking this time to talk to
me?" He said, "I want to help you." I said, "Then I must need
help, right?" He didn't answer. I said, "What do you profess to
have that I don't have?" He put on the humble bit and said, "Oh,
nothing. I didn't profess that." I said, "Well, I've got
something that you don't have." Nothing humble about me, brother;
I've been accused of a lot of things, but not of being a
gentleman! If I take time out to talk to you thirty minutes, it
is because I am convinced that you are short on something, and
I've got something you need. If I didn't think that, I wouldn't
open my yap to you. So I told that preacher, "I've got something
you don't have." He asked, "What's that?" I said, "Absolute
assurance of eternal life without talking in tongues," and I was
right. He didn't have that. He needed some help from me and
didn't know it. The soul winner must be saved and he must know
that he is saved.

The soul winner must have a life surrendered to Jesus Christ. You
are going to bear a lot of shame, reproach, cussing out, and
mockery if you witness for Christ, and if you are not surrendered
to Jesus Christ and living the right kind of life inside and
outside, you won't stand up very long.

The soul winner must work in a spirit of love and perseverance.
He can't be arrogant or overbearing in personal work. When it
comes to preaching, you shell it out hot and hard and clear. When
it comes to teaching, you lay it on the line and roar and stomp
and shoot it out like an eighty-eight. But when it comes to
personal work you will have to lower the tone of your voice and
say, "Good day, sir, how are you? I wonder if you have a few
minutes. I hope I'm not taking up too much of your time. If you
have just a few minutes I would like to show you something from
the scriptures." Personal work is not the same as preaching.

We have many cowards in the pulpit today who have tried to make
the approach to personal work their manner in the pulpit, and
these people have sold the pulpits down the river. They have made
it impossible for a man to come to a church and hear a rebuke.
Preaching is not just "sharing the love of God." Preaching and
teaching means the whole counsel of God, and many times like
Jesus preached in Matthew 23 and John 9, it is blistering,
scathing, negative denunciation. Many times preaching is name
calling and open rebuke before them all (1 Tim. 5:20), but
personal work is something else.

The Christian who deals with souls must have a knowledge of the
Bible. Many people shy away from personal work because of their
ignorance of the word of God, but ignorance is no excuse. The
Bible says if any man "lack wisdom, let him ask of God" (James
1:5).

The soul winner must be a man of prayer, relying on the Lord to
convert the sinner. His life must be powerful, and he must be
filled with the Holy Spirit to lead people to Jesus Christ. Or,
as Paul says, "be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be
filled with the spirit" (Eph. 5:18).

He must have a compassion for lost souls, a passion for the
unsaved people. If he does not, he will work with a dead,
mechanical, dispassionate concern, and the individual will
respond accordingly. We have what we call a Romans Road to
salvation, which many times is dished out in a mechanical
computerized fashion, and it produces nothing except a carnal
convert. I know of a man who was a great personal worker, who
probably led thousands to Christ. But he didn't get enough sleep
at night because he had problems in his family which kept him
burdened night and day. He often got so tired that he would go to
sleep while giving the plan of salvation to somebody sitting on a
sofa with him! He would sit there and quote the verses, and he
would yawn and go to sleep. Obviously his problem was just not
enough sleep. But beware of the formalized, computerized,
mechanical method of leading souls to Christ that puts them
through like a baloney factory and then brags about great results
because of so many decisions.

This generation has the idea that regeneration is a decision for
Christ. This is because the average Christian will not study his
Bible to find out what is doctrinally correct or incorrect.
Preachers can get away with a kind of chicken-livered
Christianity whereby, using terminology which the Christians will
misread, they can put across something the sinner will accept
without getting upset. For example, the common approach in the
ministry these days is, "Let Christ come into your life." Every
lukewarm, watered-down, Bible-rejecting Christian who hears that
thinks that is proper because he has been saved, and Christ is
already in his body. What that backslidden Christian never
realizes is that that is the most dangerous thing you could
possibly say to an unsaved man, because Christ is in the life of
every devil on the face of this earth. Christ controls the devil
and his angels. All power is given to Christ in heaven and in
earth. Christ controls, by His permissive will and authority, the
activity of every unsaved man on the face of this earth.
Therefore, to talk about letting Christ come into your life is to
deceive the unsaved man, with the consent of the body of Christ.
By the same token, the "decision for Christ" we often hear about
is perfectly acceptable to a Christian who has to constantly make
decisions, but deciding for Christ is not regeneration.
Regeneration doesn't occur until God grants a spiritual new
birth, and the new birth is never granted until that sinner
receives God's Son as his Saviour (John 1:13). So what our
preachers have done is take advantage of the fact that Christians
no longer study their Bibles and are no longer concerned with
Biblical terminology, so they don't offend the unsaved man and
still pass off as good little boys and girls while they are not
preaching the truth.

Nothing could have helped this movement toward apostasy any
better than the new translations, which use wording that is
inoffensive to the unsaved man, and ambiguous wording which can
be interpreted by a Christian to be the truth, when it is not. So
with the new bibles and the new preachers we have developed a
lanolized, leavened, synthesized Christianity; a watered-down,
adulterated Christianity that does not lay the plan of salvation
on the line. The plan of salvation begins with Romans 6:23, with
the White Throne Judgment and the Lake of Fire, because that is
the destination of every unsaved man (Rev. 20:11,15).

We find God's method of soul winning in Psalm 126:5-6, where the
Christian principles are set forth, although the immediate
context is the restoration of Israel and the fact that the Jews
will go through a terrible time of trouble and will eventually
get good crops. Yet spiritual application can be found, as long
as the other scriptures are not violated. Certainly it is true
that the seed can be the word of God because it is defined as
this in at least one case (Luke 8:11). Certainly the reaping can
be the souls led to Christ: "he that reapeth receiveth wages, and
gathereth fruit unto life eternal" (John 4:36). Paul also likens
the Christian soul winning or the ministry to a harvest and being
a husbandman to a vine or a crop (2 Cor. 9:6; 1 Cor. 3:6-8). So
we are not being far-fetched when we say that Psalm 126 deals
with some principles of soul winning.

Notice the "go" in soul winning. "He that goeth forth...." You
will never win souls unless you go out after them. The first two
letters in gospel are "go." There is no way to get to souls
without going after them. Christ said, "Go ye into all the world,
and preach the gospel" (Mark 16:15). Do not wait for the sinners
to speak to you or open the conversation. God's orders are that
we go after them and maneuver the conversation to salvation. If
there is one great sin in the modern church, it is the fact that
they are not going after sinners.

I hear a great deal of criticism from the brethren these days
about promotional methods used by the larger churches in America,
and without taking sides, I am certainly against any type of
computerized salvation that is mechanized to build a monument and
get shallow conversions, carnal conversions, or no conversions.
Still, you will have to take your hat off, even to those who
manage to bungle the job sometimes, in that they are trying. I
certainly do not condemn a church that is trying to win people to
Jesus Christ. If you are trying to win people to Jesus Christ,
that much of your work is scriptural, and if you are not trying
to win people to Jesus Christ, that much of your work is not
scriptural. That is very apparent. The commandment is "go." The
commandment is not "bring them to the building." The commandment
is "go" out after them, and God's people in these days should be
on the go. As Moses said, they should have their loins girded and
their shoes on their feet and the staff in their hand (Exod.
12:11). As soon as the Israelites were redeemed by the blood in
Exodus 12, they had to get going. Many of God's people are
waiting for...I don't know what they are waiting for. They're
waiting for a freight train or for a commandment to go, but the
commandment was given more than nineteen hundred years ago.

A soul winner one time figured what would have happened if every
soul led two people to Christ every ten years, and each of those
led two more people to Christ in ten years. The entire world
would have been converted to Jesus Christ before the year 400
A.D. In four hundred years you would have had over a billion
conversions, and there were not that many people alive on the
earth, which shows that the majority of God's people are not soul
winners. The vast majority of church members have never led one
person to Christ in their life. If every Christian had led two to
Christ in ten years and each of those new Christians had led two
to Christ in ten years, the world would have been converted
before the fall of the Roman Empire.

This shows that despite all the talk about soul winning and
revival and the great outpouring of the Spirit, God's people have
never been in a more carnal, non-Biblical mess than they are
today with their apostate translations. It would be safe to say
that ninety-five percent of the church members in America have
never led one person to Jesus Christ in their lifetime and never
will. The trouble is, there are one or two churches that have the
funny idea that because half of their congregation shows up for
visitation and a quarter of them are soul winners that some
national revival is going on. That is going on in only one church
that covers an area less than forty square miles. Have you ever
seen a road map of America? Do you realize that if America had
ten more churches that ran twenty thousand in Sunday school, they
would not have any effect on the Senate or the Congress? What
this country needs is one church in every town that teaches,
believing the word of God and preaching it from cover to cover to
keep the town torn up from morning to night. Until that takes
place, there isn't going to be any revival.

One of the requirements for the soul winner is a broken heart.
Jesus wept over Jerusalem (Matt. 23:37). Paul wept: "serving the
Lord...with many tears" (Acts 20:19). "I ceased not to warn every
one night and day with tears" (Acts 20:31). So the broken heart,
a compassion for souls, is one of the requirements, which
explains why some people are successful in soul winning and
others are not. It also explains why you can't computerize or
mechanize the soul winning method. Without compassion and love
for lost men and women, soul-consciousness--the knowledge that an
eternal soul is there with an eternal destiny to face and a
burden and compassion for that soul, the results are going to be
mechanical and computerized, and no new life will be imparted.

The word of God is necessary in soul winning. The Psalmist said,
"bearing precious seed." Do not expect people to be converted by
your rhetoric or your logic or your arguments. Although these
things may be helpful in convincing them and getting them upset
(which is good for them) and disturbing them (which is excellent)
and making them think (which is even better), the matter of
conversion lies with the Holy Spirit applying the word of God.
Peter tells us that men are born again by the word of God (1
Peter 1:23). In the parable of the sower and the seed (Luke 8),
the good seed is said to be the word of God.

The soul winner should learn verses by memory, or at least learn
the reference so you can find it. The soul winner should be able
to freely show what he says in the word of God. This is
absolutely necessary because sooner or later somebody is going to
call his hand and say, "Oh yeah? Where is that?" The soul winner
should be able to turn to the passage immediately without any
hesitation whatsoever and show the person where it is.

The greatest damage to soul winning and evangelism has been the
newer translations of the Bible, for when you turn to the passage
you suddenly discover it doesn't say what you thought it said at
all. It said what somebody thought it said or thought it meant or
meant it thought that it might have said that they would like to
have it think that it said. With forty-five translations on the
market these days, the unsaved man can hide behind any alibi.
Nobody can pin him down to what God said because nobody knows
what God said. The most destructive, damaging work that has been
done, has been to pervert and leaven the word of God by
translations until nobody has any authority but their own
opinion.

Make sure that when you go out soul winning you know what the
word of God is. It certainly is not Phillips, Weymouth, Moffatt,
Goodspeed, the so-called Living Bible, the Amplified, the ASV,
New ASV, RSV, IV, NIV, Maggie and Jiggs, Green Hornet, Tarzan, or
the Incredible Hulk. Those are not Bibles. Those are religious
comic books, and they are for the kiddies. You say, "Well, I've
been told that these are for folks who are serious Bible
students." Nonsense. They are just puffing you up and making you
think that you are smart if you read that junk. No serious Bible
student would recommend an NIV or NASV because any serious Bible
student knows that those Bibles are from the Westcott and Hort
Greek text. If a man is serious about his Bible study, he knows
that the Westcott and Hort Greek text was invented by two men in
1881 to replace the Receptus, and that those two men thought
their personal opinion about manuscript evidence was more
important than the entire body of evidence delivered to the body
of Christ through eighteen centuries. When a man tells you he is
a serious Bible student and he doesn't know that, he is just
pulling the rug out from under your feet. Every Bible printed
since 1881 is from the two oldest and most grossly corrupt,
perverted, blasphemous, obscene manuscripts known to history, two
manuscripts that contain the Apocrypha in the Old Testament, the
Apocrypha in the New Testament, and contain more intentional and
unintentional blunders, glosses and errors than sixteen hundred
manuscripts of the Textus Receptus. If you are a serious Bible
student, you know that, and if you are just taking somebody's
word for it, then you don't know that. Make sure if you are a
soul winner you know what the Bible is, and make sure you have a
copy, and make sure you know what is in that copy. Learn the
verses by memory.

Depend upon the word of God for conviction of sin and renewal of
faith. "Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God"
(Rom. 10:17), but not by newer translations in the language of
the modern apostate. Have you got a copy of the word of God? If
faith comes by the original manuscripts, nobody in America can
get any faith. If the word of God is the originals, you can't
hear it, and you can't get any faith.

When you go out to win people to Christ be sure of some things.
Be sure of joy. You are told you will come again rejoicing,
reaping in joy and bringing your sheaves with you. "Likewise, I
say unto you there is joy in the presence of the angels of God
over one sinner that repenteth" (Luke 15:10).

The joy of personal salvation is often superseded by the joy of
soul winning. The joy you get leading a man to Christ many times
is greater than the joy you found when you first got saved
yourself. For many of us, receiving Christ as Saviour was not a
joyous experience: it was a breaking up time; a time of deep
depression and discouragement and all kinds of trouble. Paul's
time of salvation was not a time of rejoicing (Acts 9). He was
knocked flat on his back and was blind as a bat for three days.
Would you call that a time of joy? The dying thief's time of
salvation was not a time of joy (Luke 23). He had to die a slow,
lingering death with both of his shin bones busted. Do you think
he was shouting for joy and having visions of the Holy Ghost?
Many times your salvation experience is not a time of joy, but a
time of deep depression and sorrow. This is often superseded
later when the Christian realizes that he can lead others to
Christ and grant them the gift of eternal life which he has
himself, and this brings him great joy. He can be certain of
results, for he "shall doubtless come again with rejoicing,
bringing his sheaves with him" (Ps. 126:6).

God promises to bless His word as He promised to bless nothing
else on the face of this earth: "So shall my word be that goeth
forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it
shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the
thing whereto I sent it" (Isa. 55:11). God may bless your jokes,
and humor has been used to pen the sinner's eyes to the truth. I
know an atheist who was converted when a preacher patted him on
the back and said, "Aren't evolution and nature wonderful,
friend? Just think, if your nose was made upside down, every time
you sneezed you would blow your hat off, and every time it rained
you would drown." That got the evolutionist to thinking. God may
bless some illustration you give. God may bless some experience
you give or some testimony, but He has not promised to bless it.
The only thing that He promised to bless and prosper for certain
is His word. If all you have got is a reliable translation, then
you can't claim one promise in that passage.

Those of us who have the word of God preach it because we were
told, "Preach the word" (2 Tim. 4:2). We were told to believe it
because "faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the word of God"
(Rom. 10:17). We read it to sanctify and cleanse ourselves
because Christ said it was the truth (John 17:17). Those of us
who have copies of it love it and believe it and read it. When we
say we have a copy of it, we mean we have in our hand the words
that God wants us to have, in our language, the infallible,
authoritative, living, quick, powerful, and without one proven
error, in spite of the rotten propaganda put out by Christian
colleges and universities.

Put out the word, and it will bear fruit. You will not win
everyone you talk to, but you will win some. It would be a
wonderful thing if you won even two percent of the people you
talk with. If you witness to three a day, and only two of them
get saved in a month, that would be a wonderful thing.

Seek and pray for opportunities, and then use them. The Bible
says, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God" (James
1:5). If you are naturally timid or bashful, then prayer. Don't
wait for situation ethics. The One who created the situation
knows the proper, ethical way to handle it, and you are not that
smart. The thing to do is pray, "Now, Lord, I need wisdom. Lord,
give me courage. Now, Lord, give me boldness. You know I'm shy
and timid. Please give me the boldness I need to witness for
thee." Paul prayed for boldness to speak the word of God as he
ought to speak (Eph. 6:19). If Paul needed prayer to be bold
about his witnessing, don't you think we need it? Obviously,
always, the first thing to do is pray. Prayer is not a last
resort; it should be the first thing a man resorts to.

The next thing to do is to deal with your own age and your own
sex, if possible. If you are a teenager, try to deal with
teenagers. If you are a young man, deal with young men. However,
if the Holy Spirit prompts you to speak to someone else, don't
hesitate, but proceed at once. There is nothing in the Bible that
says a teenager can't lead his mother and father to Christ. A man
sixty years old can lead a fifteen year old girl to Christ; Moody
did it all the time. But the general rule is to deal with your
own age and your own sex.

"Be courteous" (1 Peter 3:8). Don't be overbearing or too
talkative. Let them speak, too. When you talk to somebody, don't
rush up and grab them by the collar and say, "Where are you going
when you die?" Use some common sense. Give them a tract and say,
"Would you read this when you have time?" Or, "Here's some food
for thought." Or, "I would like to give you one of these. I don't
know whether you want it or not, but I read one of these about
twenty years ago and it changed my life. Maybe it could help
you." Be courteous. Knock at the door and say, "We're from the
church. May we talk with you for a while?" Be courteous. You
don't have to be brutal, blunt, and uncouth in a personal
witness. In preaching, the Lord might want you to take somebody's
hide off, but in personal work your job is to reach the person as
an individual and lead them to Jesus Christ.

Deal with the person alone if at all possible. In a crowd he will
try to save face by arguing, even when he doesn't believe what he
is saying. He will give excuses that he doesn't believe himself.
But when you are alone, he is more apt to open up to you, heart
to heart. This is very important in places like the military, and
mills, and factories. If you ever deal with a fellow with a crowd
around, he will lie like a dog and give you alibis he does not
even believe himself in order to save face. The best time to get
a man is when he is alone. This may not always be possible. One
of the greatest opportunities to win souls is in hospital
visitation by the bedside, when the person is alone and has time
to think about his sins, his depression, God, and eternal things.
You can talk to him quietly and lead him to Jesus Christ. A
hospital is one of the finest places in the world for a personal
worker.

Be a gentleman about it. When I talk to people about their soul I
don't charge into them--and I've been criticized for that! From
the pulpit I am preaching and teaching the whole counsel of God;
in personal work I am aiming for an individual soul, trying to
lead him to Jesus Christ. There is a difference.

Avoid argument if possible. Sometimes it will not be possible.
You may be forced to defend the word of God, and when you are,
stand up and defend it. Somebody said, "Never defend the word of
God," but that is not good advice. You should always "be ready
always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of
the hope that is in you with meekness and fear" (1 Peter 3:15).
You are called for "the defense and confirmation of the gospel"
(Phil. 1:7), and to "earnestly contend for the faith which was
once delivered unto the saints" (Jude 3). You are not called to
waste undue time arguing, so don't spend any time arguing if
nothing can be gained from it (2 Tim. 2:14). But if some
heretical vultures come around to get the new born calf as soon
as he is born again, know how to refute them with the word of God
so the man you are dealing with won't be taken in by their false
doctrine. Although you may not win the argument with the
heretics, you will win the argument with the man who listens to
you and the heretics argue. One of the great advantages to
knowing the word of God and being able to "rebuke them sharply,
that they may be sound in the faith" (Titus 1:13), is so an
unsaved man listening can see the difference between absolute
truth and somebody's theological opinion.

There are four denominations raised up by Satan to prevent you
from leading souls to Christ: Campbellites, Charismatics,
Jehovah's Witnesses, and Seventh-day Adventists. If you ever try
to lead people to Christ, you will immediately run into these
four denominations, and you will have trouble from one of them.
They all profess to be Bible believers, and they are incorporated
as non-profit religious organizations, but their members will do
everything they can to keep you from leading a soul to Christ.
These fellows never deal with unsaved people; their ministries
are getting proselytes from other churches, and when you are in
an argument with those fellows, "rebuke them sharply, that they
may be sound in the faith" and deal with them directly so that
the unsaved man knows that you have the truth and that these
people don't care for their souls. They care for their own
belief.

Don't rely on your own ability or experience in soul winning.
Keep praying for guidance all the time you are dealing with a
man.

Don't become impatient. Receiving Jesus Christ is a tremendous
decision, the most important decision in a man's life. It is only
proper that people consider it well before taking the step. If
you don't win him the first time, pray for him before you go back
and deal with him.

Deal with sinners as if you yourself were in the same shoes, as a
fellow sinner, not a superior being. We saved people are merely
saved sinners who, by the grace of God, have had the good fortune
to receive Jesus Christ as our Saviour. When we deal with unsaved
people about their souls and their sins, we should never assume
the attitude that, "I am the great sanctified, Charismatic,
Spirit-filled instructor," but rather, "I am a sinner saved by
grace, and if it weren't for the grace of God I would be in
hell." Let the man know that. Let him understand that you and he
are both in the same boat except for one thing, and that is that
you  have applied the shed blood of Jesus Christ to your sins and
he has not, and you are praying and begging and hoping he will.

May you fulfill your commission: "Now then we are ambassadors for
Christ, as though God did beseech you by us: we pray you in
Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God" (2 Cor. 5:20).