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Scripture Reading: Matt. 28:19; Mark 16:15; Acts 2:14; Eph. 6:15
In this chapter we will see something concerning how to preach the gospel in the church. According to church history, Christians in past generations have taken many ways to preach the gospel for the Lord. However, we would like to see something from the Scriptures concerning gospel preaching. At the end of the Gospel of Matthew, the Lord told us to go and preach the gospel to the nations, making them the Lord’s disciples (28:19). In the Scriptures, especially in the first three Gospels, there is the principle that Christians must be persons who go. We must go for the purpose of the gospel. In the Gospels we are called by the Lord to come, and we are commanded by the Lord to go. Christians are people who constantly come and go. We come all the time to the Lord, and we go all the time to others. We come to the Lord for mercy, grace, life, and power. However, this is half of the commandment. We also need the other half. We must go! After coming to the Lord, we must go to the nations for the gospel, to gain their souls.
It is very strange that most Christians are not balanced persons. The Lord calls us to come to Him, but after we come, He tells us to go to the nations. However, some Christians learn how to come to the Lord all the time, but they forget to go. Of course, other Christians today are going Christians, but I am afraid that they do not come enough to the Lord. Therefore, we must be balanced. The coming and going Christians are sound, normal Christians. On the one hand, we need to learn how to come to the Lord all the time, day by day; then on the other hand, we need to learn how to go. We come into the Holy of Holies, and we go outside the camp, to others, to the nations. If we have the intention and sincere desire to practice the church life, we must be brothers and sisters who come to the Lord day by day and go to others all the time.
When I was young, I was helped by a short but interesting writing. The writer said that in order to be a sound Christian, every day we must spend at least ten minutes to speak to the Lord, ten minutes for the Lord to speak to us, ten minutes to speak to sinners, and ten minutes to speak with the saints. Day by day we must have these four times of at least ten minutes each. This is not a small matter. Try to put it into practice. If we do this, we will be healthy in spiritual matters and in the spirit. However, we should not do too much; at the outset we should just do a little.
We need to be balanced. Even for our physical life we need many things, including eating, drinking, and clothing. It is the same in the spiritual life. We must include gospel preaching as an item to balance our Christian life. If we have not preached the gospel in several days, we are not balanced. If we are going to practice a proper church life, our church life and the Christian life of every brother and sister must be balanced by gospel preaching. In the four Gospels, whoever came to the Lord, the Lord sent him to others to preach. Matthew 28:19 tells us to go to the nations, but Mark 16:15 says that we must go even to all creation. This verse says, “He said to them, Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to all the creation.” Christians have much to do to preach the gospel not only to the nations but also to every creature. We must do it!
In the Acts we can see that gospel preaching is a matter of the church. It is when the church is built up that there is the impact in our preaching. After the Lord accomplished His redemption by His death and resurrection and after He ascended, the gospel was completed. Then the first time it was preached, it was preached not by an individual but by the church. The first time the gospel was preached after the completion of the gospel was by the Body of Christ on the day of Pentecost. When Peter stood up, he stood with the eleven; twelve stood together to speak the gospel to the people. They had the oneness and the impact. No doubt, all the one hundred twenty also stood together. In this way, the entire church, consisting of one hundred twenty persons, preached the gospel. There must have been a great impact on the day of Pentecost.
The preaching of the gospel is a battle. Therefore, we need to pray. Before we plunder the strong man’s vessels, we must bind him. The strong man is the enemy, Satan, whom we bind. We must fight the battle so that we can preach the gospel in a prevailing way. However, if we are not built together as one, the enemy, Satan and the evil spirits, will laugh at us because we will not have the impact. We will have lost the testimony of the Body of Christ before the enemy. If we are going to preach the gospel in a prevailing way, we must be built together as one. Even though the brothers among us are few, if we would be one in the spirit and built together as one, we eventually will have the impact. However, if there are divisions among us, if we have opinions and quarrel with one another, the impact of the gospel preaching will be gone. This is something that transpires in the spiritual world. In any kind of world there are always certain principles. In the spiritual world with the preaching of the gospel, there is the principle of the oneness of the Body. If we are not one, we simply lose the impact, the power, and the authority to preach the gospel.
We need to help all the brothers and sisters learn how to pray, on the one hand, and learn how to preach, on the other hand. However, this does not mean that we give people a sermon. In order to help the brothers and sisters preach the gospel, we must help them to consecrate themselves again. Even though they may have consecrated themselves many times, they still need to consecrate themselves once again purposely and specifically for this matter. This is absolutely according to the principle of the teachings of the Scriptures. The Scriptures teach us that whenever we are going to do something specifically, we need to consecrate ourselves again for that very specific purpose. We may ask the brothers to come together to have a meeting for some prayer to offer themselves to the Lord for this purpose.
It is helpful to consider before the Lord all the names of our relatives, neighbors, friends, schoolmates, and colleagues and all the persons with whom we are familiar, and it is better to write these names down. Then we should consider how many of them are already Christians and truly saved, and if possible, we should pray for them. In this prayer the Lord may lead us to do something, perhaps not for all of them but for a few of them. There are many details to consider. We should consider whom to visit and whom to write, sending them gospel tracts, booklets, and helpful messages. We should invite some of these persons to our homes to eat. If we have friends or relatives in other cities, we can mail them something and tell them where the meeting place is in their city. We can also ask the brothers there to visit them. We should first take care of the persons with whom we are familiar. This is our responsibility, and we should carry this out not once for all but all the time, year after year.
The first commission from the Lord to the church is to preach the gospel, to bring new believers to the church. I met a group of brothers and sisters who considered themselves to be the most spiritual persons in their locality. They were very nice, spiritual, and everything about them was good. However, I asked them, “Brothers, how long have you been meeting in this way, and with how many persons did you start to meet?” They said that they had been meeting for a long time and that they had started with about twenty persons, the same number they had when I spoke with them. Whenever they came together, they were very nice and spiritual, but they had no fruit, no converts. This is wrong.
How can a tree not bring forth fruit if it is truly living? As a church, we must be prevailing in winning souls. We need to check ourselves by many ways to see if we are right or wrong; one way to check ourselves is by whether or not we bring forth fruit. The number of the members of the church must increase all the time. New converts must be added to the church constantly. I hope that the churches will bring forth fruit in the next half year. Then that will be our “fruit season.” If we do not bring forth fruit, there must be something wrong with us. We cannot and should not gather together week after week, singing hymns and listening to good messages, but not bring in new converts after one, two, or even three years. If so, there is something wrong with the church, and there is also something wrong with the believers.
A necessary item for training young believers is to help them to promise to bring one person to the Lord each year. Some need to promise to bring two or four persons a year to the Lord, and one saint may even promise to bring ten persons. If they promise, they will do it. If every brother or sister brings one new convert to the church each year, the entire world will be evangelized in about thirty years. The first year we will start with one hundred, then the next year we will have two hundred, and each year we will double again. If we just do it, it will be easy to bring one person to the Lord in three hundred sixty-five days.
We need the ways to carry this out. As I have said, the first way is to consider our relatives, neighbors, and all the persons with whom we are familiar. If we will consider in this way, I am sure that we can bring one person to the Lord each year. When D. L. Moody was young, he made the decision to speak to one person about Jesus each day. One day after he went to bed, he remembered that he had not told anyone about the Lord that day. He went out, but since it was late in the night, he could find only a policeman. The policeman asked him what he was doing, and Moody told him he must believe in Jesus. The policeman was angry with Moody, but eventually he was saved.
I do not like to speak about myself, but I must tell you that when I was about twenty-five years old, I always carried gospel tracts in my pocket. When I walked on the street, I distributed them whenever there was the opportunity. Some fruit came out of that practice. We should encourage the young brothers and sisters to carry tracts in their pockets and distribute them in order to contact people. By doing this, they will eventually bring someone to the Lord. At the least, this will create the atmosphere of the gospel. There are many ways to preach the gospel if we would just do it.
When we first came to Taiwan in 1949, many of us were poor. We did not know how we would live after another two or three months. We did not have much, but I told the saints that we still should use some of our money to prepare tracts and posters. We prepared many posters, and just within one month we distributed two-thirds of a million tracts, which was as many tracts as there were people. We distributed them in all the lanes, roads, and streets and at every door. We used a map to systematically go to every door. We also put posters on the electric poles in the streets, which said, “God so loved the world,” “Jesus saves,” and other phrases in bold characters. Within a short time, we created the atmosphere of the gospel, and we stirred up nearly the whole city. At every door, without exception, there was at least one tract in the letter box telling people that the Lord Jesus is their Savior, and nearly in every street there were posters on the walls. We also asked the saints to place many posters in front of their own doors. When we walked on the street, we knew which homes the brothers lived in because of the number of posters.
All this happened in the first year, in 1949. We did many things. We formed gospel teams, and the brothers wore long white “gospel robes” with bold characters in Chinese. We also had parades with drums; at one time we had a parade nearly every week. We paraded through the streets with a large number of saints, and sometimes we prayed on the street. While we paraded on the street, sometimes we would shout, “Friends, we must tell you that you are sinners, and you need to believe in Jesus.” We preached the gospel in the park in the center of the city, where there is a stadium that seats several thousand people, and we used the gospel parades to bring people to the park. All the saints came together to preach the gospel in this way every Lord’s Day afternoon.
In one year the church increased thirtyfold, and the whole city was stirred up by us. Doctors, nurses, and professors paraded together in long robes; everyone knew that we were the “crazy” people. Nearly everyone talked about us in their homes. After this, it was very easy to preach the gospel because we stirred up the gospel atmosphere. What we did tilled the ground. In principle, we should do these things. Recently I asked the brothers in one church, “Why can we not see any activity for the gospel here? Even if you have only thirty or forty persons, you all must go out to the street to distribute tracts.”
In 1948 in Shanghai we had the largest gospel team, and we paraded on the street on the Lord’s Day. The police on the streets maintained the order for us. They stopped the buses, cars, and trains. We had banners in our hands, and we shouted much. Then we brought people to the park, and many of them knelt down to pray, some with crying to the Lord. Some of us gave a message, some sang a hymn, some maintained the order, and others distributed tracts and booklets. To be sure, this way brings people to the Lord, and the Lord will honor us in this. We also did this in northern China in 1935. Many nights we went out in groups, and we shouted and sang to bring the people in. Then we would kneel in a circle to surround the people, and some would give a message.
In Taiwan, many saints opened their homes once a week on an evening in which there was no church meeting. They would invite three to eight people and would also invite some brothers and sisters to their homes to help them to give informal testimonies and personal talks. In this way, many people were brought to the Lord. The saints were active in preaching the gospel all the time. Many times we did not have a gospel preaching by the whole church for several months, yet when the announcement was made that the church was going to have baptisms, three hundred people would be baptized. Through what means did these new converts come into the church? It was simply through the personal testimonies.
There are many ways to preach the gospel. The metropolitan centers are crowded with people day by day. There are many “fish,” and it is easy to catch one. The only problem is that we may not be prepared to do it, and we may have no intention of doing it. The church must be helped to learn how to pray, how to preach the gospel, and to prepare gospel tracts and good booklets. Then the brothers must have the habit of distributing the booklets, mailing the tracts, and so on, in order to stir up the city and even stir up the country.
More than fifty percent of the people in the United States are at least nominal Christians. Of these, about half are Catholics and half are Protestants, and in addition, many of the nominal Christians are false believers. This still leaves many millions who are unbelievers, Gentiles, to preach the gospel to. Many missionaries are going out from this country to the Philippines and to other countries, but in the United States there are many more millions of unbelievers than in the Philippines. What a big field there is here. I came from the Far East, and I have traveled throughout many nations. I have to say, “Praise the Lord for the United States!” because it is the best field for the Lord’s work. We have all the conveniences, and it is so easy to preach the gospel.
If we would do it, it is easy to bring people to the Lord. We should help each of the saints learn how to preach. We cannot go into detail here, but there are many ways. A nurse can preach as a nurse, and a schoolteacher can preach as a schoolteacher. This is what we practice in the Far East. Every member there is a preaching member; they preach all the time, nearly day by day, and so many of the saints simply live for the gospel.
If we do this, this will be a protection to us as Christians. In Ephesians 6:15 Paul tells us that the firm foundation of the gospel is our shoes. Shoes protect us from the earth. If we do not have shoes, our feet become dirty and damaged. To protect our feet from being hurt, damaged, and dirty, we need a good pair of shoes. If as a Christian we do not preach the gospel, we are “barefoot.” The best way to keep our feet from being dirtied and damaged by the world is to preach the gospel to our friends, neighbors, and schoolmates, telling them something about the Lord Jesus. To preach the gospel in this way helps us to be better Christians. It always reminds us that we are Christians. We are reminded not to do certain things with persons to whom we have preached the gospel. It is simply because we do not testify for the Lord Jesus that we can do certain things with our friends. We should tell all our friends and neighbors, “I am a proper, normal Christian, and I wish to tell you that you need to love the Lord.” Try to do this, and see what will come out. Being a testimony to people helps us to be humble, sincere, careful, faithful, and to try our best to love others. This is the best pair of shoes for our Christian feet. Let us pray for this and try to help all the saints who meet together with us to have such a habit.
At a certain point, when the leading ones of the church realize that the church needs to have a gospel campaign, a gospel meeting, they should call the saints together every evening to have a week of prayer meetings to pray specifically in preparation for the gospel preaching. Then, we need at least one or two weeks more to come together to train them how to preach, how to take care of their relatives, how to invite and bring people to the meeting, and how to come to work together in a coordinated way to preach the gospel in coordination. Some can take care of people, some can distribute tracts, and some can do other things. There are many things to do in a move for the gospel. We especially need to train the brothers and sisters to do the work of visiting people after the gospel meeting. Then, after they are baptized and brought into the church as new converts, the church must care for them. If we practice this, it will be easy for the number of the saints to be doubled by the new converts, and there will be the newness and freshness in the fellowship of the church. To have the same brothers coming together week after week on the Lord’s Day becomes old, with no freshness or newness. There is the need for new converts, new members, new “cells.”
Here I have given only some general ideas. May the Lord help us to practice these things in the church service.
