Nothing is clearer in the Acts of the Apostles than that the disciples after Pentecost had success in gospel service. Everywhere they went God rained fire upon their Word and sanctioned the truth which they preached by tremendous moral and spiritual upheavals.
B. T. ROBERTS.
Bishop Roberts has put the matter of success very succinctly: "If the lawyer must win his case and the doctor cure his patient in order to be successful, the minister and worker must save souls if they in their calling are to be said to be successful." But alas, saving souls is precisely what we are not doing. Thank God! there is here and there a man who stands out as a soul-saver. But the average minister is not distinguished for revivalism so much as proficiency in making a church social a "blooming success."
FALLEN SAMSONS.
We all want to seem to succeed. We shun and dread the appearance of failure. When a church begins to rot instead of grow it is natural for us to do our utmost to find out some way of excusing the retrogression without admitting our failure to reach men with the gospel. There are evangelists, who in the palmy days of their power had wonderful, heaven-gladdening revivals, who have ceased to wield "the sword of the Lord and of Gideon," and, in order to cover their spiritual nakedness, are forced to resort to finger-raising, card-signing methods for stuffing and expanding "the big revival." There is no more sobbing, no more desperate praying, no more shouting; all is "decent and in order," as well it may be, for all is dead.
QUESTION OF EVANGELISM.
Honor to soul-saving! Show us the man who wins men to our Master, that we may clasp his hand and look into his face. Right here hangs all the discussion about evangelism. If the evangelist gets men soundly and scripturally converted and sanctified, let us bid him Godspeed! If he only amuses them and deals in paltry three-cent sensationalism, away with more of the same sort of stuff which we already have in so many pastors!
THE DIVINE RECIPE.
One thing is certain: God intends success and only success for His people. If, as His children, we fail, it must be because we have not followed the divine recipe for power and accomplishment. It was because the one hundred and twenty obeyed Christ and tarried at Jerusalem that God used the early Church to whip the Roman Empire.