Each One of Us

Our Drawing Power.

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.