Let us remember, too, that, just because this commission is given to the whole Church, it is binding on every individual member of the Church.  There is a very common fallacy, not confined to this subject, but extending over the whole field of Christian duty, by which things that are obligatory on the community are shuffled off the shoulders of the individual.  But we have to remember that the whole Church is nothing more than the sum total of all its members, and that nothing is incumbent upon it which is not in their measure incumbent upon each of them.  Whatsoever Christ says to all, He says to each, and the community has no duties which you and I have not.

Of course, there are diversities of forms of obedience to this commandment; of course, the restrictions of locality and the other obligations of life, come in to modify it; and it is not every man’s duty to wander over the whole world doing this work.  But the direct work of communicating to others who know it not the sweetness and the power of Jesus Christ belongs to every Christian man.  You cannot buy yourselves out of the ranks, as they used to be able to do out of the militia, by paying for a substitute.  Both forms of service are obligatory upon each of us.  We all, if we know anything of Christ and His love and His power, are bound, by the fact that we do know it, to tell it to those whom we can reach.  You have all got congregations if you would look for them.  There is not a Christian man or woman in this world who has not somebody that he or she can speak to more efficiently than anybody else can.  You have your friends, your relations, the people with whom you are brought into daily contact, if you have no wider congregations.  You cannot all stand up and preach in the sense in which I do so.  But this is not the meaning of the word in the New Testament.  It does not imply a pulpit, nor a set discourse, nor a gathered multitude; it simply implies a herald’s task of proclaiming.  Everybody who has found Jesus Christ can say, ’I have found the Messiah,’ and everybody who knows Him can say, ’Come and hear, and I will tell what the Lord hath done for my soul.’  Since you can do it you are bound to do it; and if you are one of ’the dumb dogs, lying down and loving to slumber,’ of whom there are such crowds paralysing the energies and weakening the witness of every Church upon earth, then you are criminally and suicidally oblivious of an obligation which is a joy and a privilege as much as a duty.

Oh, brethren!  I do want to lay on the consciences of all you Christian people this, that nothing can absolve you from the obligation of personal, direct speech to some one of Christ and His salvation.  Unless you can say, ’I have not refrained my lips, O Lord!  Thou knowest,’ there frowns over against you an unfulfilled duty, the neglect of which is laming your spiritual activity, and drying up the sources of your spiritual strength.

But, then, besides this direct effort, there are the other indirect methods in which this commandment can be discharged, by sympathy and help of all sorts, about which I need say no more here.