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.

“How to succeed”

“How to Succeed,” used as the title for a book, will make any book sell, though it be as dry as a patent-office report.  People want to know how to succeed in the world.  How strange then that ministers and churches who are brilliant and conspicuous failures should shun the preaching of Pentecost—­the one cure for failure and the sole guarantee of success.

Empty comfort.

How many times some of us have sighed over our inefficiency!  How frequently, in default of apparent results, we have been forced to console ourselves with the thought that we are “sowing seed” and that there will be an abundant harvest at no distant date!  Thank God! there is success for us all.  Pentecost will give it to us.

John the Baptist.

We do not mean by success financial opulence.  A man may be a success and yet as poor as John the Baptist lunching on dried locusts and honey-comb.  One may be as wealthy as Croesus and yet be an awful failure.  A church may be rich and increased with goods and incur the Laodicean curse.

Padded statistics.

Neither does success mean a great and highly-trumpeted statistical report to lug to conference.  Some of our most inspiring “successes” are all right on paper, but in reality they are stuffed and padded scandalously.  No, success in Christian work is to “turn many to righteousness,” save souls, and secure the sanctification of believers.  If we do not see such results following our labor, we have either missed God’s plan as to our selection of a field or we are not living in the present enjoyment of the Pentecostal Baptism.

The epochal experience.

The preachers and evangelists who have won great successes in the calling of sinners to repentance have almost without exception testified to having received an “enduement” or “anointing” subsequent to their conversion.  The Caugheys, the Moodys, the Whitefields, the Wesleys, the Foxes, the Earles, though in some instances they have not believed in holiness according to the Wesleyan view, have all had an epochal event after which their work and works were effective and startling.