Chapter 1

THE

ART OF SOUL-WINNING.

(SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR PERSONAL WORKERS.)

BY

J.W. MAHOOD, EVANGELIST,

Author of "The Missing Wheel Found," and joint-author of "The Young People's History of Methodism."

"_And he brought him to Jesus._"

CINCINNATI: JENNINGS & PYE.

NEW YORK: EATON & MAINS.

1901

PREFACE.

Never was there such great need for a mighty, Pentecostal revival in all our Churches; and the key to such a revival is earnest personal work. But the membership of the Churches are not prepared to enter upon this work. Multitudes know nothing of a personal Pentecost. Many are utterly indifferent. They do not realize their opportunity and responsibility before God. If they did, the revival would come at once.

With the hope that many professing Christians may be awakened to duty, and hear God's call to personal work in soul-winning, this little volume is written.

Let the pastor see that a copy is put into every home one month previous to the time set for special revival-meetings. Let him secure a pledge from the people to read the study for each day, commit the memory verses, and meditate upon the Scripture suggested.

Once each week, either at a special meeting appointed for this purpose, at the week-night prayer-meeting, or at the young people's devotional meeting Sunday evening, let the studies for the week be reviewed and the memory verses recited. Short talks may also be given on each topic by persons previously selected.

When the entire Church membership shall begin to think and speak upon these vital themes; when the spirit of grace and supplication shall take the place of formality and worldly desire; when the Holy Ghost of Pentecost shall come upon the waiting, praying Church, then the times of refreshing will be sure to come from the presence of the Lord, and the perishing multitudes will be saved.

Sioux City, Iowa.

CONTENTS.

FIRST WEEK--THE SOUL-WINNER'S MOTIVE.

"THE LOVE OF CHRIST."

PAGE STUDY I Foreword and Appeal 9 STUDY II The Lord's Command 12 STUDY III By Personal Effort 15 STUDY IV Trophies of Personal Effort 18 STUDY V The Worth of a Soul 21 STUDY VI The Death of a Soul 24 STUDY VII The Supreme Motive 27

SECOND WEEK--THE SOUL-WINNER'S LIFE.

"YIELD YOURSELVES TO GOD."

STUDY VIII A Definite Experience 33 STUDY IX A Complete Surrender 36 STUDY X The Spirit's Witness 39 STUDY XI Every Weight 42 STUDY XII Prayer 45 STUDY XIII Faith 48 STUDY XIV Self-Sacrifice 51

THIRD WEEK--THE SOUL-WINNER'S EQUIPMENT.

"COMPLETELY FURNISHED."

PAGE STUDY XV Knowledge of the Scripture 57 STUDY XVI Tact 60 STUDY XVII Earnestness 63 STUDY XVIII Perseverance 66 STUDY XIX Tenderness 69 STUDY XX Burden for Souls 72 STUDY XXI A Personal Pentecost 75

FOURTH WEEK--THE SOUL-WINNER'S METHODS.

"BY ALL MEANS."

STUDY XXII Direct Approach 81 STUDY XXIII Correspondence 85 STUDY XXIV Tracts and Books 88 STUDY XXV The Prayer List 91 STUDY XXVI Work Among Students 93 STUDY XXVII Meeting Objections 96 STUDY XXVIII No Effort in Vain 100

THE SOUL-WINNER'S MOTIVE.

"FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST."

STUDY I.

FOREWORD AND APPEAL.

Memory Verse: "And they that are wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever."--(Dan. xii, 3.)

Scripture for Meditation: Matt. vi, 19-23; Rev. iii, 14-22.

Fred B---- was a medical student. He was stricken, with that dreaded scourge, consumption. The physicians advised a trip to the mountains. During the first few months among the Rockies he improved rapidly, and hope and ambition flamed anew; but it was only a brief respite from suffering before the final collapse. Lying in a Denver hospital, he was visited by some consecrated young people, who sang and prayed with him. He yielded himself to Christ, and the peace of God filled his heart.

They brought him home to a little Iowa city to die. The day after his arrival the pastor was summoned to his bedside, when the young man related the circumstances of his conversion. The pastor said, "Then you are not afraid to die?" "No," said he, "_not afraid, but not ready_."

When asked why he was not ready, he replied: "I have done nothing for my Master. I have won no souls for him. Could I have six months more to live that I might bring some souls to Jesus, and thus not go into his presence empty-handed, I would be satisfied to die. _I am not afraid to die, but not ready._" Just then the door of the room opened, and the dying boy's father, an old, white-haired man who had been absent from home and had not seen his son since his return, came in. The old man was not a Christian. Then occurred a pathetic scene. The young man threw his arms about his father's neck, and drew him down upon his knees at the bedside, urged him to give himself to God, and then, with shortening breath, uttered such a prayer of intercession as is seldom heard. The old man sobbed aloud, yielded to Christ, declared his faith, and the dying boy had won one soul for his Master. In a few hours he had gone into the presence of the King; _but not empty-handed_.

O ye to whom God has given the strength and vigor of manhood and womanhood, and who have pledged your allegiance to the Christ of Calvary, are you winning any souls for your Master? Or are you going into his presence _empty-handed_? What if in the judgment-day it shall be seen that some souls who might have been saved have been lost through your neglect? What if it shall then be seen that the crown of many stars which you might have won is given to another? And what, if in the great day of his appearing you shall be found, having gathered no sheaves and _empty-handed_?

STUDY II.

THE LORD'S COMMAND.

Memory Verse: "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature."--(Mark xvi, 15.)

Scripture for Meditation: Ezek. xxxiii, 1-11.

By the Master's final words to his disciples the obligation is laid upon every Christian to be a soul-winner. "Ye shall be my witnesses," is the risen Lord's message to all his followers. No one is excused. "Follow me," said Christ, "and I will make you fishers of men." And when his face was set toward Calvary, he said to the Father, "As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world." By the mouth of the prophet Ezekiel, God distinctly says that, if we neglect "to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand." We are all _sent_, and if we shrink or excuse ourselves from our great mission we shall come into condemnation.

The unsaved multitudes know that every Christian should be an ambassador for Christ, and when we fail to do our duty we are condemned in their eyes as well as before God. A writer in the _Epworth Era_ says:

"A college professor who was noted among his fellow-teachers for his habit of addressing young men upon their personal relations to Christ, was asked by one of his fellow-professors, 'Do they not resent your appeals as an impertinence?' He replied: 'No! Nothing is of such interest to any man as his own soul and its condition. He will never resent words of warning or comfort if they are prompted by genuine feeling. When I was a young man, I felt as you do. My wife's cousin, a young fellow not yet of age, lived in our house for six months. My dread of meddling was such that I never asked him to be present at family worship, or spoke to him on the subject of religion. He fell into the company of a wild set, and was rapidly going to the bad. When I reasoned with him I spoke of Christ. "Do you call yourself a Christian?" he asked, assuming an astonished look. "I hope so," I replied. "But you are not. If you were, he must be your Best Friend. Yet I have lived in your house for six months, and you have never once named his name to me; no, he is nothing to you!" I have never forgotten the rebuke.'"

STUDY III.

BY PERSONAL EFFORT.

Memory Verse: "And he brought him to Jesus."--(John i, 42.)

Scripture for Meditation: John i, 35-45.

Have you ever noticed that much of the work which the Master and his disciples did was "personal work?" Some of our Lord's greatest sermons were preached to one person. The apostles were all won individually. Turn to your Bible now, and read the account of the visit of Nicodemus to Christ, and of the meeting with the woman of Samaria at the well. If you take the time to follow this theme through the Gospels and through the Acts of the Apostles, you will be sure to see that the work of winning souls for Christ by personal effort is the work of every Christian.

And a conviction of this is the greatest need of the Church to-day. It is the key to the twentieth-century revival. The world would be evangelized in this generation did each professing Christian win only one soul each year for Christ; and the great social and labor problems of the day would be speedily solved were the great Christian Church actively engaged in leading men and women to Jesus of Nazareth. Mightier than the influence of great sermons and fine music and splendid ritual is the influence of a life consecrated to personal effort in seeking the lost.

That remarkable soul-winner, Dr. J.O. Peck, now translated, said: "So great is my conviction of the value of personal effort, as the result of a lifework of winning souls, that I can not emphasize the method too strongly. If it were revealed to me from heaven by the archangel Gabriel that God had given me the certainty of ten years of life, and that as a condition of my eternal salvation I must win a thousand souls to Christ in that time; and if it were further conditioned to this, that I might preach every day for the ten years, but might not personally appeal to the unconverted outside the pulpit; or that I might not enter the pulpit during these ten years, but might exclusively appeal to individuals, I would not hesitate one moment to make the choice of personal effort as the sole means to be used in securing the conversion of one thousand souls necessary to my own salvation."

Dr. Theodore Cuyler once said concerning the three thousand souls he had received into Church fellowship during his ministry, "I have handled every stone."

STUDY IV.

TROPHIES OF PERSONAL EFFORT.

Memory Verse: "And he that is wise winneth souls."--(Prov. xi, 30, R.V.)

Scripture for Meditation: 2 Cor. v, 14-21.

Is it not a suggestive fact that nearly all those men who have shone brightly in the galaxy of martyrs, preachers, and reformers in the Christian Church through the centuries have been won to Christ by the personal effort of some consecrated life? Think of some in our own age.

Dwight L. Moody, when a clerk in a store, was visited by his Sunday-school teacher, who put his hand upon the young man's shoulder and talked to him about Christ; and Mr. Moody says, "I had not felt I had a soul till then."

Colonel H.H. Hadley, who has kneeled and prayed with over thirty-five thousand drunkards, declares that one of the agencies which led him to Christ was a brief interview with Chaplain (now Bishop) McCabe on a railway-train in Ohio just after the Civil War.

Lord Shaftesbury, one of the greatest Christian philanthropists of the nineteenth century, was won for Christ in early boyhood by the effort of Maria Willis, a servant-girl in his father's home.

The conversion of Diaz, the great Cuban evangelist, was due to the faithfulness of a consecrated young lady of Brooklyn. She found him in a hospital at the point of death, procured a Spanish New Testament, read to him the words of mercy and invitation, pointed him to Christ; and he went back to his own country, a flaming herald of the gospel.

J. Wilbur Chapman, one of the most successful pastor-evangelists of this generation, says that while in a revival-meeting, when a boy, his Sunday-school teacher touched him on the elbow, and said, "Do you not think you had better stand?" and that one touch, as much as anything else, pushed him into the kingdom.

Joseph F. Berry, whose name is a household word in the Methodist Episcopal Church, was led to Christ by two young friends who took the young printer to his father's barn, and held a prayer-meeting with him, which resulted in a glorious conversion.

STUDY V.

THE WORTH OF A SOUL.

Memory Verse: "For what is a man profited, if he gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?"--(Matt. xvi, 26.)

Scripture for Meditation: Luke xv, 1-10.

What is a life worth? What is your life worth? What is the life of your son or daughter or mother or wife worth? What would you take for a life? But if the life of a dear one be worth so much to you, what must be its value in God's sight, who sees to what depths a soul may plunge and to what heights it may rise? It may be a small matter to you that in yonder saloon is a man dissipated and drunken. But what if he were your father or brother or husband? It may be a very small matter to you that the boy whom you met on the street is puffing a cigarette and wears already upon his face the marks of an evil life. But what if he were your boy or your brother? Yet, in God's sight, his life is as valuable as if he were your boy or your brother; and every soul is of infinite worth.

Jesus Christ set a high estimate upon human life when he left his Father's throne and came into this sin-cursed world to suffer and die that he might redeem us from death.

The Church of to-day needs a new vision of the worth of a soul. We need to stand beside Calvary and see the price that was paid there for human life.

John Keble, the poet-preacher of the English Church, said that the salvation of one soul is worth more than the framing of the Magna Charta of a thousand worlds.

It was meditation upon the words of the memory verse of this study that fired the souls of Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier with a holy enthusiasm to rescue the perishing multitudes. Had their successors and disciples been, filled with the same enthusiasm, and kept themselves free from the machinations of politics, they would have long since evangelized the world, and Jesuitism would not have been "the scandal of Christianity."

STUDY VI.

THE DEATH OF A SOUL.

Memory Verse: "Let him know, that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death."--(James v, 20.)

Scripture for Meditation: Luke xvi, 19-31.

What is death--the death of a soul? What is it to die eternally? In the passage for meditation our Lord gives us a glimpse into the realms of death. Surely the Son of God is not trifling here; nor does he speak to confuse. For a moment the curtain is drawn, and we see what is actually transpiring in the future world. In these days there is a disposition in some quarters to make light of the future punishment of the wicked. Some preachers are dumb upon the awful punishment of sin, or preach only half a gospel, saying, as Bishop Warren puts it, "You must repent, as it were; be converted, in a measure; or you will go to hell, so to speak."

But Christ did not speak with any uncertain sound about the future punishment of the impenitent. He is authority. Take your Bible and read such passages as Matt. xxv, 41, 46; Matt. viii, 12; Luke xvi, 23; John v, 29.

In the light of these words, we must see that the death of a soul means eternal separation from God, from mercy, and from heaven.

And yet how indifferent we are concerning the unsaved multitudes all about us who are drifting into a hopeless eternity. The Church needs a vision like that of the little lad in Olive Schreiner's "Story of a South African Farm," who, waking at midnight, sees multitudes drifting over the precipice into eternal night, and throws himself on his face on the floor, crying out in the agony of his burdened heart to God to have mercy.

Some one tells of a shepherd in the Far West who, on a dark, stormy night, found three sheep missing. Going to the kennel where the faithful shepherd-dog lay with her little family, he bade her go to find the sheep. An hour afterwards she returned with two. When these had been put in the fold, he said, "One sheep is yet missing. Go!" The faithful dog took one mute look of despair at her little family, then was off in the dark and the storm. In two hours she had returned with the lost sheep, but was torn and bleeding, and, as she staggered toward the kennel, fell dead at the door. But if a poor, dumb brute, with no immortal hope, be obedient, even unto death, what shall we say of men and women who know the destiny of the soul, and whom the King of kings has bidden seek the lost, yet are disobedient, indifferent, and thoughtless as to the dying multitudes about them?

STUDY VII.

THE SUPREME MOTIVE.

Memory Verse: "For the love of Christ constraineth us."--(2 Cor. v, 14.)

Scripture for Meditation: 1 Cor. xiii, R.V.

But the supreme motive in all our efforts to win others should be "the glory of God." Possessed of an undying love for him who first loved us, we will have an inspiration to seek the lost for whom he gave his life. And all our efforts shall be, as Paul puts it in his letter to the Ephesians, "unto the praise of his glory."

"The love of Christ doth me constrain To seek the wandering souls of men."

Love never faileth. Love knows no impossibility. He who works for wages and he who works for love live in two different realms. A lot of men were entombed in a coal-mine, and great crowds gathered to help clear away the earth and rescue the miners. An old, gray-headed man came running up, and, seizing a shovel, began working with the strength of ten men. Some one asked to relieve the old man. "Get out of the way," he cried; "I have two boys down there."

Love will triumph; and he whose heart throbs with love to Christ will find real joy in rescuing from sin those who are the purchase of his blood, _that his name may be glorified_.

Study his life of self-sacrifice. See again his suffering for sinful men. Linger in Gethsemane, and behold the agony of Calvary. Then your heart will begin to throb with love to him "who first loved us."

Get a new vision of your crucified, but now risen, Savior, until the beauty of his matchless life charms your heart and you are ready to say:

"Come, and possess me whole, Nor hence again remove; But sup with me, and let the feast Be everlasting love."

Then you will possess the highest motive that moves human hearts, and personal work in soul-winning will become a real delight.

THE SOUL-WINNER'S LIFE.

"YIELD YOURSELVES UNTO GOD."

STUDY VIII.

A DEFINITE EXPERIENCE.

Memory Verse: "Verily, verily, I say unto thee, except a man be born again, he can not see the kingdom of God."--(John iii, 3.)

Scripture for Meditation: John iii, 1-15.

In a prayer-meeting a young lady was asked, "What is the first thing we must do if we would win others to Christ?" She replied, "_We must live holy ourselves._" She was right. Just as the telegraph wire must be insulated, so must the life of him who expects to be the messenger of God be insulated from the old life of sin before he can hope to carry the loving messages of the gospel to other souls.

This implies a definite experience of conversion. He who would engage in this most fascinating of all work must have nothing short of an inner consciousness of sins forgiven and of the presence of Christ in his life. He must be able to say, like Andrew and like Philip of old, "I have found him." He must know what it is to have "a new heart" and to have peace with God.

William Butler, the veteran missionary and soul-winner, now translated, wrote the author of these studies a letter, in which he said:

"First and foremost, I thank God for a true conversion. When I got religion, I got it good and thorough. Christ became everything to me. The law of sin, or temptation to worldly conformity of any kind, was completely eradicated from my heart; and from that hour to this the law of Christ has fully satisfied my soul, and made me gloriously free and independent of the world and its maxims and pleasures. And now, after fifty-five years' enjoyment of peace with God and humble devotion to his service, I bless him that I ever gave him my heart and devoted myself to his work. I am happy. The consoling comforts of the grace of God are with me by day and by night, and the blessed future is radiant with the hope of being 'numbered with the saints in glory everlasting.'"

In these days of compromise and doubt we need to have as definite an experience of salvation as had William Butler. He who would win others to a new life must himself possess that life, and know it, being able to say with Paul, "I know whom I have believed."

STUDY IX.

A COMPLETE SURRENDER.

Memory Verse: "I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service."--(Rom. xii, 1.)

Scripture for Meditation: Rom. vi, 1-13.

John Wesley said, "Give me one hundred preachers who fear nothing but sin and desire nothing but God, and I care not a straw whether they be clergymen or laymen, they alone will shake the gates of hell and set up the kingdom of heaven upon the earth."

A life surrendered to God will be an invincible life, while the life only partly surrendered will know nothing but defeat. Someone says that, in the transfer of property, any reservation implies, also, reserved rights. If a man sells a ten-acre lot, and keeps a yard square in the center for himself, he has a right of way across what he has sold to get to his reservation. And if, in our surrender, we keep back anything, "that constitutes the devil's territory, and he will trample over all we call consecrated to get to his own." Therefore a complete surrender of the life to God is absolutely necessary.

To the rich young man who came to him, Jesus said, "One thing thou lackest." He demanded an unconditional surrender of every interest of his life. But the young man was not willing to make the surrender, and went away sorrowful. Of every man and woman Jesus asks the same surrender. But many now wander off in the darkness of formality and doubt because they are not willing. Three things are implied in such a surrender: (1) An acknowledgment of the Divine ownership and human stewardship in all temporal affairs; (2) A complete submission of the will to God; (3) The supremacy of Jesus Christ in the heart and life, so that the interests of his kingdom are first, always, and everywhere.

There is an old story of a monk who, having been disobedient to the rules of the monastery, was told he must die. They took him out into the graveyard, stood him upright in a grave, filled in the earth about his feet. Then they asked, "Are you dead yet?" He said, "No." The earth was then filled in about him to his waist, and the question again asked. He replied, "No." Then they filled in the earth until he was covered, all but his head, and could scarcely breathe. When asked if he would die, he replied, "Yes, I will give up; I will die." So may we die to the old life of self and sin, and live the new life of entire surrender to our risen Lord!