PERSONAL EVANGELISM SERIES
by D. Stuart Briscoe
THE COMMAND
were not the ones to be scattered but rather the general church members. The big names stayed in Jerusalem. Don’t you be waiting for some big name Christian, or your pastor, to do the job you are supposed to be achiev ing. Be sure you are taking your part. In these early days of the church it wasn’t the pulpit that was preaching, it was the pew. This is how these faithful witnesses rightly practiced evangelism. Would this be a good de scription of your church? As far as personal evangelism is concerned Christian experience com pels it. If you read your Bible care fully, you will always find that the blessings God has available are in tended to be made possible through you. How many Christians there are who just soak up and never give out. They are always going to meetings and listening to sermons. They read all the Christian books, ready to tell you how blessed they have been. God told Abraham that he would not only bless him, but also that He would make him a blessing. The Lord Jesus Christ declared, “He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” The Saviour says that when we are thirsty we are to come to Him and drink. The reason for that is so He can make rivers of living water flow from our lives. This is the basic principle of Christian experience. God blesses you so that you might be a blessing in return. You see, the privi lege is to be blessed while the respon sibility is to be a blessing. In summary, here are the basic rea sons for the importance of personal evangelism: God ordained it, Christ engaged in it, the Lord commanded it, the first disciples were contacted through it, the early church practiced it, and Christian experience compels it. Can we, dare we, do anything less? 11
I F fo r n o o th e r reason we should certainly want to engage in per sonal evangelism because the Lord commanded it. His very last recorded words, before ascending to the right hand of His Father, were, “Ye shall be witnesses unto me.” He didn’t say that they might be, or that if they had nothing else to do, they should be. He told them in no uncertain terms. The first disciples were contacted through personal evangelism. In the days of the early church soul winning was faithfully practiced. This is why it grew so phenominally. There is no other way to describe the results of their faithful efforts. They had evangelized the majority of the then known world. They did a job that by and large is not being done today. They suffered tremendous persecution. The devil didn’t intend to leave them com fo rtab le , satisfied, and settled down. The people were scattered all over as a result of the persecutions they endured. Wherever they went they preached the Lord Jesus Christ. There is a great danger in settling down, folding our hands in our little evangelical community. This is the story of many churches today. People are content and satisfied with their church, never bothering to move out side the sphere of activity in their cloistered atmosphere. I wonder, have you ever had some fat catch fire in your kitchen? In your effort to ex tinguish the blaze, you poured some water on it discovering, to your hor ror, that instead of extinguishing the blaze, you had spread it all over the kitchen. In a way, that is what the devil did with the apostles. He thought he would e x tin g u ish Christianity through p e rse cu tion . Instead, he caused it to grow and spread. The hand of the Lord was upon this faith ful band and a great many believed. In Acts 8:1 we learn that the apostles
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