Be a Soul Winner! (2)
“… and he who wins souls is wise”(Proverbs 11:30b).
While offering the 2006 New Year worship to God, I meditated on the four powers based on the words of the second half of Proverbs 11:30, the New Year theme verse of Victory Presbyterian Church. I proclaimed the word of God with the heaviness of my heart in my desperate desire to wake up from sleeping. The reason is because I wanted to wake up from my spiritual indifference and especially from my spiritual incompetence. I proclaimed the word of God while feeling my incompetence. So I proclaimed only these four powers with earnest longing desire. It was the New Year worship where I felt my incompetence even though I must be a good example of winning souls to my church members. In the midst of that, God's word was proclaimed with my heartfelt wish to experience these four powers by God's grace. In this New Year 2006, I pray that God will have compassion and fill me and all of you with these four powers.
The first power is the power of prayer.
Looking at Acts 1:14-15, the Bible says about 120 persons were continually devoting themselves to prayer with one mind. They held on to the words of Jesus' promise, Acts 1:8, and prayed earnestly for the Holy Spirit to come upon them. They prayed with one mind, wholeheartedly or devotedly, and continuously. In the article in ‘Evangelism through prayer’ [America Gospel Newspaper, November 27, 2005], it says, ‘Prayer is leadership’. If we look at the article, there is writing like this: ‘A person who prays is greater than people who don’t pray. Therefore, the person who prays becomes a channel of blessing to a organization or a nation. Pray to govern and manage the nation, home, society and workplace. … Think of the arising of the desire to pray as a sign that God will bless you. Those who come to mind in prayer are a chance to evangelize’ (Internet). At the same time, the author of the article said, ‘The Christian internet site GodPeople.com surveyed 1043 netizens from Oct. 23 to Nov. 12 about 'the best evangelism method I've ever done' and 17% said they cited 'Evangelize every time I meet and pray if there is hardship' (Internet).
We must first experience the power of prayer as we believe in the power of prayer and surrender to the Lord. Therefore, as in the pattern shown in Acts 16, God opened Lydia's heart to receive the gospel through an encounter of Apostle Paul whom God guided and permitted while he was looking for the place to pray (vv. 13-14). As a result, not only Lydia believed in the Lord Jesus Christ but everyone in her household believed and was baptized (v. 15). So we earnestly pray for this kind of wonderful work of salvation to take place. Also, the apostle Paul and his co-worker went to pray but were persecuted through an encounter with a demon-possessed woman servant (v. 16), they prayed inside the prison (v. 25). As a result, Paul and his co-workers experienced God's presence in prayer (v. 26), and the jailer accepted Jesus (v. 33) and his whole family believed in Him (v. 34). Just as this amazing work took place, we also pray for God’s amazing work of opening the hearts of those who we try to reach out and preach the gospel so that the work of salvation will take place.
The second power is the power of the Holy Spirit.
The power of the Holy Spirit refers to the “power” we receive because the Holy Spirit comes upon us as in Acts 1:8a – “but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you ….” Here the “power” [“power from on high” (Lk. 24:49)] isn’t referring to the political power that the disciples were interested in, or the personal power of a godly life as spoken in the Old Testament. It refers to the ability for Jesus’s disciples to go into all the world and to preach His gospel (Word Pictures in the NT & Nelson Study Bible). Professor Sang-seop Yoo said: ‘This power is the same as the Holy Spirit who came upon Jesus while He was praying after being baptized and who made Him to begin full-scale gospel ministry with power. And now Jesus told His disciples that the same Holy Spirit would work in and through them with power’ (Yoo). In short, “power” refers to the power to carry out the ministry of the gospel.
If we have already received this power, why aren’t we preaching the gospel? I think the reason is because we aren’t experiencing this power from above. In other words, it is because we aren’t filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. Because we do not give in to the power of the Holy Spirit, we aren’t obeying God's commandment to preach the gospel. It is never because we have not received the “power” of Acts 1:8. In the Bible, we are those who have already received this “power” as witnesses of Jesus. So the apostle Paul prayed for the believers in Ephesus: “that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man” (Eph. 3:16). We must pray to the Lord for Him to strengthen us with power through His Spirit in our inner man so that we may live a life of boldly proclaiming (preaching) Jesus Christ. The surprising fact is that the Lord makes more overflowing when we ask for this: “Now to Him who is able to do far more abundantly beyond all that we ask or think, according to the power that works within us” (v. 20). Therefore, in prayer, we must receive not only the power of prayer, but also the full power of the Holy Spirit. Then we will be able to boldly preach the gospel to dying souls by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that we will be used as the Lord’s tools to make the wonderful work of the Lord’s salvation.
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The third power is the power of the gospel.
What is the power of the gospel? This is what the apostle Paul said in Romans 1:16 – “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, ….” The power of the gospel is “the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.” I think about how Paul, the one who won many souls to Christ, could have passion for evangelism. When I read an article on an Internet website, it says: ‘Because he tasted the power of the gospel that saved him from sin, from the world and from the law.’ Then, looking at the written text, it says, ‘The first step in evangelism is to know the power of the gospel’ (Internet). Indeed, if I myself have tasted the power of the gospel that saved me, I cannot endure it without preaching the gospel. One example is the woman at the well in John 4. This woman, who experienced the power of the gospel testified Jesus. As a result, many of the Samaritans from that city believed in Jesus (Jn. 4:39). Then the people of the city said to the woman, “"It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves and know that this One is indeed the Savior of the world” (v. 42).
The power of the gospel appeared in the early church when about 120 persons held on to the word of promise Acts 1:8, and continually devoted themselves to prayer (1:14), the Holy Spirit came upon them on the day of Pentecost (ch. 2). At that time, when the apostle Peter, who was filled with the Holy Spirit, arose and preached the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to the crowd, 3,000 people believed in Jesus and were baptized (2:41). Here we see a pattern: prayer à filled with the Holy Spirit à proclamation of the gospel à the work of saving 3,000 people. Therefore, we must pray and be filled with the Holy Spirit. And we must boldly proclaim the gospel. Then the work of salvation will take place.
The fourth and last power is the power of love.
I think about what would happen if there isn’t any God's love while the truth of the gospel is being proclaimed. As truth without love is incompetent, so if the truth of the gospel is not preached through love, which is the fruit of the Spirit, there will be no power. In 1 Corinthians 13:1, the Bible says, “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.” Even if we speak with the tongue of angels but don’t have love, we are nothing but “a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal”. What is the most fearful enemy for us today? It is “indifferent”, Pastor Han-eum Ok, a former senior pastor of the Church of Love in Seoul, Korea, said in his book ‘The Evangelist’. He said, ‘Being caught up in relentless egoism, he has no interest other than himself, his family, or his loved ones. We can see that this generation is becoming more and more terrifying slaves of indifference’ (Ok). Like the parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10:30-37, there are countless souls dying spiritually like he who was robbed. But we are just seeing and passing by like a priest and a Levite (vv. 31, 32). The Lord said in Matthew 9:13 that He desires compassion and not sacrifice. But we lack interest for our neighbors, lack compassion for our neighbors, and lack love to make sacrifices (Ok) and come before God and worship (“sacrifice”) Him. I wonder God would receive our praise and worship when we come before Him by ourselves, leaving other dying souls, unbelieving family members and children, parents, friends, etc.. Pastor Ok said that we should have some sort of pain when we worship God because we think we are sinning too much. In the midst of this, he said that God will be receive our worship and will be pleased with it when we shed tears in our unfortunate heart and cry out earnestly, ‘Lord, save those souls no matter how’ (Ok). We should never justify our life of faith without actions by saying, ‘Who is my neighbor?’, like the lawyer in Luke 10:29. We must put our soul-loving hearts into action. Aren’t there so many dying souls among our families, relatives, friends, co-workers and so on. We must not be like the priest and the Levite who just see them and just pass by. We must love them faithfully with the love of Christ.
My grandmother's favorite word was Psalms 23. In Psalms 23:1, the psalmist says, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” As I meditated on this word, God gave me this understanding. The understanding is that if I don’t make the Lord my shepherd, and live as if a sheep is going my own way, I must feel completely lacking before returning to the Lord and relying on Him to serve Him as my shepherd. Like the prodigal son in Luke 15 left his father, went on his own way and lived a wild life, feeling utterly inadequate, so that he returned to his father, I would like to thoroughly feel the lack of myself when I serve the Lord’s church, not having the Lord as my shepherd and relying on Him with doubt. Therefore, I want to rely more and more on the Lord. I want to long for His power to manifest. I want to taste the power of prayer. I sincerely wish you to experience the full power of the Holy Spirit, the power of the gospel, and the power of Christ's love in deep and wide range.