"Does that mean an increase of salary?
"Does that mean an increase of salary?"
"Yes, sir, fifteen hundred dollars a year."
Then he said, "The increase of salary has allured you and brought you here for us to ordain."
Vassar said, "Stop where you are! I don't want it; I won't take it if you give it to me", and he wouldn't. He went back to distributing tracts for three hundred dollars a year, to do something for Jesus Christ. He was a wonder. God did marvelous things through him.
"Are you lonesome?" a man asked a lighthouse keeper. "Are you lonesome out on this lonesome spot?" He said, "I was before I saved four men from drowning...Is that a boat out there?" He was always on the lookout for other boats that he might save men from a watery grave.
Get somebody else for Jesus Christ and you will get a new vision of life, a new vision of what it means. It is something besides going to church and keeping warm a little spot seventeen inches square for a half hour and listening to a sermonette. You had better squirm around in your seat and stoop down! You had better duck!
"He that winneth souls is wise." Some people think it is beneath their dignity. Then you live on a higher plane than your Master, for He went about doing good wherever he was in the world.
A lady said to a friend of mine, "Do you think that my blindness will hinder me?" My friend answered, "It is a misfortune, but I don't know. I have the opinion it will be a help to you, because people will come up to you to express their sympathy for your lack of sight and that will give you the opportunity to speak of Jesus."
"Oh," she said, "I don't mean in an effort like that, but to stand on the platform." She thought the only way to serve God was to get in the spotlight, not to be doing something with the people whom she might shake hands with day by day in her home.
A man was thinking of entering evangelistic work. He came to my friend, Dr. Chapman, and said, "I am thinking of entering evangelistic work."
"That's good." Dr. Chapman said.
"I think I will begin out in Colorado -- Denver and Colorado Springs, and out in Pasadena, California. My relatives are there."
My friend said, "Have you any brothers or sisters?"
"Yes, I have."
"Are they Christians?"
"Well," he said, "I don't know. When we set up the estate four years ago my brother and I had a quarrel over it and we haven't spoken since."
"And your sister?"
"My sister took my brother's views of the proposition and she hasn't spoken to me since. I haven't been in her home."
Dr. Chapman said, "What do you intend to do?"
He said, "Evangelistic work."
Dr. Chapman said, "The Bible says, 'First be reconciled to thy brother.' If you start out the way you are, failure is written all over you. 'If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not hear me,' the Bible tells me, so there is no use trying to bother your head about God for He won't listen to you. That's as sure as you live."
Soul Winning is Difficult Work</h4> <p>Now, it is a difficult form of work. It is more difficult than preaching; it is more difficult than attending conventions; more difficult than giving goods to the poor. (When you do give goods to the poor, don't wait until the moths have eaten holes in them. And when you give them away, don't cut off all the buttons and braid. Poor folks like them as well as you do. It is no act of charity when you have taken off all you want, then turned the rest over to somebody else. No, no! Then angles never record an act like that.) You will never see it when you get to Heaven if you have an easy time. Oh, you can pin on a badge, usher people to their seats, pass the collection plate, be an elder or a deacon or a steward; you can go to church, sing in the choir, be a member of a Home or Foreign Missionary Society -- the Devil will even let you attend Bible conferences -- but the minute you begin to do personal work, to try to get somebody to take a stand for Christ, all the devils in Hell will be on your back, for they know that is a challenge to the Devil and to his forces. And I hope that the work of leading people to Christ by personal effort will always be hard. I have no sympathy for folks who are looking for something easy!
I preached out in Salida, Colorado, a few years ago. The city lies 8,5000 feet on one of the spurs of the Rocky Mountains. There was a woman there who sang in the choir. I used to drive them out when they went to speak to somebody about Jesus Christ. One day she came to me and said, "Mr. Sunday, will you speak to my husband about being a Christian?"
I said, "Have you spoken to him?"
She said, "No."
I said, "No madam, I will not."
She said, "Why?"
I said, "God wants you to go and you are trying to sidestep and get me to do it."
I said, "You go speak to him and if you can't win him for Christ, come and tell me, then I will go."
"Well," she said, "you would have a greater influence with him than I have."
"How long have you been married?" I asked."Five years." I said, "I have been in this town three weeks and it is a compliment for you to say that to me. You have cooked for him and sewed on buttons for him for five years."
Finally one night, she said, "Isn't it hot?" I said to her, "You like to sing in the choir, don't you?" She said, "I love to do that." "You don't like to do personal work?" I asked. "Then your idea of serving God is to pick out the things you would like to do, and the things that you don't like to do you let somebody else do; then you let it go at that." I said, "Then you will forget every blessing that ever came to you."
One night I drove her off the platform; later I saw her coming down the aisle. Her husband sat on the front seat. She slipped her arm around his neck and whispered something in his ear. He nodded his head and down the aisle he came. He turned to her and said, "Bess, I've been waiting for weeks for you to ask me that."
I was out in Colorado Springs not very long ago and she came up to Denver. I said, "How do you do, Mrs. C." "How do you do?" I said, "Where's Charlie?" "He went to heaven two years ago, but he prayed and lived consistently until the hour that God called him."
Get out and do something! "He isn't my boy." That same spirit of letting people go to the Devil because they don't eat at your table and because you are not married to them -- there is too much of that today in the world."He that winneth souls is wise."