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HOW TO WORK FOR THE CURE OF SOULS
"And David said there is none like that; give it me" I Samuel
xxi. 9.
The setting is known to us all. David is talking
about Goliath's sword, and he asks for it, "Give it me."
We read the passage in Deuteronomy where Moses said to the children of Israel,
"the cause that is too hard for you, bring it unto me, and I will hear
it" (Deuteronomy i. 17). I want to take these two Old Testament mighty men
of God as types of what the worker for God must be like to work for the cure of
souls.
With
regard to the sword that there is none like it, if you will turn to Hebrews iv.
12, you will see how I want to take Goliath's sword and spiritualize it in the
hands of a worker for God among the children of men: "For the word of God
is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and
spirit, of both joints and marrow, and quick to discern the thoughts and
intents of the heart." Now it is quite obvious that if you are not David and are trying to use
Goliath's sword, you will do far more harm to yourself than damage to the
enemy. You must be in the direct line of succession to David. David and Moses
were mighty giants, but we have to be of the same family connection. What is
the same family connection in this dispensation? Why, those who are born again
of the Spirit of God, and those who are so identified with the Lord Jesus that
they have entered into the experience of entire sanctification. When they use
the word of God they do not damage themselves, nor hurt other souls; but they
do great damage to the kingdom of the devil and bring benefit to the souls of
men.
Before
we take up the question of the kind of souls we shall have to deal with, we must
deal with the worker. Now there are big difficulties in the way. The first
difficulty is that we are not dealing with men's bodies. If we were, we could
be taught in special schools and colleges, trained and developed in such a way
that we should know fairly well how to apply principles to the various ailments
of people, because physical ailments have a wonderful likeness to each other.
This has led many Christian workers astray, they think that because men's
bodies and bodily ailments are alike, and because one cure, carefully and
judiciously prescribed by a physician who diagnosed the case aright was
successful and can be applied to other cases with similar results, that man’s
souls can be treated in the same way. But you cannot deal with the human soul
and with the ailments and difficulties of the human soul according to any principle
whatever. I think that any of you who have worked for God know this, that
immediately you get into the way of using certain verses of Scripture and
applying them to those who are seeking new birth, and certain other verses to
those seeking sanctification, you will find suddenly that God's Spirit will
depart from you and He will not use those verses in your hands any more. The
reason is this, that immediately we get wedded
to a short-cut in dealing with souls,
God leaves us alone.
The
first thing I want to lay down for the worker (I am talking about one who
really is born again of the Spirit of God
and has been entirely sanctified) is that he or she must rely on the Holy
Spirit to direct them as to what to say in the case of every soul that comes.
Do not rely on your memory, do not remember how you dealt with cases in the
past, but recognize and rely on the Holy Spirit that He will bring to your
remembrance the particular verse for you to apply at this time. You will find
over and over again that God will bring confusion to your methods and will make
you apply a text to sanctification which you in your system have said can only
be applied to new birth; and He will make you
apply a text which you have said can only apply to sanctification to
something else, and you will make incessant blunders in work for God if you are
not careful and watchful and heedful of the
guidance of the Holy Spirit and of His bringing the word of God to your
remembrance. Remember, then, that the worker
who is rightly related to God must ever rely on the Holy Spirit for guidance in
each individual case.
Then I
want to apply Moses" statement: "The cause that is too hard for you,
bring it unto me." Do you know how to bring your cases to God? We all know
how to bring them to one another and how to
talk to Christian workers about dealing with souls, but just as there
are quack doctors in the medical profession, so there is the same thing in the spiritual domain. Beware of anything that
does not fling you straight back in reliance on the Holy Spirit as the
most practical factor you know in bringing to your remembrance the word of God
and how to apply it.
Then another thing—the worker must live among the facts he has to deal with. Regarding the training of workers, take the highest class we
know of, ministers. One of the greatest difficulties in most of our colleges for training ministers, who
are supposed to work for the cure of souls, is that they are never
taught how to deal with souls. There is hardly a college anywhere for training
ministers where the question of dealing with souls is ever mentioned. Ministers
will bear me out in this, that everything they have learned they have had to learn out of their own experience. They are
trained in everything but how to deal with the facts they have to deal with.
There
are two kinds of facts the worker must be amongst—he must go to school among
human souls. I mean we must keep ourselves in touch, not with theories, but with people, and never get out of
touch with human beings, if we are going to use the word of God skillfully
amongst them, and if the Holy Spirit is to apply the word of God through us as
workmen needing not to be ashamed. Live among your human facts, and you will
find how continually God stirs up your nest. If you are a worker, He will
constantly surround you with different kinds of people, with different
difficulties, and He will constantly put you to school amongst those facts. He
will keep you in contact with human stuff, and human stuff is very sordid; in
fact, human stuff is made of just the same stuff as you and I are made of; do
not shut yourself away from it. Beware of the tendency to live a life apart and
shut away. Get amongst men. Jesus prayed, "I pray not that Thou shouldest
take them out of the world, but that Thou shouldest keep them from the
evil."
Then
there is another series of facts, viz., Bible facts. We have to go to school
among human souls, and we have to educate ourselves in Bible facts. A
remarkable thing about this Book of God (and I hope, by God's grace, to point
this out) is that for every type of human being we come across there is a
distinct, clear line laid down here as to the way to apply God's truth to it.
The stupid soul, the stubborn soul, the soul that is mentally diseased, the
soul that is convicted of sin, the soul with the twisted mind, the sensual
soul—everyone of the facts that you meet in your daily walk and business has
its counterpart here, and God has a word and
a revelation fact with regard to every life you
come across.
Let me emphasize these three things again: First, the Christian worker who is right with God must rely every
moment on the Holy Spirit when dealing with another soul. Second, the worker
must live among human facts, men and women, not theories. Do not let us tell
ourselves what men and women are like, let us find out what they are like. One
of the greatest mistakes in the world is to tell yourself what a man is like;
you do not know what he is like. The only One Who can teach you how to deal
with the various specimens around you is the Holy Spirit. / The third thing
is, ransack this old Book from cover to cover in the most practical way you
know—by using a concordance, by re-writing the Psalms, or by any other
immediate practical method.
I know
it is customary to ridicule certain ways in which some people say God guides
them, but I am very chary about ridiculing any methods. For example, it is easy
to ridicule this kind of method: 'Lord, direct me to a word, I am just going to
shut my eyes and open the Book and put my finger on a passage.' I say it is
easy to ridicule it, yet it is absurd to say that God has not led people in
that way; He has. Why I mention these facts is to knock certain theories
to pieces. You cannot tie God down to a particular line. You will find that God does use the most extraordinary methods people
adopt; only do not take anyone else's way, get to know how God deals with you,
and how He
deals with others through you in the most practical way.
Keep these three things in mind—reliance on the Holy
Spirit of God, keeping in contact with people, and
above all, keeping in contact with the revelation facts in God's Book; live
amongst them, and ask God how to apply them.
Another
thing I want to mention—never believe what people tell you about themselves.
There is only one person in a thousand who
can actually tell you his or her symptoms; and beware of the people who
can tell you where they are spiritually. I mean by that, never be guided by
what people tell you; rely on the Spirit of God all the time you are probing them.
Let me
read you this in regard to medical treatment,—
"Recent evidence in the law courts has pointed to a fact which the medical profession holds of great value—the
necessity, not only of personal and private interview with a patient, but of
the penetrative ability to get at the real facts and symptoms. In other words, successful diagnosis depends on the doctor's acumen in cross-examination.
'Cross examination of a patient is almost always necessary,' says an eminent medical
man. 'They will give me causes^ or rather what they think are causes, instead of symptoms. The rich patient
is more troublesome in this respect than the
poor, for he has had leisure in which to evolve a sort of scheme of his
illness, based on "popular" medical
knowledge.
'Patients
always color facts, speaking absolutely instead of relatively. They never tell
the truth about the amount of sleep they have had or as to appetite. They frequently
say they have had nothing to eat. Casually you find there were two eggs at least for breakfast. A minute or two
later they remember stewed steak for dinner.
Perhaps
the greatest need for cross-examination is that it gives an extended
opportunity to the medical man to examine the patient objectively. The most
important symptoms are generally those the patient never notices." "
If that
is true in the medical profession which deals with men's bodies, it is a
thousand fold more true about spiritual symptoms when it comes to dealing with
a man's soul. Do beware, then, of paying too much attention to the talk of the
one that is in trouble, keep your own heart and mind alert on what God is
saying to you; get to the place where you will know when the Holy Spirit brings
the word of God to your remembrance for
that one.
Now
there is a wrong use of God's word and a right one. The wrong use is this sort
of thing— someone comes to you, and you cast about in your mind what sort of
man he is, and then hurl a text at him like a projectile, either in prayer or
in talking as you deal with him. That is a use of the word of God that kills
your own soul and the souls of the people you deal with. The Spirit of God is
not in that. Jesus said, "The words I speak unto you, they are spirit, and
they are life." "Who also hath made us able ministers of the New
Testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but
the spirit giveth life." Do remember to keep your soul in unsullied touch
with the directions of the Spirit.
Another
thing that is very puzzling is this. Probably all of you have had experiences
as I have on this line: you listen to clear Bible teaching, unmistakably
clear, almost taking people by the hand and leading them straight into the
Kingdom of God, but they never come. Another time a man gets up and twists
everything, and to your astonishment people are born again. That frequently
happened in Water Street Mission in New York, a man who had been wonderfully
saved would get up and tell what he had
been and what he was now, then others would do the same, and the Spirit
of God got hold of the people before you knew where you were, out they came to
the altar, and these rough men knelt down and prayed with them and they 'struck
something,' as they say out there, and something 'struck them,' and they were
wonderfully born again.
Now
these are facts we have to look at. You cannot put God down to a prescribed
method. These souls were real, living, good specimens of what God had done, and
the Spirit of God worked through them. I mention that because it confuses a
great amount of our reasoning in Christian work; over and over again you will
find that some poor, ignorant servant, or
artisan, who seems scarcely to know how to put anything together, is
used of God mightily in the salvation of souls, and others who have a clear understanding of the whole thing
and put the way of salvation ever so clearly, yet nothing happens. So all we
can get at is the main methods laid down in God's Book about the worker. Let us
ask ourselves, 'Do I experimentally know what the salvation of God is? Do I
know what entire sanctification means in my own experience?' The worker for
God must be in a healthy, vigorous, spiritual condition himself.
I want
to say one word of criticism about the choosing of Sunday-school teachers. The
way Sunday-school teachers are chosen is that immediately a person gets
introduced into the Kingdom of God, they are given a Sunday-school class to
teach. When you come to God's way, you will find something very different;
immediately a soul gets introduced into the kingdom of God, it has got to do
something, but it is something along the line of the new life it has received,
obedience and walking in the light, until it is consolidated in the ways of
God. Why is this necessary? Because dealing with souls is tenfold more
dangerous than dealing with bodies. Unless you are in a healthy, vigorous
condition with God, you will catch the disease of the soul you are dealing with
instead of helping to cure it. Unless you
are out amongst the tremendous facts of God's revelation in the Bible,
unless you know how to take breezy walks through that Book, unless you know how
to walk up and down that country and take in the air of God's hills and get
thoroughly robust and continually change your walk amongst those facts, you are
sure
to catch the diseases of the souls you are dealing
with. So remember, it is absolutely necessary to be like the cedars of Lebanon.
Do you know the characteristic of a Lebanon tree? The cedars of Lebanon have
such extraordinary power of life that instead of nourishing parasites it kills
them, the life within is so strong and so robust that instead of feeding the
parasites it chokes them off. God grant that we may be so filled with His life,
may flourish as the cedars of Lebanon, so that He can trust us down in all the dark, difficult places amongst the
souls of our brother men and be able to pour His tremendous health and power
through us.
How sad
it is to see men and women who did begin to work for God, and whose work God
honored, slowly fall off. Why? They have caught the disease of death amongst
the people they have been dealing with. In the medical profession,
particularly doctors who deal with the insane, have continually to be changed,
continually shifted. Why? Because they take the diseases and troubles they live
amongst, and you will find that God the Holy Ghost has an amazing power of
shifting His workers. Some wonder why God keeps shifting them, why He shifts
their circumstances; the reason is not only to keep them in touch with the
great sphere of work, but to keep their souls alive.
Do
remember, then, that it is necessary for the worker to be healthy, and beware
of this mistake, that by working for God amongst men, you develop your own
Christian life; you do not unless your Christian
life is there first. It is so obvious that it needs to be said over again—you
cannot develop your own Christian life unless it is there. The advice given
that if you work for God you develop your own life often means that if you work
for God you get right yourself; you do not, you have to be right with God
first.
The
next time you deal with a soul at the penitent form, remember it is one thing
to tell him to receive the Spirit of God, to recognize and rely on Him, but
quite another thing for you to do the same thing. Unless you recognize the
Spirit of God, and rely on Him, and expect Him to bring to your remembrance
some word that is going to apply in that case, you will be of very little use
as an expert soul-curer and for putting people in the way to get right with
God.
Then do
live among human facts! Thank God He has given the majority of us the
surroundings of real, definite, sordid human beings; there is no pretence about
them, the people we live among and come in contact with are not theories, they
are facts. That is the kind of thing God wants us to keep among.
Then
third, see that you get into this Book. I feel more than hungry to see men and
women roused up to get hold of this Book and live among its facts, then the
Spirit of God will bring to your remembrance how to apply the truth in each
case.
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