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Our Duty of Evangelism By Douglas MacMillan

Today we're going to talk about evangelism. One of the things that I have been asked to do in my visit to Australia is just to try and set out in various meetings, at conferences, the biblical teaching on evangelism. And last night we were thinking about the kind of thrust, the directives that the Church of Christ should be looking to and working under. And tonight I want to try and be as practical as possible about the obligation on Christian duty of evangelism and bringing the gospel to bear upon others.

Now I want to base or introduce my subject by going to that passage that was read, 1 Thessalonians chapter 1 and verses 5, 6 and 7, a very exciting portion of the Word of God. And a portion that tells us that a God himself is the great evangelist and that by his Spirit and through his people he brings the gospel to lost men and women but to men and women who have been loved by him from all eternity. The last book in the Bible, the book of Revelation assures Christian believers that God will have his people from every nation under the sun. They shall be there the redeemed in heaven of every tribe and of every nation and of every tongue. And that prospect is itself a impetus for us to evangelize our fellow men and to bring the gospel to bear. And here is the gospel coming into a new situation, a new land, into Thessalonica and into among the Gentile nations and into the European continent. And Paul says, he's reminding the church at Thessalonica about how the gospel came. Our gospel, he says. Now again and again and again Paul delights to speak of the gospel and define it in terms of the one who gave it, the gospel of God. The gospel is first and foremost good news from God and we must always remember that. But the gospel is very, it's almost trite to say it and yet it's something that we have continually to remind ourselves about, that God has spoken into this world and that the essence of his message is good news for people like you and me. The gospel of God. And then Paul often delights to define the gospel in terms of the one who's the heart and center of the gospel, the one who is good news. The gospel, he says, of our Lord Jesus Christ. What is the gospel? It is, says Paul, Christ and Him crucified. It's a message of God sending his son in human nature to bear our sins in his own body in the tree and to do what we ourselves were helpless to do, to redeem us unto God through his blood. But here Paul is defining the gospel not in the terms of the God who sends the gospel or of the Christ who is the gospel, but in terms of the human reception of it and the human responsibility with it and he says it's our gospel. I just want to stop here and ask you my friend tonight, is this true for you? Is the gospel of God's amazing saving grace so much part of your heart and mind and life that you see of it my gospel? And there are places where Paul does that. My gospel, the gospel under the power of the Holy Spirit becoming a personal and powerful, it's not enough to say part of life, but a personal and powerful kind of life, new kind of life, my gospel. Now when Paul got the gospel he got salvation for his own soul, but again and again and again we see that he got the gospel also as a message to take out to others and he's talking to these Thessalonians and he's talking about our gospel and he's taking in with himself the people that he names at the beginning of the letters, that he associates with himself because they have been his associates in evangelizing other places and among them Thessalonica, our gospel, it's the gospel of Paul and of Timothy and of Silvanus and Silas and others. God has saved them through this gospel and then he has commissioned them with this gospel to go out and I want us first of all to see just in this passage that Paul is talking about powerfully successful evangelistic endeavor. Let me just repeat that, Paul is talking about powerfully successful evangelistic endeavor. Do you see how Paul's thinking is orientated? It's orientated out of his own experience of the gospel and it's orientated
out of his doctrinal beliefs about the gospel and it's orientated out of his trust and confidence in
God's assurances about this gospel. Paul knows, he expects this gospel to work and Paul has seen
this gospel at work and he reminds these Thessalonians of this gospel at work. Our gospel
he says came to you and although he puts it in a negative way he does that in order to emphasize
the positiveness of it. How did it come? And he says not in word only. Now it came in word. The
gospel is a message, this is something of what we were talking about last night. The gospel is a
message which can be defined in terms of objective and subjective truth. It can be spelled out in
propositional truth. What is propositional truth? It is a statement of fact or of truth which is
true over against its opposite or its negative. For example, God is is a propositional statement
of truth in a propositional form. God is not is the opposite of that truth and the gospel comes
to us from God in words and in propositions and in truths that we could understand or the opposite
of which are the untruths. He is one propositional truth that comes with the gospel except men repent
and believe in Christ they shall be lost. Here's another propositional truth. Whosoever believes
upon the Lord Jesus Christ shall be saved. That's the other side of it. Now the gospel came in word.
It is the very first thing we need as an evangelistic truth. We need words. My friend,
God has given us words and he has given us the ability to communicate to one another and to
convey thought through words. I could stand here and I could put my hand over my mouth,
I'll do it. Are you hoping I'll keep it there? See? Now you have absolutely no idea what I'm
thinking but the moment I begin speaking I am unveiling my thought to you. I may do it
poorly, I may fail to do it as accurately and as powerfully and as cogently as I would wish to do
it but I convey my thought to you and I convey the message that God has given me for you. I
convey it by means of the word of mouth. God has spoken and in this last age, in these last times,
in the movement from the coming of Christ right through until the end, in this last age he has
spoken unto us by his Son and the title that he has given his Son in human nature. The word tells
us about the importance of words and of the word, the message that God has given us. Now the very
fact that I can convey my thought and my experience and my feelings and my plans and my purposes and
my hopes to other people in words means that I can convey also my religious experience. I cannot
give it to you, I cannot give Christ to other people but I can describe in words what God in
Christ has done and I can describe to other people in words what God has done for me. I once heard,
many years ago, way back in 1961, a fellow student took me along to, of all places, the Edinburgh
University Philosophical Society to listen to an American and his name was Francis Schaeffer and
it was the first time I had ever heard of him. Francis Schaeffer was sitting cross-legged on
the floor and looking very unlike a Doctor of Philosophy or a Doctor of Theology and he was
surrounded with the Yaya students of that day, the hippie tanks that went to the moral philosophical
society of Edinburgh University and there was a fellow sitting at his feet there and saying,
Doctor, Doctor Schaeffer, you're not communicating. Schaeffer had been talking about Christ and about
sin and about salvation and about the Bible being the work of God and about Christ's death, physical
death and human nature, God and Christ experiencing death, rising again, all the Bible deals. He was
on the Christian message and he would say every now and again, this is very simple fellas and then
this guy suddenly is saying all the time, Doctor Schaeffer, you're not communicating and then he
said to make it more forceful, he said, Doctor Schaeffer, your head's round and my head's square
and they don't fit together. Now he was trying to say, I haven't a clue what you're talking about
and of course he happened and just in that moment, just after we had come in, we were a bit late to
get the start of this informal discussion, a cup of tea was passed round and Schaeffer took a cup
from a tray and he handed it to the boy and he said, here you are son and the chap says, thanks
Doctor. Oh, I'm communicating, he said, I'm glad I've said something that shows that there's
something in my head that's the same shape as there's something in your head. You know,
by the end of an hour and a half he was communicating very powerfully to that boy.
The fact that we can communicate with one another gives us an obligation and a responsibility. You
and I intuitively, instinctively shrink from talking to other people about God and about
Christ and about what Christ can do. Then we say they won't understand me and perhaps many of you
have had the experience that I had. The first night I was converted I was so filled with the
joy of the Lord that I said, the first thing I'm going to do tomorrow is get a hold of my
pals and I had four friends about the same age, I was almost 22, and it was four friends and I
was sure now that I would be able to explain the gospel to them and that they would be hungry and
thirsty for what I had. I had often over the previous years sat under the gospel and I'd
heard men say things like, come to Christ now and believe in the Lord Jesus and you're going to be
lost and none of it really had ever made any kind of valid sense for me. When men said in the
picture, come to Christ, I used to say I wish you'd explain how I can come to Christ and when I was
feeling the power and the weight of my sin and my lostness and men would say Jesus is a Saviour,
I would say I wish you'd tell me how I could get Jesus as my Saviour and I was blaming them
as pictures and I would say to myself these fellows in the Three Church College in Edinburgh
can't be training their ministers very well because they're not really communicating with
me. The whole thing that they had didn't make a lot of sense, it didn't all click in and then one
night in my knees before God and just what's quicker than a flash, it's as though someone
pulled a curtain back in a dark room and the whole thing had fallen into place. John 3 16
God spoke to me, God so loved the world but he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believes
in him should not perish but have everlasting life. When I saw for the first time in my life
by God's grace and I believe in the illuminated power of the Holy Ghost, I saw that I didn't have
to do anything but it was all done for me already and I couldn't believe it and I said now I'll be
able to explain this to other people, why on earth did nobody ever tell me this before and of course
the strange thing was that for almost 22 years a few people had been trying to tell me. So I got a
hold of these four guys the next night, I knew they were on their way to the pubs so I got a
hold of them, I waylaid them and I said now you fellas come in here and I want to talk to you,
got them into my car and they listened for a long time and then one said maybe,
maybe you'll get better and another one said no I think it's bad. They thought that I had
lost my reason. Really, honestly, they thought that some of them, only one of them said off,
come up to the hotel, come up to the pub, have a dram and forget all about you. Now,
I was very disappointed and something happened to me that night that for a, it is very difficult
to get a job. I often feel there's no use speaking to people who are blinded by sin and by
ignorance and who refuse to understand and who don't want to understand and yet I have
continually remembered that God spoke to my heart by the Spirit through words. I have to remember
that for 13 years my soul has been fed through words and over these years God has taught me that
through words the Holy Spirit works. It came not in wardonne but the Word was there. Now you see,
there was something lucky in that night, wasn't there, that I spoke to these four fellows. The
gospel that I was bringing to them was coming in wardonne and we have to say this and the whole
Bible teaches it, man cannot convert man. Man is helpless in evangelism until God brings something
along with his word and here it is, our word, our gospel, our good news came to you not in
word only. What then Paul? But in power, you see, and when the gospel comes to the soul of a man or
a woman or a boy or a girl who's lost and on the road to hell, when it comes in the power of God
it saves them with a mighty salvation and it makes them new creatures in Christ Jesus and it's not
just a mental decision to follow Jesus, it's a new heart and a new spirit. It is the repentance of
the life and it is faith which is the gift of God. It is men and women made new in Christ.
That's the kind of work that we want to be doing in our evangelism but you see, although there is
the power of God involved there is also the responsibility of man because Paul says it was
our gospel, we brought it to you and one of the responsibilities of every local church
is to bring the gospel to bear on other people and this where I want to begin at the practical level.
The gospel I believe belongs within the church.
God gives the gospel to his people not as isolated units but as they stand in relation
to one another and in the church of Christ on earth as it takes shape under the one
and it is the responsibility of the church of every church that is what Calvin would call,
I hope you're not afraid of his name, every church that Calvin would call a true church and he called
a true church one in which there was the preaching of the true gospel where Christ was lifted up,
where there was the preaching of the gospel, where there was a right administration of the sacraments
of baptism on the Lord's Supper under the word and these are the three basic things that Calvin looks
for in a church and despite what many people write about Calvin he does not add discipline
as a permanent mark of the church and when Calvin talked about discipline he was basically talking
about pastoral responsibility with people caring for them in a spiritual way not about cutting them
down so it doesn't matter what shape your church has if it's got a Presbyterian shape I think
that's good you know but let's forget about that this night I think that we're living in a day when
church polity is second I think we're living in a day when our gospel is at stake the authority
and infallibility and inspiration of the word of God are things that we have to fight for
and it seems to me that it is idiotic and ungodly for professing church of God in our day to be
squabbling about the ins and outs of baptism or about church polity even there is a place where
we should be acknowledging the unity of the one church which is Christ's when things are good
my friend I'll sit down with you in a corner and I'll teach you the way of God more perfectly
yes but when the church of Christ has been squeezed until it can scarcely breathe
what right do we have to be quibbling over things that are secondary well let that be as it may every
church I believe is responsible for evangelism and then I want to go on and say this only the
church is given responsibility for evangelism one of the things that has bedeviled the church and I
use the word deliberately to my way of thinking under the light of the word of God one of the
things that has bedeviled the church for the last 150 years is the the mushrooming of para
what I'll call para church organizations now I hope I'm not hurting anybody here because there
may well be people who are involved in para church organizations para church organization is just
something which has sprung up out with the body of the church of Christ out with the rule of the
governors and out with its discipline and its teaching and its training we have them in Scotland
and people who are in them say that the only excuse for them or the excuse them on this ground
that the church has been unfaithful you know something if all the people if all the fine
men and women of God who've become involved in para church organizations over the last 150 years
had taken their their salt and their light and their knowledge and their prayer and their energy
within the walls of the church that was failing the church would have been transformed
and basically evangelism is in the church from the church through the church
and wherever we have members of a local church it is our responsibility
to be evangelizing one thing you see that I have against para church
organizations is this but they have left the churches in Scotland and in England perhaps
in Australia too I don't know but certainly they have left the churches in our united kingdom and
on the American scene also they have left the churches with an excuse and because these other
organizations the Salvation Army they don't do much evangelism now unfortunately in Scotland
or others whatever they're there we leave them to them I as a minister of the teacher of the
Scotland once that a teacher said to me Mr McMillan why are you so concerned about the
unconverted in Aberdeen the Salvation Army will look after them now that's rather a strange way
of thinking isn't it that is us saying it is no longer the responsibility of the church
to be concerned about evangelizing lost men and women we can leave it to the organization that's
been that's risen up specially for it not so the bible says it's through the church
Paul and Silas, Paul and Timothy, Paul and Silas, Paul and Barnabas these men were commissioned
and ordained to go out with the gospel
and every church I believe that every church has an obligation not just a mandate
but an obligation and a duty to evangelize let me say this I believe also from the bible
that the moment a church begins to evangelize that it ceases to evangelize that church begins to die
let me say that again the moment any church ceases to evangelize that church begins to die
and I'll go on and say this the moment any church ceases to evangelize that church deserves to die
on a practical level I believe that a minister a pastor and his local church officers whether
they're deacons in a baptist church or elders in a presbyterian church of whatever title they
may go under I believe that one of the first things they must do is get together in the
cook session meetings or the deacons court meetings and say why are we here why has god
placed us here what is god asking us to do what is our obligation and then they must
answer these questions in the light of scripture
and then they must say how would god have us do it
now I um speak like this only because uh first of all I am called to minister the word of god
and when I study the word of god this is the kind of pattern I find I do it secondly because
I have had experience in two pastries where under god and the grace of god
the situations into which we went were turned around I do it also because for the last four
years I have been responsible for teaching our ministry the young man that god is calling into
our ministry the responsibility and the principles of faithful reformed biblical evangelism
and let me break into what I was going to say here and say you may think that
the two words reformed and the evangelism don't fit together too well if that's so
in your thinking then I'm sorry it's a terrible reflection of the reformed church and if you
think it's not an evangelizing church and should not be a an evangelizing church then
it's not a re-formed church it's a deformed church let me tell you about a man called
john calvin he's the one who who under god is the father of what we've come to know as the
foreign churches in the world john calvin as early as 1554
sent and then trained encouraged to go and ultimately sent two missionaries
to Rio de Janeiro in Brazil did you know that
and they were there for two years and the work of god began and then the man who headed up this
expedition which was a spanish expedition although these were two frenchmen he sent them
back home because people began to become lefty did you know that calvin between 1556 and 1662
trained in Geneva between Geneva and Lausanne he trained 1200 men and sent them into France
and they began to work and to evangelize they were taught to stay hidden keep out of sight
through the week or they would have their throats cut they come out on the Sabbath day and they did
them they preached in the open air they preached in barns they preached anywhere they could and
they were trained in Geneva and many of them died that's how the Huguenot church of France began
one of the great the foreign churches and it was it was to be almost extinguished in blood
lived for more than a hundred years and then
louis the 14th louis the great
revoked the edict of nantes and the Huguenot church almost perished in blood but at one stage
and that just four or five years after the evangelism from Geneva had begun
1561 it's reckoned that there were 20 million people in France and the Huguenot church in five
six years had by then grown to a church of three million people these were men fired with the
passion of God for evangelism and they went out to win men for Christ and my friend they won many
and the men the one for Christ stood strong they became martyrs for the faith that's the kind of
man John Calvin was and the world doesn't know it today they think John Calvin was a hard or
steep bitter intellectual theological man that's not the kind of man I find when I turn and read
history and read his own writings and I'm sure if you know his writings you know that's not the kind
of man he was either he cared about men women you know what was said of his churches a German
scholar of the day writing just before Calvin died he said I find that the Calvinistic gospel
is a very intellectual gospel I find that Calvinist Christian believers are men and women who know
what they believe and why they believe it and that's why the reform church changed the whole
ethos of the western western culture and the western world in a sense that's why we have the
kind of world we have today they took the mind of men and taught it in the work of God and men
began to do great things for God they were reviving what had been going on in the first
four or five centuries of the church's own missionary life
successful evangelistic endeavor
it's here in Thessalonica it was there in Geneva coming with the word but not with the word only
but with power where does the power come from with the Holy Ghost God is in evangelism
as I would sense in which God himself is the evangelist in the Holy Spirit and you see when
you and I go out when we preach if we're preachers when we visit and pastor and try to teach if we
are elders or deacons when we talk with our brothers and sisters in humanity in the sense of
being one with them in humanity one with them in sin and lostness as ordinary Christians when we
talk with them we have the promise that Christ is always with us and that the Holy Spirit will
enable us and teach us and that he will work in the minds and the hearts of people we have come
to accept the idea let me say it again I've said it I think twice already in meetings in Australia
we have come to accept the idea that Christianity is per se in and of itself an unattractive thing
not so God help us sometimes we can portray it in a very unattractive way
but I believe I would challenge you to to disbelieve it I believe that Jesus Christ
is the most attractive character this world has ever seen and I believe that men and women who
are filled with the Spirit of God and with the love of Jesus Christ become the most attractive
people the world ever sees I know that the men and women whose lives most powerfully affected mine in
my ungodly days were the godly men and the godly women I can think of them now they're in glory
whose lives had such peace and serenity
that they made you think even an unconverted life of the beauty of holiness you see my friend God
let me say this and you may never have had it put like this before but God is beautiful with
the beauty of holiness he couldn't have made the kind of world we live in if he had not himself
been a beautiful God I was reading something of John Calvin's the other day I'm speaking on Calvin
at three conferences in South Africa later on that's why I'm I'm so full of them just now
you know I wouldn't have believed that John Calvin could have written this the kind of
John Calvin that so many people think about anyway he was writing to a friend and he said
as I write he said the little singing birds whom God made to sing are praising my Savior
and last night in my study I looked up into the dark sky and I saw the majesty of my God
twinkling out to encourage me he had seen the stars and that's what he said often
he's it's poetry it's magic it's beautiful that's the kind of God
cowardly fused to allow the dichotomy in his thinking and in the thinking of the
Christian people of his day which would make sacred and secular yes there is a the Bible
says it there is a world which is steeped in Satan but my friend God is redeeming the world
God did not leave the world the world is God's and you and I must bring it back into obedience
to God with his grace with his help the Holy Ghost when the Holy Ghost comes power comes
and words are made quick and powerful God is sovereign and he gives or he withholds
the spirit but you see his promise is to give he assures us that if we are faithful he'll be there
I want to speak now just by way of illustration of two or three men
that I know and I'm glad to know who have taken God at his word
and in their ministries have expected to see God at work I want now to bring successful
evangelistic endeavor right up into the 1970s not just in Thessalonica not just in the Geneva
of the 1540s and 50s and 60s but right up into 19 I want to take you to one church in the
United Kingdom it's in Yorkshire this called Pontefract Arthur Scargo lives there you ever
heard of Arthur Scargo I'm sure you have oh one of the servants
and Pontefract is one of the great mining areas of Britain
it's a town full of working-class people and I want you to pause there that word working-class
I don't know what it's like in Australia
but the church of God is not touching the working class by and large in the United Kingdom
a young man from the south of England who was a farmer until he was 24
and then trained for the ministry and he trained he says sadly in a college where
almost all his tutors were unbelieving men
but where the unbelief was so so so open and so blatant that it drove him to his bible
and to the books that the banner of truth were beginning to put into the hands of students
and he became not just a converted even that he became what he calls and his loves to call a
Reformed Christian
and he left that college and went to a congregation
of a congregational church in Pontefract it had 11 people in it
only one of whom he was sure was a converted genuinely converted Christian person
I met him when he had been there for about 15 years and in that 15 years what we're talking
about here the word of God coming in power and in the Holy Ghost had transformed that little
church of 11 people there were 325 or 355 professing Christian people on its membership books
it was having a a morning an evening of attendance every Sunday of between
five and six hundred people and it was throbbing with spiritual life
and the story was very simple it's just the story of a man who passionately believed
that preaching the gospel would change the situation and it did
his wife because at that time he had no elders his wife encouraged him
and he worked very hard
and he prayed very hard and then his wife she seems to be a good woman
she began she saw she met two or three ladies who said that they wished that somewhere in
Pontefract there was a place where they could leave the children for two or three hours two
or three mornings a week one day she got a one the one other Christian lady in the congregation
and she said how about us starting a little kindergarten for these women and their children
they did that a few people have been converted and were coming up the church was beginning to grow
very slowly they volunteered and they set out and they began something that seems so unspiritual
doesn't it using a church hall to look after the children of mothers who are away shopping
or of mothers who are away at work because they were divorced of one thing or another
but they were living in a real world where this real heart and real sin and where lives are broken
and homes are broken then a very strange thing began to happen
one by one the mothers who were bringing the children there
began to ask if they could perhaps come to a church to a service on a Sunday
they were encouraged to do it then something even stranger still perhaps began to happen
the work began to come to them with power and in the Holy Ghost I won't go on with the long story
that's begun to do other things as well they set up a little a little Christian bookshop
the back of the church and people began to call in there and then they they widened it
Jewish men were converted they widened out the shop they painted it and they began to sell coffee
as well little place where they sold coffee and people came in and then they wandered around the
Christian books and they bought Christian books very simple very little a small way
now it had all been going for 15 years when I was asked to go and speak
at three nights of evangelistic meetings and I think that would have been about 1979
and I was only one of three speakers because he was having evangelistic meetings that much for
10 days and he had been doing that for nearly nine years then
and I went down I preached on the first evening I went down to six or seven hundred people
they were tremendously interested there was a great sense of the presence of God
and when we came out I said to the man you've got a very powerful spiritual atmosphere here what's
behind it and what he said didn't surprise me he said for the last week he said our elders by then
he had I think five or six elders our elders and our people he said we're meeting in the morning
every morning last week quarter to seven before we went off to work for an hour of prayer then
we were meeting every evening half past seven to half past eight for an hour of prayer we've been
seeking God for these meetings next morning he wanted me to go that was a Tuesday morning he
wanted me to go and speak to a group of the miners who were coming in there were members in the chat
but they were on an evening shift and they couldn't come in he said that we've had to have
two clear meetings in the week we have one on Wednesday night we also have one on Tuesday
mornings because our men and many of our people are on broken shifts and they began to complain
some of these miners who were converted that they couldn't get to the prayer meeting on Wednesday
when did you last hear some Christian complaining that he couldn't get to the prayer meeting
I wish more of them would complain so he said we had a session meeting and we decided that
we would have the prayer meeting at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning and bible study
he said it meant two meetings for me but I don't mind when did you last hear of a church having its
prayer meeting and bible study at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday forenoon I have never heard of it
in my life outside the island of Lewis and that morning the Tuesday morning before we spoke he
said we'll go down there having a prayer meeting first of all these mines we were down there was
60 or 70 men there they were having a prayer meeting then he's when we came out of that
clear meeting he said I would like to show you something else there was another room
and he said just keep in the be quiet he opened the door you know what was in there there were
women a group of women on their knees in their thing he told me there were 40 of them there were
women who have been converted through the the the Tuesday and the Thursday kindergarten school for
kids and there were women who were there he said that they're specifically praying that their
husbands will come to church come to these mission meetings and be converted some of them are having
terrible a terrible life the husbands have have turned against them because they've been converted
now I was back three years later and he told me I met a whole lot of new miners new converts who
have been converted over the three years and he said you remember these hockey ladies that
were playing in your room I said yes he said well 25 of them have had their prayers answered so far
he phoned me this much because I was supposed to go back to
another group of evangelistic meetings there and I had to cancel them and he changed the date
he phoned me back and he was talking about one woman who had been converted
during the meetings I had been out there two years before and he said that one woman now he said
she was so fired for God and for the gospel when she was converted but there are now 30 or 35
of her immediate family circle converted to Christ not one of them went to a church before
now some people might call that revival I don't know but the minister there says he doesn't think
it's revival he's still waiting for revival he says this is just us doing evangelism
and they're doing it well God is certainly blessing them that's one church
I want to speak about another church this time in Wales in Cardiff I'll make it much shorter
as a man they were in the Presbyterian denomination the Presbyterian denomination
was going down the sink doctrinally spiritually and now 20 years ago after he had been there for
two years they pulled out of a corrupt denomination and they went independent
and then the man took ill he became very bad with asthma
there was a congregation I think of a membership of 70 or 80
and he was so he was so bad with his asthma that he could scarcely go out to do any work at all
he could scarcely preach the doctors were telling his wife that there was something was happening
that couldn't be reversed and that they thought he didn't have very long to live
and the strange thing was that he was he kept on going out to preach every Sunday sometimes
he could hardly dug himself up the pulpit stairs and there's a there's a high long stare in it
Heath Evangelical Church in Cardiff I've been in the pulpit a number of times and I've been
privileged to be there then he got so bad that he had to sit down to preach would you listen to a
minister sitting down to preach they listen to Vermin Higham in Heath Evangelical Church sitting
down and then the power of God began to come down in that man every time he was in that pulpit
then people began just to come in off the street and to be converted he tried to get
me to go to preach for him when I was a minister in Glasgow I can't remember exactly what year it
was I think it would be 76 or 77 he phoned me and he said he would like me to come and preach for
him on the last Sabbath in October and I said why the last Sabbath in October and he said well
I've got a manual standing engagement when I teach for a friend in the last Sabbath of
every oh well I said I'm very sorry I couldn't go I couldn't go the next year and I said I
think you'd be better to look for someone else Cardiff's a long way from Glasgow and I'm quite
busy and you've got plenty of preachers down there that can relieve you for a Sunday and he said well
I would like you to have you you know it would really be worth your while coming we've got a
congregation that's growing and God is blessing it we've got about 600 people coming so he booked
me 40 years ahead and eventually I got to Cardiff on the last Sabbath of October his son met me a
young boy who's married to a free church girl from Inverness he met me at the station 10 o'clock
on a Saturday evening and he said I hope Mr McMillan he said you won't mind we've got a few
young people in the house and you you'll have to my mother was saying to tell you that you'll have
to have your meal in the kitchen will that be all right I said I don't mind I'll have it in
the kennel as long as I get something to eat and he said there's a few young people he said you
might have to walk over a few legs when you go in the door so I was in the door and I had to walk
over a few legs they were sitting up the hallway facing each other and I could hear hear them
talking and singing and the place seemed to be absolutely packed with young people
and when I got into the kitchen Mrs Hyam was there and she said I'm very sorry Mr McMillan
she said you know we've got half our youth fellowship here tonight the other half's in the
elders one of the elders houses and I said how many people are you doing here tonight there
seemed to be a number she said oh she said there's about 75 of them and the other 75
there was a youth fellowship in that church I got to the church of 140 150 young people in the
teen teenage years I got to the church the next day I got up into the pulpit I don't know how
many people it holds that's 1200 people 1100 1200 it was parked to the ceilings it was jammed up
I was expecting 600 people and there was twice that number there they were singing the first
place the man that was leading the service for me was was we were singing the first place and
then the secretary a man climbed up the stage and he said excuse me Mr McMillan before you play
could I make an announcement I said well yes that'll be all right you church and the announcement
he made I've never heard anything like it he said we'll ever be sitting a little bit closer
the hall's now full and there's a queue in the street and we want to try and get them all in
so they filled up they all moved in closer and then they brought in chairs and they sat them
in the pulpit stairs and they were there all listening to the gospel and they listened for
an hour and a half and that's two churches I could take you to others now there are churches
where God is blessing and every single one of them are churches where men are prayerfully
thinking about and engaged in bringing the gospel to other people it's a strange thing but wherever
I go I see it it's true that success brings success in the work of God there is nothing to
there is nothing to make a congregation long to see God working in converting power like
one or two people converted I want to stop and have you ask yourself a question
when did you last see conversions in the church which is your church
and ask yourself another question if you're not seeing conversions in the church which is your
church why are you not seeing conversions is your church an evangelizing church is your minister an
evangelizing minister are you elders evangelizing elders are you people evangelizing people I think
these are questions we've got to ask you I think the questions we've got to answer even where
the painers and actors
I am as I say was in two pastorates and in both of them through time I was glad to see
work of evangelism begun and carried on and it still goes on
and you know there are all kinds of ways in which to evangelize
I'm not thinking of big evangelistic meetings I am thinking of ongoing every day all the year
round evangelism from within the context of the local church you have a home every Christian
believer has a home do you use your home for the purposes of evangelism
when did you last have someone coming to your home who was unconverted and before they came
you sought God that the opportunity of witness to them might be given to you
and if you last ask God to give you someone this day to talk to you about the souls
my father-in-law was a minister of the Free Church of Scotland his name was Mardoch
Campbell and he has written and left behind them a number of little books very warmly devotional
books and he was a man who was amazingly used in personal evangelism and he told me once that he
never ever grows from his knees in the morning of a new day without asking God to give him at least
one person to speak to for Christ in that day you know he got them amazingly on buses on trains
on station platforms I can remember being on a station platform with him his wife was there
his two daughters were there I was there his other son-in-law was there and he suddenly disappeared
in a crowded station platform he couldn't see him anywhere and then I saw him he had a black
hat on he was dressed the way a minister should be dressed in Scotland he he was dressed up with
a clerical collar black coat black hat and here he was talking to an old lady in a corner of the
station and the old lady of tears running down the rise and when we got over she asked me what
were you doing Mr. Campbell oh he said this lady came to me you know and she was in distress about
her show you know and I was just pointing her to the Savior he said I think he said God is working
in her heart I've got that address and I'll go and see you next week that was always happening to him
a very a very simple ordinary way no very simple but extraordinary way you and I could be doing
that too but many of us could we could be using our homes to invite people in for a cup of coffee
in the morning what sort of neighbors have you got to the ever of three mornings ladies could
you open your home make a cup of coffee of half a dozen or a dozen ladies in ask someone to come
along and give them a little talk my wife was walking out shortly after we we went to Jordan
Hill in Glasgow we were five miles away from from our church where we stayed and she was walking out
and she happened to meet a woman with a pram spoke to her and turned out the lady was a Christian
while these two were talking another lady came along she was a Christian as well so there was a
free church lady church of Scotland lady and a lady from the Christian brethren I think they
had stopped calling themselves Christians and they called themselves the evangelical chaps
of the cross but the three ladies were talking and they were wondering about what they could do about
the evangelism or the evangelizing of what was Syria a residential area it was rather posh
and it was very materialistic and they were saying I wondered how we could get at these people and
they decided that they would use each other's homes they would start every couple of weeks
what they called a coffee morning and they would ask the neighbors to come in and they did that
and they got someone into and they made no bones about it we would like you to come for a cup of
coffee and hear someone talk about the Christian faith or we would like you to come to a to a Bible
study would you come to a Bible study and you know they found that people were willing to come
and over the eight and a half nine years that we were there many people were converted very
strange thing happened most of them somehow got channeled into the brethren assembly for some
strange reason I couldn't understand her but but there you are in the long run you see what
mattered was they were converted to Christ and these are just two ways we must begin to use
our thoughts I came across a minister in Edinburgh recently and his church recently
hived off 80 of its members into another old church that was almost run down and vacant there
was 12 people left going to it and it's a huge church they hired 80 people off they employed a
young earnest powerful Bible picture and they set out to evangelize and what was interesting to me
was not the new project it was the old one how on earth can you afford to get 80 of your members
and tell them get out well he said I was very glad to see them get out because we had no room
for any more I said what's been happening over 40 years that church had filled up do you know what
was happening they were having ongoing evangelism and then three times in the year they were having
special evangelistic endeavors they were having special meetings and not one of them was in the
church he said we talked with our elders our elders we all got together and we decided that
we would have to if people weren't coming into the church we set up evangelist special evangelistic
meetings we we we bombed the area with leaflets and nobody came so we decided well we'll have to
do the church and the gospel out among the people so he said we decided to try a different way
they invited a well-known Bible speaker preacher biblical preacher up to Edinburgh
and instead of having the meetings in the church they did different things
they went to an hotel which is on the main street in the West End of Edinburgh
and they asked if they could have two rooms in the hotel at 11 o'clock in the morning to have
coffee and tea to talk to people about the Christian faith they got them they hired them
they've got notices outside want to talk about the Christian faith where's the world going
come in and talk about it come in and hear mr so-and-so speak on the Bible and people came in
women out shopping men popping off for the for lunch they all came in they out their workplaces
they organized 15 of their men and the wives of these men they delegated I think it was three
groups of 15 and they made each couple responsible for booking a dinner in the hotel for themselves
and one a couple of their friends you know another man and wife they had they were expected to pay
for it would cost them I suppose over maybe 12 15 pounds for their own dinner 12 15 pounds for
the friend's dinner three groups of 15 there was three groups of the 15 couples 30 people
double it 60 people and in each one a preacher in evangelist was put in to talk for 25 minutes
from the scriptures about the message and through the three years they carried on with
these these are only two ways that they went you see they went into different patterns new patterns
and God worked and that church filled up and I went to to see I was a little bit suspicious
the way free churchmen will be of things and I thought is this another Armenian gimmicky stunt
I knew the man wasn't an Armenian and I got down there you know what I found was earnest
well-taught Bible believing Christians he said you know mr. Miller when when people have converted
in our missions they come to church and they'll sit there and listen to our narrowest preaching
when people are converted they'll come to our prayer meetings
and he said they'll pray can't stop them and he said to go out and evangelize others
we had missions three times a year now he says these new converts come to me and they say
mr so when are we going to have another mission we want to see more people converted
that's just one such an admiral I could take you to a free church congregation in
air where a very faithful and ministry has gone on for some 9 10 11 years there had been a faithful
ministry there before that then the minister died very suddenly that man had been my own minister
when I went out of the way to study the Reverend Kenneth Taylor and he had prospered in the little
town of air in airside then he died and within six months strangely either
his elders died or they moved away from the town and the congregation
shrunk to almost disappearing point and then a young minister went out to college to air
he got some people converted and he began to pray about and to plan and to program
evangelism one of the things he's done is to have twice a year I think bible teaching meetings
when men and women from other churches can come and learn the way of God more perfectly
when they come and bring other people who never hear the gospel at all
you see there is much we could do but we need to plan and ask God to teach us how to do it
some people seem to think that for a church or even for a Christian to have any program
or plan the evangelism is to leave no room for the spirit of God yet it seems to me that
yet it seems to me that in the apostolic patterns of the new testament church there was planning
there was programming and it was all done under the light and the teaching of the spirit of God
and if we bring God and the spirit and the word into our programming and into our planning then
I think we'll be able to evangelize in a biblical way and we'll be able to bring the gospel to bear
another one would like to to say much more but I'm sure that time has long gone and you need to
get away the important thing is that we become involved in that we engage in what is the most
important activity for any Christian for any church to be engaged in
what is the church of Christ left on earth for
why did God not take all his elect people away as soon as they were converted
you know why he left them to be witnesses to him and you see perhaps we are tending
and perhaps even this talk this evening is supporting that we are tending
to think only about evangelism only in terms of success but we must first of all think about it
in terms of witness it is our responsibility to face the men and women of our generation
with the truths of God and of Christ in the scriptures whether they will hear or whether
they will forbear we must clear out heads of their blood and when we're doing that
God will bless and many will be brought in
when I flew into Sydney the other day I don't know whether it was from the Lord but whether
it was just the size of the city I was seeing underneath me a text from scripture came to my
mind God has much people in this city then my my thoughts went out to the land of Australia
surely God has much people in this land many of the people who came to Australia
were godly people people who were in the covenant the everlasting covenant of God
and God's covenant covers his people from generation to generation to generation
perhaps you're here and you're the second or the third or the fourth or the fifth generation
of godly people where God has blessed you know what you should be doing you should be going out
and looking for others who are in the line of God's promises who are in the eternal councils
of God for evangelism is nothing else and you're now to seek to bring in those whom God has chosen
in Christ from all eternity did you notice did you notice I'm sure you did what the apostle said
just before our text knowing therefore brethren beloved your election of God how did they know
the election of God in these people in Thessalonica you know why
because the gospel had come to them in power and because they have responded they said ah
these are the chosen and beloved of God and that's true of every genuine convert to Christ
and you should be looking over the harvest fields of Australia
and saying surely here surely here we can find many
who are his in Christ who will be brought out by our witness
evangelism a renewal book I meant to take it with me to a civilian at the last moment for gossip
and it's opening sentence it's written by an American but it's not a hard
fast selling American book of evangelism it's written by a fine
reformed teacher of the gospel Ernest Reisinger and he begins that little book by saying this
the church must evangelize or fossilize
and with that I leave you just think about that the church must evangelize or fossilize
and all too sadly
when one goes through Scotland that used to be the land of the book one sees fossilized churches
I hope that won't happen in Australia God bless you and thank you for your
careful listening may you teach us how to bring his work to others
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