Paul W. Powell Legacy Library

We must understand that Jesus failed often in his public ministry. You remember when he went to his hometown of Nazareth. The Bible says that he could do no mighty works there because of their unbelief. He struck out in his own hometown. Then he went into the region of Gadarenes and he cast the demons out of the man into the pigs, and then the pigs plunged over the cl...

You could go on and on with the excuses, the reasons that people give for not witnessing. But the bottom Iine is that if we do not share our faith with other people, we simply lack the motivation that we ought to have. I am persuaded that witnessing and sharing your faith with another person ought to be the spontaneous result of being converted to Jesus Christ. When w...

Sam Shoemaker, the great Episcopalian preacher and evangelist, used to say, “Every man is like an island and if you will row around him several times you will find a place to put in.” In every person’s life there is a problem or a need or they live near one. If you can identify that need and begin to talk to them about that need and how God and Chris...

I have been reading a book entitled Marketing the Church. The author of that book asks a question that I think is worth asking to every one of us. He said, “How many of you have ever met an unsaved person who is craving for a sermon? Or how many of you have ever met an unsaved person who has sought diligently a place where they can sing ‘The Old Rugged Cro...

It is never wise, nor is it ever profitable to try to argue with people about spiritual things. We never argue a person into the kingdom of God. We simply share with them out of our own experience. We try to meet them at the point of their need and keep the conversation centered on Jesus Christ. In this experience with the woman at the well, the Lord keeps talking to...

I’ve been impressed as I’ve studied Christian history to see God so very oftentimes use ordinary people—those people who seem most unlikely to be used—to do his great work. All of us have heard of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the great preacher of another generation. He spoke to 5,000 people every Sunday morning and 5,000 people every Sunday night....

The Holy Spirit convicts people of sin and awakens them to a newness of life. The Holy Spirit is the communicating factor of evangelism. The Holy Spirit is more important than a PA system is in communicating to your physical ear—he is the PA system of the soul. Dwight L. Moody, the gifted evangelist, once went to London and the entire city responded to his prea...

Henry David Thoreau once sat at Walden Pond watching a lineman string wires down the railroad. “What are you doing?” he inquired. The lineman replied, “We are building a telegraph system so the people of Maine can talk to the people of Texas.” Thoreau commented, “What if the people of Maine have nothing to say to the people in Texas or Te...

In his book This Way, Please, Roy McClain tells the story of an old Chinese man who was healed in one of the hospitals of the China Inland Mission started by the missionary Hudson Taylor. The old man had been blind for 50 years. For more than five decades he had not seen anything. Medical examinations at the missionary clinic revealed that he had acute cataracts on bo...