9 And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not.
Introduction
Bishop Keyes once said, “We need to recover and maintain the balance between ‘red hot evangelism’ and down-to-earth religious education.” The fact is that these two cannot be separated. Evangelism without discipleship is incomplete evangelism. Discipleship without evangelism is incomplete discipleship.
The Sunday school is not just another organization of the church—it is the church organized and functioning to carry out the Great Commission. It is the church meeting, maturing, ministering, and marching for the Master.
Maturing suggests discipleship. We need to take off the rose-colored glasses and admit that we have spawned a generation of biblically illiterate people. We’ve rocked ourselves to sleep with the illusion that we are doing the work of discipleship. We are not. About all of the Bible study most people get is what they receive from their Sunday school class. Teachers need to study hard, pray much, be on time, be well prepared, stop on time, and know their pupils well.
Meeting suggests fellowship. As a church grows larger, the people must work harder to maintain a warm, friendly atmosphere. Be sure to introduce people by name, tell where they work, where they went to school, something about their family, their address, and anything else that others can latch on to and associate with. How quickly we forget what it is like to be a stranger in a new place.
Ministering suggests caring. The New Testament church was a caring and sharing fellowship. We must be sensitive to people, pray for them, establish prayer chains, visit them in the hospitals, and take them food in times of need.
Marching suggests evangelism. The church needs to get more militant and aggressive. We need to see the church as an army and ourselves as soldiers. The gates of hell shall not prevail against us. We are not like the National Guard. The National Guard meets on the weekends every once in a while to train and go through the motions of warfare. But they are not fulltime soldiers. They are occupied with other things during the week. We are a fulltime army and we need to call ourselves into active duty. When an army loses its spirit of conquest, mutiny follows.
We need to set goals. Fred Nichols told me about one of his business ventures. They project the growth that ought to take place in that business and then check up by monthly computer printouts to see whether the business is measuring up to their goals. If it isn’t then they get busy and go to work to find out what is wrong. Should we be any less serious about the work of God?
We need to set enrollment and attendance goals and then go after people. If we do not set goals and march toward them, then we simply drift. We allow the wind to blow us wherever it wants us to go. Mediocrity is a menace and malignancy and it infects our whole organization.
For the past several years our church has averaged 10 additions per Sunday in Sunday school. However, by now we ought to be averaging 15 or 20 per Sunday because we have grown much larger. Someone said a long time ago, “You build a Sunday school during the week and it functions on Sunday.” I believe that and I think we need to get busy to building our Sunday school during the week.
How can we do that?
1. It is as much our duty to go and visit as it is to come and hear.
I therefore want to challenge you to go every week to visit. Wednesday night is church visitation night. We need to go after people. The letters G-O are essential in our faith. You can’t spell “Good News” without the letters G-O. You can’t spell God without the letters G-O. You can’t spell “Gospel” without the letters G-O. And you can’t be obedient to Christ without going.
Why do we need to visit? Jesus commanded it. There is a point beyond which you cannot grow personally if you do not go. You will not grow because you are disobedient to his command. There is a verse in Proverbs that says, “Iron sharpens iron.” As you go and visit and encounter questions, you sharpen and hone your own faith. We do not really possess a truth until we can express it. Visiting helps you to learn to express your faith and thus possess your faith in a real and dynamic way.
We miss much joy in Christian life. I come in rejoicing when I’ve been out visiting. It is the way to win the lost. Knowing where you ought to be does not mean you know how to get there. Many people know they need to be saved but do not know how. They are waiting for us to tell them. Ask Elaine, whom I visited this week. I said, “Are you a Christian?” She said, “No, but I want to be.” I had the joy of telling her how to become one. J. N. Barnett said, “All good Sunday school work is evangelism.”
It helps us to retain the saved. Someone has said that erosion takes longer than explosions but the effects are just as devastating. If we aren’t careful, then bit by bit our Sunday school attendance erodes. The percentage of people attending goes down. Some of you get upset when we think about splitting big classes. The reason is that you can’t keep up with big classes. You just don’t have enough time. We are splitting them so that we can give you a class you can keep up with and we do not lose people who ought to be in Bible study. You don’t keep a big class just to satisfy your ego. You keep a class so that you can reach and teach the people and minister to them.
I’ve discovered that people usually just drift away from Christ. People are like sheep. Sheep don’t get wild, but sheep do wander. What do you say when you go after these people? Well, you don’t hound them. You just go to visit them to be friendly with them. To have a cup of coffee with them and let them know that you are interested. When the time comes that they have a spiritual need they’ll remember that and they’ll come to you.
You can’t teach people you don’t know. You can’t teach strangers effectively. A family may be going through a divorce, poverty, or some other tragedy in their life. You need to know that so you can minister to them effectively.
If you doubt the effectiveness of visitation, go do DFW Airport and see the salesmen pouring out of there to all parts of the country. They are going to make personal visits to new and established clients because it pays.
2. We are as responsible for developing witnesses as we are for witnessing.
If you have a class of 20 and two people in that class are lost, it is your job not only to win the two but to train the 18 to be witnesses. Winning the lost is addition. Training witnesses is multiplication.
Charles Spurgeon said, “He who wins a soul draws water from a fountain. But he who trains a soul winner digs a well from which thousands may drink to eternal life.” I therefore challenge you to have a monthly fellowship visitation meal. Invite members of your class into a home, have a meal together, then go out and visit. Return to the home for reports and dessert.
Last week the chairmen of our deacons had men in his home for a meal. They had beans and cornbread. Then they followed the example of the Savior, paired off in twos, received assignments, and went out to visit. They stayed and talked to past 11 o’clock.
3. We must not give up.
The Bible says, “And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not” (Galatians 6:9). I don’t know much about agriculture, but there are four factors that are important: the seed, soil, sower, and seasons. The seed is the word of God. The soil is the hearts of men. The sowers are people like you and me. The seasons are the climate and atmosphere that surrounds people.
We have no control over the seed. It has life in itself. We have no control over the hearts of men. Some are hard and calloused and some are soft and workable. But we do have control over sowing the seed. Stay faithful at it. Create a warm and a loving climate and the seed will grow.
You can’t build a different world with an indifferent church. We must not be indifferent to other people’s indifference. The temptation is to say, “Well, if they don’t care, why should I care?” However, I’m glad that when I didn’t care about myself someone else cared about me. I was spiritually dead and couldn’t care.
Our chief problem is not that we don’t know what to do but that we don’t do what we know. When the interest inside the church exceeds the indifference of those on the outside of the church you’ll be surprised at the change.
Don’t assume that because people are not interested today they won’t be interested tomorrow. Keep contact with them. Divorce, a kid busted using drugs, or a cancer in the family can change the way they feel about the church and their spiritual needs, so keep in contact with them.
A Sunday school teacher, Mr. Kimball, in 1858 led a Boston shoe clerk to give his life to Christ. The clerk, Dwight L. Moody, became an evangelist. In England in 1879, he awakened evangelistic zeal in the heart of Fredrick B. Myer, the pastor of a small church.
F. B. Meyer, preaching to an American college campus, brought to Christ a student named J. Wilbur Chapin. Chapin, engaged in YMCA work, employed a former baseball player, Billy Sunday, to do evangelist work. Sunday held a revival in Charlotte, North Carolina. A group of local men were so enthusiastic afterward that they planned another evangelistic campaign and brought Mordecai Hamm to town to preach. During Hamm’s revival a young man named Billy Graham heard the Gospel and yielded his life to Christ. Only eternity will reveal the tremendous impact of that one Sunday school teacher who invested his life in the lives of others.