Getting the Message Through

E. Stanley Jones was a missionary, a theologian, and a prolific writer. In his devotional book Victorious Living he describes how to get the gospel through to human need:

"We must now study how to get the message through to human need, for it is not enough for us to live victoriously--we must help others to do so. Nothing is really ours until we can pass it on. Someone has defined a Christian as 'one who makes it easy for others to believe in God.' Jesus did that. He did not prove God. He brought Him. In Korea they do not baptize a new convert until he has brought another to Christ. Then they know he is Christian, for he is Christianizing.

"Let us study how Jesus got His message through to an exceedingly difficult case, the Samaritan woman. Not that Jesus ever looked on a person as a 'case'; if He had, He would never have won that person. You have to love people to influence them. There were no 'cases' with Him, there were only persons. Let us study His method, for He was not only our example of how to live, but our example in helping other people to live. We shall take His delicate dealings with the woman step by step and learn as we go.

"First, the account says, 'He must needs go through Samaria.' It was an inevitable thing, so He 'evangelized the inevitable.' He found His opportunity of getting His message across in the everyday invevitabilities of life. There are certain things in your life and mine which are inevitable--we have to go to the office, to school, to workshop, to home duties, or we may be compelled by circumstances to sit on a park bench, unemployed. Evangelize that inevitable thing--find your opportunity in the ordinary contacts of the day. Then that day will no longer be ordinary, for the contacts are redemptive. You are turning the commonplace into the consequential. The little things of His become the big things--big with destiny. Life-contacts become life-changing. Nothing--absolutely nothing bigger under heaven than just that."