Christ cannot save this world alone
"Christ, alone, can save this world; But Christ cannot save this world, alone."
I love how Arthur Pierson, in his book "The Divine Enterprise of Missions," calls on us to realize how important we are in the world's salvation. We must, as a people, go to work.
Too often, we pray and ask God to do the part he assigned to us. God does all the saving, but he has called us to be his messengers. We are to take the good news of salvation to the world.
I have always been surprised by how much we want to pray without working. We want God to give us a harvest of corn, yet we are unwilling to plow the field, fertilize, plant, water, and care for the corn. God gives the increase, but we are called to plant, water, and even harvest, recognizing that God gives the harvest.
Trust and obey, for there is no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey. We want to trust but not obey. We want results without the sweat. We want to see a great harvest of souls without doing the work. Yes, we must pray. We must trust. But we must also obey what he has commanded us to do. Go, teach all nations.
Would that every reader might feel the full force of this paradox of missions:
"Christ, alone, can save this world;
But Christ cannot save this world, alone."
In the plan of God, every believer is a witness. In the wide field of the world, every disciple is needed as a workman. Without him, God cannot do this work, unless He abandons His plan! The Church must be aroused to this great truth and fact, that both Christ and the world are waiting for disciples, as such, to become heralds of the Gospel and witnesses to Christ; that a few thousand missionaries, scattered through cities and states at home or empires abroad, can never overtake the awful destitution of a thousand million of souls who know not the Gospel. The only hope of the race is that, as in apostolic times, the whole Church shall become a body of evangelists, and every converted soul consider it a necessary part of discipleship to witness to all men that Christ died for all.
