04.2. Andrew – The Fraternal Soul-Winner

Andrew – The Fraternal Soul-Winner

“One of the two which heard John speak, and followed him, was Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother. He first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messias, which is, being interpreted, the Christ. And he brought him to Jesus. And when Jesus beheld him, he said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, A stone.” (John 1:40-42) OUR subject this morning is “Andrew - The Fraternal Soul-Winner.” Our statement of theme rests with the fact that Andrew was no sooner convinced that he had found the CHRIST than he went after his own brother Simon.

Dr. Alexander Maclaren, in his sermon on “The First Disciples” remarks that these two followed behind the Master, fancying themselves unobserved, not wanting to speak to him, and possibly with some notion of tracking Him to his home, with the hope that they might interview him at a later time. “But He who notices the first beginnings of return to Him and always comes to meet men, and is better to them than their wishes, will not let them steal behind Him uncheered, nor leave them to struggle with diffidence and delay. So He turns to them, and the events which I have read in the verses that follow as my text for this morning, ensue.”

Permit me, therefore, to bring to you the following suggestions:

Acquaintance With JESUS Introduction is commonly the first step looking to acquaintance.

John Baptist introduced Andrew to JESUS, and Andrew followed John’s example. In one of my scrap books I find this clipping.

“What did you preach about on Sunday?” was the question asked of a city pastor the other day.

“I preached about Andrew” was the reply, “and do you know, I found him a most interesting character.”

“What was there about him that was remarkable?”

“Well, I do not suppose you would call him a great man, but the significant thing about him was that every time he is mentioned in Scripture he was introducing someone to JESUS. Would that we had more of the Andrew type!

More men who are thus engaged; more Sunday School teachers who adopted that practice: more Deacons who made introductions to JESUS their business: more preachers who copied Andrew’s example.

I read a few days since from that same scrap book another clipping that brought the blush to my face, a sense of the sin of neglect to my soul.

It related how a pastor, passing a big department store, suddenly turned through the door and went straight to its office. Finding the proprietor, he said to him, “Mr. T - I have talked with you on many subjects, but never yet have I engaged in conversation with you on the subject of my chief business in the world. Would you give me a few minutes?” Being taken to a more private office, the minister said, as he drew his New Testament from his pocket, “My business is to show men to CHRIST, and I have neglected you.” In a few minutes the great merchant was looking at him through tears, and he said, “Pastor, I am seventy- six years of age. I was born in this city; I have been in contact with more than five hundred ministers since I came into this business, and with many times five hundred church officials; but you are the only man who has ever yet spoken to me about my soul.”

Minneapolis multiplies that story many fold this morning, to the shame of us all. When and where did you, did I, seek to introduce a man to CHRIST. A review of this matter will not be comforting, even for those of us who have enjoyed the same; and ought to bring deep conviction to those who have never seriously considered such a step.

Acquaintance with JESUS depends upon companionship. When these two had spent the day with Him they had no doubt as to who He was, what His mission to the world, nor yet as to his Messiahship - his Saviourhood. In a city where a revival was going on, a widowed mother, incited to interest in her own child, said to little Alex, “Allie, you joined the church tonight; tell me what led you to want to be a Christian?

“Was it what I have taught you? Did your Sunday School teacher lead you to CHRIST? Was it the preaching of our pastor? What?”

Looking up into her face, he replied, “No, Mamma; it was none of these. Do you remember when we were coming here from St. Albans. I wanted to go on the engine and ride with the engineer, and you wouldn’t let me, until the conductor told you that he was a good man and no harm could come to me!

“Well, when about ready to start from the station where I first went in, the engineer knelt down for just a moment, and then got up and started his locomotive. When we stopped at another station he knelt down again, closed his eyes and said something. So I asked him, ‘Are you praying?’

‘Oh, yes, my little lad, I pray constantly. I have to; there are over two hundred people on this train entrusted to my care. A little mistake on my part, or failure to do my duty, might cause them all to lose their lives and I have never had an accident.’

“And Mamma, I have never forgotten it.” That engineer cultivated acquaintance with the Lord.

Time is required for a true cultivation of CHRIST.

Andrew, with John, spent a day with JESUS. Have you ever spent a whole day with Him?

What a marvelous day it must have been! What a wonderful opportunity to listen to His words, to sense His spirit, to be inspired by His teaching, to have Heaven itself illumined by His instruction, and life made meaningful as He talked with these two. The difficulty with the average Christian is lack of acquaintance with CHRIST. We do not spend enough time with Him to get to know him.

Henry Clay Trumbull once said, “The more we think about CHRIST, the more we will think of Him”. And the parallel statement would be equally so: the more we fellowship with Him and listen to Him, the more ready will we become to speak for him, and win others to His discipleship.

Dr. Howard Kelley is a man whose name is known all over America, and is a synonym for high Christian living; and his advice, as to the secret of success in this matter, if we are to grow from faith to faith, is:

“We must step by step and day by day acquaint ourselves with the Word of GOD. We must give it free course in our lives, and meditate also upon its teachings under the recognized guidance of GOD’s HOLY SPIRIT. Only in this way can we realize in time those deeper things of GOD which belong to his experienced followers.”

Now, since CHRIST is no longer with us in visible form, the only way to cultivate His acquaintance is by prayer, and through the knowledge of His Word; and that fellowship which comes by the work of the HOLY SPIRIT in the heart, revealing CHRIST in all His fullness.

But, Andrew thus becoming acquainted with JESUS himself is recorded as Introducing His Brother Experience with Him enabled Andrew to witness for Him. So it is with men to this hour! It is the man who knows JESUS best, who can, and will, bear the best testimony. When I was graduating from college, Will Baird was one of the loved circle that received the diploma of Hanover in ‘85.

Sam Moffatt had graduated a year before, and after finishing a course in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at Chicago - which in those days was far sounder than it is now - they set off together for Korea where they, with their wives, accomplished that marvelous work to which the attention of the Christian world has been called more than once.

Early in the life of that mission they adopted an unwritten law that no one should be admitted to full membership in the church until he had shown his zeal by persuading another to become a Christian. Little wonder that the church marked such progress; and that the Korean Christians, before these two consecrated souls laid aside their endeavors, exceeded 350,000. But lest anybody should imagine that this was to be accredited to the names of Moffatt and Baird, let it be further known that the explanation was in the conduct of the laymen, who not only won another man or woman to CHRIST before being received into full membership in the church, but who were accustomed to finish the Lord’s day services with the common salutation, “Now that the meeting is over, let us go out and engage again in personal work.” Their behavior is in keeping alike with CHRIST’s practice and CHRIST’s precept. The truly convinced man can commonly persuade others.

Andrew, fully won by JESUS, was fitted to be a personal worker.

We sometimes imagine that one has to be highly educated in order to be successful in this endeavor. Our mission boards have often taken the stand that only the university and finished theological seminary school product should receive appointment to the foreign field. But for this country at least, and I suspect it is just as true in the heathen world, what we need most are men and women who know the Lord.

Dr. Harold S. Laird, speaking at the 1938 commencement of Wheaton College, said:-

“One of the keenest bits of Christian philosophy that has ever come to my notice was a word spoken by a full-blooded Navajo Indian woman, born in heathenism and reared in superstition on the plains of Arizona, but now a true Christian. Following her conversion to Christianity she was brought east by one of the missionaries to the Indians as an exhibit to the churches of the power of the Gospel among her people. Never having been off the reservation before, the trip east was filled with many new and strange experiences for her. She had her first sight of and ride upon a railroad train. Upon her arrival in the eastern cities she saw for the first time our modern skyscrapers, our underground and overhead railway systems, with the thousand and one other stranger sights. When she returned to her own surroundings after weeks, and possibly months, she was asked by one of the missionaries what it was that impressed her most among the strange experiences she had had. Without hesitation she replied, ‘The great number of white men and women who are trying to live the Christian life without being born again’.”

Think of this statement given by another Indian and recorded by John Foster:

“Brothers, I have been long in the warfare; fifty-nine years on my way. I’m seventy-six years of age. The winds have blown hard on this old carcass. But the good hope is here. I see you white people brought up at home, able to read, taught arts and sciences; and yet you live without JESUS! Poor me! - I grew up wild; no father; brought up in the woods! Yet I found Him. Some of you have known me many years. Poor me! - couldn’t read; knew nothing; yet gave JESUS my heart. The first Bible I ever had I took home, put under my pillow, and slept with it there. This old frame totters; the strong wind shakes it, and it must go down. But I bless JESUS; I’m on the way to glory.” When Mingo had closed his testimony not a few were weeping and praising GOD. What we need for personal work is to know JESUS; then we can serve with love and consecration.

Who, above a brother, should be our first concern?

“He first findeth his own brother Simon, and saith unto him, We have found the Messias, which is, being interpreted, the Christ. And he brought him to Jesus” (John 1:41-42).

What about your brother? What about my brother? If either of them is without CHRIST what about your conduct? What about mine?

I fear a good many of us might have to face the sort of charge that was brought against Charles Simeon by his own brother, who, on his last bed of illness, said:-

“Charles, I am dying and you never warned me of the state I was in and of the danger to which I was exposed by neglecting the salvation of my soul!”

Charles answered:-

“Well, I thought I took every reasonable opportunity of bringing up the subject of salvation in your presence, and several times alluded to it in my letters to you.”

“Yes,” exclaimed the dying man, “you did; but that was not enough, and you know it! You never came to me and took me by the collar of the coat and told me I would be lost! And now I am dying and you haven’t done much toward my salvation; but secretly I have learned of the Grace of GOD: else I would have been forever undone.”

I am telling you this morning that if every father in this church, who has unsaved sons, should deal directly with them; every mother should talk face to face with her children; every Sunday School teacher plead with the individuals of her or his class and every man with friend, employee and business associate, there would be such a revival on, and that shortly, that we would not need to transport John Brown for our pre-Easter service, but rather, to enlarge the capacity of this auditorium to hold the crowd, and hundreds of them would be here to accept and confess the CHRIST!

Alexander Maclaren says:- “Nobody said to Andrew, ‘Go and look for your brother!’ “

If we spent more time with JESUS, nobody would need to tell us to go after our loved ones. That impulse would be as natural as the more abundant life would be certain. When I was a boy they used to have a proverb:- “The man who owns the grindstone is the man whose axe is dull.”

There is another proverb:- “The shoemaker’s wife always is the worse shod.” And too often it is true that the members of our own family are the ones in whom we reveal the least interest in spiritual things!

I am not asking at all that we annoy people by multiplied references to their spiritual estate; but I am suggesting, for myself and you, that we should not be eternally silent or even customarily so.

Finally,- Andrew Accomplished a Convert.

He established the necessary contact between the two!

“He brought him to Jesus.”

Sam Higginbottom, one of the graduates of Mount Hermon School, and later a missionary to India, once said of Dwight L. Moody:

“Among the other things that characterized Moody was this,- he expected GOD to do things through him; he expected GOD to save men through him.”

We have a right to the same confidence. Andrew’s powers were untested; Peter was his first attempt at soul winning, but it was successful none the less. Success never attends the man who makes no endeavor.

Andrew’s first convert became a leading apostle. At the time he went after Peter, Peter - like himself - was a social nobody. He had no university degrees; he had no financial standing; he lived by daily fishing; he had no social rating, but was reckoned among “the ignorant and unlearned.” But men are often transformed in becoming Christians; so with Peter.

He became not only a disciple of CHRIST, but an outstanding figure of the centuries! Two thousand years of time have not dwarfed him! He stands among the notable names of the past,- a veritable giant! His Pentecostal sermon has survived the writings of thousands of doctors of letters. His small books, known as Epistles, are more widely read than are the addresses of any Greek orator or Indian philosopher or English scientist. Who can tell what will be the result when he wins one to CHRIST? In the south, Dr. J. B. Hawthorne was an orator sought by scores of churches and heard by thousands and tens of thousands of auditors. On one occasion he went to help a southern church in a two weeks’ evangelistic campaign. At the end of it only a little unpromising boy had made a profession, and Hawthorne was a bit chagrined over the result. But that boy became A. T. Robertson - my classmate, the son-in-law of John A. Broadus, and the greatest American Greek scholar of the 20th century! A similar thing took place in Scotland. A church went through a whole year with only one profession, and when that was reported at the annual convocation, they said: “None except Wee Bobbie, and he’s so sma’ he’s no worth the countin’.” But Wee Bobbie became Robert Moffatt, the flaming torch that illuminated the night of Africa and blazed the trail for the great and marvelous David Livingstone,- his son-in-law!

Oh man; Oh my sister! Despise not the day when you win a child to CHRIST! Only GOD knows what that contribution may mean to the church of the redeemed! To accept CHRIST involves an immeasurable change.

Peter, the plain fisherman, became Peter the immortal apostle. No man is ever the same after he has received JESUS! He is not only another; he is a better man, a bigger man; and only GOD knows to what heights that change may carry!

We measure men by station; GOD measures them by service instead.

We look on the outward appearance; He considers the heart. A Christian worker in Arizona tells the story of an uncouth cowboy who came to him asking for copies of Mark’s Gospel. When he inquired why he wanted them, the cow boy said:-

“I went to San Francisco and threw away my money in revelry. I slept late after a night of dissipation. When I awoke the next morning there was a little book on the table near my bed, named The Gospel of Mark. I threw it on the floor. I did the same thing for three successive mornings, and then on the fourth I took the thing out into the park and began to read it. I found JESUS saying to a leper, ‘Be thou clean’; to a paralytic, ‘Thy sins be forgiven thee’; I heard Him commend a widow for her mite; I saw Him take little children in His arms and bless them; I listened while He pathetically asked his disciples, ‘What; couldst thou not watch with me one hour?’ As I read on I saw Him die, and when He hung on that cross, and I read that it was for me, it broke my heart and changed my life, and I am another man,- a different man! And now, stranger, I want the Gospel of Mark to give to other people that they too may know CHRIST and be changed!”