Paul's Defense of His Ministry, Message & Method, Pt. 2.

Do you feel a sense of responsibility to the lost? Do you desire to bring people to faith in Jesus Christ? Do you feel inadequate for the task? Then learn from the second greatest soul winner of all time - Paul the Apostle of Christ. 

As Paul defends his message, his motives, and his methods, he divulges his practice as a winner of souls. “Soul winner” is an older term. The term originally was a reference to pastors and ministers of the gospel. When the great pastor Horatius Bonar of Edinburgh, Scotland penned his little book entitled “Words to Winners of Souls,” he was speaking to fellow pastors. Bonar reminded his readers of the weight of the eternal matter with which we have to do. 

Horatius Bonar: “Men can not but feel that if religion is worth anything, it is worth everything; that if it calls for any measure of zeal and warmth, it will justify the utmost degrees of these; and that there is no consistent medium between reckless atheism and the intense warmth of religious zeal. Men may dislike, detest, scoff at, persecute the latter, yet their consciences are all the while silently reminding them that, if there is a God and a Saviour, a heaven and a hell, anything short of such life and love is hypocrisy, dishonesty, perjury!” p. 12, 13.

But over time the term has come to be applied to anyone who seeks to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with others. So what is a “soul winner?” It is a simple term meant, I think, to encourage those who share the gospel to see their own importance in the process of reaching men and women that God Himself has ordained. The term is not meant to imply that we do all of the winning but that we are part of the effort of evangelism. It is a simple term meant to say that we are all evangelists, sharing the good news of reconciliation to God through His Son Jesus Christ. I believe his method is the wisest because it is Jesus’ practice.