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A Good Preparation for the Foreign Missionary Field

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Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jul 21, 1910

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 87, No. 29.

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A Good Preparation for the Foreign Missionary Field

By DAVID PAULSON, M. D.

DAVID PAULSON, M. D.
OUR large American cities, with their enormous foreign and even heathen population, present excellent foreign missionary trial grounds, or experiment stations. If the candidate for foreign missionary service has not the mental and spiritual equipment necessary to enable him to win souls for the Master in the large cities, there is scarcely one chance in a hundred that he will succeed in the much more difficult foreign field.
Soul winning is a hand-to-hand conflict with the forces of evil, and proficiency in it can never be acquired by class-room study alone. Its first requirement is a genuine passion for souls. This can be imparted only by God himself, but it can be developed by exercise. Every new case dealt with will drive the genuine soul winner to his Bible and to his knees; with agonizing earnestness will he wrestle for souls as Jacob of old wrestled with the angel. Wrestling souls from the grasp of the enemy is such a life-and-death struggle that it almost means giving a life for a life. It is because it is all this, and even more, that so little of it is done.
To-day there is coming from the large cities a call for energetic, self-sacrificing, soul-winning recruits, who will will enlist for active service until the end of the warfare, be the time long or short,—and the present indications are that it will be only a short conflict. The teeming populations of the large cities must be reached with the message.
If you decide to enter upon this work for souls in the large cities, you will receive an excellent training and experience for the foreign field, if Providence should direct you there. It is true that a response to this appeal may destroy nearly all your most cherished plans; but if God is calling you in this direction, you would a thousand times better change your plans now than to have God change both them and you when it is so late that you can only say, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”
Why not now, right now, in the very sincerity of your soul, ask of God, “What wilt thou have me to do?” As certainly as you do this, you will hear a voice behind you, saying, “This is the way, walk ye in it.”
Hinsdale, Ill.