When we preach the gospel, we also need to consider how many people we will be able to care for. We may be able to save many people, but can we take care of them all? We do not need to save more than we are able to care for. We can get three or four saved, and then begin to take care of them. We will be like mothers with these newborn babes. If we have too many children, who will cherish and nourish all these little ones? If we save many people and are not able to care for them, they will die. If we have twenty cousins, we should get only three or four of them saved and baptized. Then twice a week we can go to feed them. We should not expect, however, that all four under our care will remain. It may be that only one will be remaining fruit, but we should not be disappointed. We can go further to visit our classmates or colleagues to get two or three more saved. If we practice in this way, we will always have three or four new ones under our care. If we do this faithfully, we can gain two remaining fruit every year. The Lord Jesus chose us and appointed us that we should go forth and bear fruit and that our fruit should remain. When four people get saved through our gospel preaching, we do not need to knock on more doors. We should take care of these four new ones. We should expect to bear two remaining fruit in a year.
Perhaps one-third of the saints will be able to go out to preach the gospel. When they get many baptized, they can share these new ones with others who cannot go to knock on doors. They can let the other saints “adopt” some of the new ones they have begotten. Perhaps we begot five children, but we can only take care of three. Then we can ask some other brothers and sisters to care for the remaining two. If the church does well in bearing fruit, it will be doubled yearly. Although we may have baptized many in the past, not many of them remained because we did not spend adequate time to nourish them, to take care of them, and to raise them up. After mothers give birth to children, they have to spend time to cherish them, nourish them, and take care of them for a long time. If we devote two days a week, three hours each day, to the Lord for the gospel and the care of new ones and do this regularly all year, each of us will gain two remaining fruit yearly.
We may think that bearing two fruit yearly is easy, but it depends upon our labor. This is why we need a revival every day. We need to go to the Lord every morning. A morning is a new start. According to the natural law, the sun rises every twenty-four hours. We also need to rise with the sun every morning to be revived by the Lord. There is a big boulevard in San Francisco named Sunset Boulevard. I do not particularly care for the name of this boulevard because I do not want to live in the “sunset” but in the “sunrise.” Every morning we need to go to the Lord to enjoy Him as a new sunrise (Luke 1:78). Every morning we can have a new start with the Lord. It is possible for us to have three hundred sixty-five new starts each year. Proverbs 4:18 says, “But the path of the righteous is as the dawning light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day” (ASV). We must have a new start every day. We should not start our day without first going to the Lord in the morning. If we contact the Lord, we will be fresh, new, and rich. Then we can separate two evenings a week, three hours each evening, to visit people for the preaching of the gospel, to have home meetings to nourish the new ones, or to have small group meetings to teach and perfect them.
We must look to the Lord for the salvation of our in-laws, relatives, friends, neighbors, classmates, and colleagues. We do not necessarily need to knock on “new doors” when so many of those related to us and around us need the Lord’s salvation. The point is that we need to beget others, to bear fruit, by preaching the gospel to save sinners for the organic building up of the Body of Christ (Eph. 3:8-11). If we preach the gospel in this way, the ones saved through us will be organic. Once they have been begotten, we need to be like nursing mothers to nourish them so that our fruit will remain. If we bear fruit yearly, we will live a joyful life. To see people saved is a real joy. Furthermore, when we see the new ones under our care growing in small things and in great things, we will be very happy.
We need to do our best to go to visit people to save them and to go to the homes of the saved ones to meet with them. Our meeting with them should not be in a legal, dead way but in a living and flexible way, which is the organic way. When we go to a home meeting, we must be full of life, singing, praising, and praying. Perhaps you will be singing a hymn while you are knocking on the new ones’ door. When they open the door, they can join your singing. Then the home meeting will start in a living way. We do not need to be set on what we would share in the home meeting. We need to be flexible and allow them to ask questions. The new one that we have recently baptized may say: “It is so strange. It seems to me that since I was baptized, someone or something is within me telling me to do this and not to do that. What is this?” Then we can tell him: “That is the Lord Jesus within you. Before you were baptized, you did not have this experience, but now you do.” We can take this opportunity to fellowship with him for about fifteen minutes, teaching him that as a saved person, the Lord Jesus is living within him and is telling him what to do and what not to do. We can fellowship with him, cherishing him and encouraging him to go on. After six months of meeting with this new one on a regular basis, he can be established.
We need to exercise to nourish the new believers for our fruit to remain (John 21:15-17; 15:16b) by having home meetings with them. In these home meetings, we can cherish the newly baptized ones as a nursing mother (1 Thes. 2:7) for the organic building up of the Body of Christ. All the steps of the way to practice the Lord’s present recovery are for this organic building. We may bring people to Christ for their salvation, but they may not have anything to do with the church organically. However, when we preach the gospel organically and nourish the new ones organically, the result will also be organic for the building up of the Body in the organic way. Our practice is not only to help the church to increase but also to build up the organic Body of Christ.