You should try your best to always keep four or five new ones under your care. If you do have four or five, you do not need to be in that much of a hurry to contact others. If one of them moves, try to replace him with someone else. Always try to keep four or five under your hand. Maybe after two weeks, two of these five will be baptized. But do not stop caring for them. Baptism is not a graduation. Rather, baptism is an entry into the Christian life. Thus, you should still count these two baptized ones as your constant contacts. Right away you have to change your way to contact them. You have to feed them. Feeding needs more patience and more labor. You should have the attitude that you do not want to see any of your children die prematurely. You must endeavor to keep them alive by taking care of them day by day. First you have to feed them. Maybe after three months, you can begin to raise them up, to teach them, to train them, to perfect them. You need to spend a lot of time to do this.

Then if the dear ones who are under your hand have really been progressive, passing through the feeding period and the perfecting period, they are ready for you to bring them on, to help them learn how to study the Word and to prophesy for the Lord. This is not easy, so you may have to spend three more years just to train your new children to prophesy. Try to teach them how to compose a prophecy and how to speak it.

You may think that after someone has learned how to prophesy, he will graduate. But I have learned that none under our care really graduate. The more you take care of certain ones, the more you feel you need to help them. For many years, I have taught many people. To my consideration, not one of them has ever graduated. I still need to perfect them. I even expect some of the brothers under my care to eventually be better than I am spiritually. We may wonder if we have to take care of certain ones until we are in the New Jerusalem. This means that we have become tired. We need to exercise our endurance and still spend time to raise up those whom the Lord has given us to care for. We must learn the lesson to keep constant contact with people. Then for the long run we all will see the rich fruitfulness.

Do not do a work in which you are expecting to be fortunate. Do not think in this way. Instead, think in the way of having something constant. You have to pray and look to the Lord all the time to give you some proper constant contacts. Do not think that since you have baptized someone quickly, you are doing all right. If you practice in this way, you will have fruit which does not remain. Whether the fruit under your hand will remain or not depends upon how you take care of people, from begetting them to feeding them, to perfecting them, and then to building them up to speak for the Lord. That means this one is a full-grown man. Until one reaches the stage where he can speak for the Lord, he is not full-grown yet. To prophesy in the meeting is a sign of full-grown status. Beginning from this day, I hope we all will have a resolution in the depths of our heart to contact people through prayer, with prayer, and in prayer and to make each one of our contacts a constant one.

We also need to learn how to redeem our time. Satan, the evil one, who is working busily in the air, never wants us to pray. Satan will do everything to waste away your time for prayer. So you have to redeem your time to pray unceasingly (1 Thes. 5:17).

Also, learn to pray directly. Do not teach the Lord and do not explain to Him in your prayer. The blind man who contacted the Lord outside of the city of Jericho cried out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” (Luke 18:38). The Lord then said, “What do you want Me to do for you?” (v. 41). This blind man did not pray in the natural way that we do. He did not give the Lord a lot of explanations, a lot of instructions, and a lot of teachings. Instead, he simply said, “Lord, that I may receive my sight!” (v. 41). In our prayer we give too many explanations and too many teachings. It seems that the Lord knows nothing, so we have to teach Him. We have to tell Him who He is and what He can do. This is a routine prayer. We should just tell the Lord what we need and what we want. If we want the Lord to stir up the saints, we should simply pray, “Lord, stir up the saints.” This is good enough.

We must learn to go and contact people through prayer, in prayer, and with prayer all the time. We can give them a phone call or send them one of our gospel tracts. We should read these tracts so that we know their contents. Then we can send a certain tract to someone based upon his need. If we know someone is not clear that the Lord is his Savior, we can send him Christ the Savior, a tract concerning Christ’s status as the Lamb of God (John 1:29), the bronze serpent (3:14-15), and the grain of wheat (12:24).

First Corinthians 15:58 says that our labor in Christ will never be in vain. Only the Lord knows what will be the issue of our labor. We need to labor in Him until the day we see Him at His return. We have started, and we still have to grow. We should have the assurance that the Lord has done something with us because we have been pursuing Him and seeking Him. On the one hand, we should not analyze. On the other hand, we should not be satisfied. We must go on to grow, to progress, to mature. Then we need to make a resolution to contact people every day. This is the unique duty, responsibility, and work we have to finish in our Christian life. We must produce some children, and we must have some children, four or five, under our care. The only way for us is to contact people, and the only secret of our success is to have constant contacts for our whole life.
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