Table of Contents
Volume 41, Number 4
July - August 2010

Gone Fishing
Dr. C. Sumner Wemp

      Celeste and I just returned from eating out. We saw, maybe, the most wonderful and unusual conversion ever in the restaurant. We were heading to our favorite restaurant quite a ways away when we came to a lesser one nearer home and both felt we should go there.
      The waiter, a college student, took our order. As always, I graciously handed him the tract, "Your ticket to Heaven." He grabbed it and began to tell us, "I am very religious" and began to tell how religious he was. WOW! His father was a Pentecostal preacher and they were in church constantly and he was doing all kinds of religious and good deeds and he was excited about it all.
      A little later he came back with our meal. I asked, "May I ask you my favorite question?" He said with enthusiasm, "Please do." "If you went up to the gates of Heaven and they asked you, ‘Why should we let you in,’ what would you tell them?" I have asked this of hundreds of people and it gets the best answer you could want if you really want to help people to go Heaven. He joyously blurted out a long list of religious and good deeds he is doing. When I asked, "Where in the Bible does it say that?" He did not have a clue.
      Then I carefully told him how God loved him and me and sent the Lord Jesus to suffer and die for our sins, paid our debt of sin in full, rose again and was seen alive by hundreds of people. This, too, I have heard hundreds of times. He said so sincerely, "I never heard it like that before." This always shocks me for isn't it the simple gospel given in 1 Corinthians 15? Then I said, "It is not what you do that pays for your sins and gets you to Heaven; it is believing what Jesus did when He died for our sins and rose again that gets us to Heaven." His face lit up and he said, "That is new to me. I believe it." And he was saved right then and there as he believed on the Lord Jesus as His Savior, too. He thanked me over and over and said, "God sent you to me tonight."
      To me, all of that is the normal Christian life and we all ought to be seeing it happen over and over for "the harvest is plenteous but the laborers are few." Dear deacon, dear pastor, dear teacher, when did you last see God do that out in the highways and byways through you? As we left there, neither my wife nor I were one bit surprised how God urged us to go out to eat, head one way, and have God stop us sooner – and in we went to a soul God had ready.

We can and we must for our world is going to Hell and very few (only 2% according to statistics) Christians ever lead a soul to Christ. "He that sows sparingly will reap sparingly. He that sows bountifully shall reap bountifully."  Remember you are going to leave everything you have right here, but you can lay up tons of treasures in Heaven if you will obey God and give the gospel to "every" person you possibly can.

Now doesn't that make sense? Dear reader, I love you and say this with all the Love of God in my heart.