ACROSS THE SEA, OR ACROSS THE STREET? -- Devotional for November 10, from "Good Seeds"

One day John the Baptist pointed Jesus out to two of his disciples, saying, “There He is, the Lamb of God!” They immediately began to follow Jesus. One of them was Andrew, who first went and found his own brother, Peter, saying, “We have found the Messiah!” (John 1:35-41)

Long before the commencement of his evangelistic crusade in a particular city, Billy Graham would send a team out ahead to blaze the trail by enlisting helpers. One time I joined up. Part of our training was an exercise in pre-evangelism called “Operation Andrew,” where we would write down the names of 10 unsaved friends, and then begin to prepare the ground for inviting them to join us to hear Billy Graham when he came to town. We were encouraged to pray every day for those on our list, and then look for opportunities to invite them to the crusade. Though his meetings could be called mass evangelism, Graham put little confidence in general announcements in the mass media. He had far greater faith in the pattern of Jesus, and of the New Testament: “Each one reach one.” And it goes a step further than that: reach out to the one closest at hand: go to your own neighborhood first, the wide world second; your brother now, a stranger later. “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush” applies to the commerce of eternal souls every bit as much as to the secular marketplace. The biggest mistake of evangelism is to think we can succeed in exotic, far away places where we’ve miserably failed in – or haven’t even tried – our cozy home places; or that we can bring those of a foreign culture and tongue to Jesus while ignoring our own kind and kindred. Why do we place a higher value on “the uttermost part of the earth” than on our own “Jerusalem and Judea” (see Acts 1:8). This is why Andrew is such a good model for us. There’s nothing wrong with what Peter and Paul did in crossing wide seas and braving wild persecution for the sake of the gospel -– but the big guns would never have fired without the little sparks, the simple souls, the everyday evangelists, who think inside the box before trying to get outside of it, who consider their brothers first, before all the others! Paul himself made this priority crystal clear in this injunction to the Galatian Christians: “So then, while we have opportunity, let us do good to all men, but especially to those who are of the household of the faith” (6:10). And how many times do we read his exhortation, and how often do we follow his example, to go “to the Jew first, and also to the Greek” (Romans 1:16)? Paul was the apostle to the wide world, but his heart was first for his own people. When will we stop pushing for outreach to the exclusion of inreach?