The Challenge of Winning Souls

Reviewing the human situation in itself, [Basil Manly Jr. (1825-1892)] confronted the apparent impossibility of the task of winning souls. He painted a distressing picture of the seemingly invincible obnoxiousness of sinful human nature.

We have to overcome entire indifference. The souls that are to be won care nothing for spiritual blessings, having lost, through the fall, the right sense of such things. We are proposing to make those serious who have given all their days to levity and amusement, and those spiritual, who have been entirely engrossed in worldly care. ... But we have to encounter the hostility of the heart, and not its indifference and reluctance merely. We have, as our first business, to fasten the charge of guilt upon men; to make them not only acknowledge, but feel their utter sinfulness and degradation in God's sight; to produce a sense of condemnation and self-abhorrence, where self-complacency had filled the mind, and love of pleasure ruled the life. Our efforts are opposed by the passions of men, too, as well as by their pride. Sins dear as a right eye must be renounced, and evil habits cherished as the right hand, must be cut off. The interests also of men, as regards this life, are frequently opposed to our errand. Gainful, as well as pleasurable sins, must be abandoned. In fact, the whole nature must be changed. Our effort is nothing less than to win a wholly perverted and depraved soul back to purity, and fit it for dwelling with God.

[Tom Nettles, Ready for Reformation? (Nashville, Broadman & Holman, 2005) p. 31. Basil Manly Jr., “The Wisdom of Winning Souls,” in The Baptist Preacher (November 1854) pp. 190-91]