Now, there are a lot of churches today that are working very hard, but they're not really
accomplishing much.
And they're toiling all night and working so hard, and they think to themselves, wow,
we're working so hard.
The rewards are going to be amazing, but they're not really getting much done.
See, they need to worry less about how hard they're working and start doing it according
to God's Word.
Now, if you can do it according to God's Word and work hard, that's the winning combination
right there.
That's where you can really get a lot done.
But what are some examples of people working really hard for the Lord and getting virtually
nothing done?
How about tracts, gospel tracts?
I know when I first started soul winning, I learned bona fide soul winning when I was
17 years old, and I've been going ever since.
Even after I learned bona fide soul winning, some churches that I would go to, like for
example, when I was in Germany for three months, they were really into tracts.
So they were getting me into just distributing a lot of tracts.
And I've been a part of distributing 10,000 tracts in just several days.
And that's a lot of work, because it doesn't sound maybe like a lot, but distributing 10,000
tracts, I mean, that takes a long time.
And I remember when I used to distribute a lot of tracts like that, and then even when
I was back in Sacramento, I'd still do a lot of soul winning, but then other times I would
just hand out tracts or just put tracts on people's doors and stuff.
And I remember just thinking, oh man, we're putting out all these tracts.
Think about how many people are going to get saved, people are going to read this.
But as I got older and wiser and smarter, I started realizing that these tracts are
virtually worthless.
They're almost totally worthless.
You hand out, I mean, if you hand out 10,000 tracts, chances are you got zero people saved,
chances are.
Now a lot of people get offended by that.
I preached a sermon back in 2007 called Why Tracts Are Worthless, and it made a lot of
people really upset.
But I stand by everything in that sermon, that sermon's the truth.
And the problem, I hate tracts.
I hate them.
I'm against tracts.
You know why I'm against tracts?
Because they're a cheap substitute for the real thing, that's why.
Because people hand out tracts and they absolve themselves from actually preaching the gospel.
And so you'll have a bunch of people handing out tracts thinking, okay, I've done my duty
for the Lord and they don't do the real soul winning.
And then people go to hell because people don't just get saved from getting a tract.
And you might have some anecdote of how one person out of a million got saved from a tract
or whatever.
But it's pretty rare, folks.
I'm not gonna sit there and hand out 100,000 tracts and spend hundreds of man hours to
maybe hopefully get one fluke person saved.
Because I could go out soul winning for one hour and if I'm in a receptive area, get somebody
saved in one hour.
How many tracts can I hand out in one hour, 60, 70?
Okay.
Well, I'm about 1% complete toward getting one salvation, which I don't think anybody
even gets saved from tracts, anybody at all.
That's my opinion.
But even if somebody does just get saved from just getting a tract out of nowhere, then
anyone would tell you it'd probably take 7,000 of them or something to get to that one person
that happens to get saved from a tract, right?
So I can go, what if I went soul winning for 100 hours instead of tract passing for the
100 hours it's gonna take to put out those 7,000?
I could get in 100 hours, I might get 30 people saved, I might get 50 people saved, I might
get 75 people saved.
It's just a cheap substitute.
It's just a way to just hand somebody a piece of paper and just say, okay, I've done my
duty now.
I've given that person the gospel.
No, you have not given that person the gospel.
The Bible says, open your mouth boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel.
You say, well Pastor Anderson, I think you're wrong.
Okay, show me a gospel tract in the Bible.
Show me one example in this book of somebody handing out a gospel tract.
No, and you say, well, it's not a sin to hand out, of course it's not a sin to hand out
a gospel tract, but you know what?
Why don't we just let the mailman do that?
If you want to just deliver things to people's door, there's a guy who does that full time
for a living.
He's called the mailman.
In fact, why don't we program a robot to do that?
We can program a robot to just go for, put the track on the door, but you know what it's
going to take to win somebody?
The Lord is a spirit filled soul winner who opens their mouth and preaches the word of
God.
And the Bible says, open your mouth boldly to make known the mystery of the gospel.
It says, preach the gospel to every creature and a track is just an easy cop out, just
an excuse.
And most of these tracks are a repent of your sins type gospel.
They don't even make the gospel clear anyway.
Now our church invitation, I don't even like to call it a track, I call it an invitation.
It's an invitation to the church, it shows how to get there, and it has the plan of salvation
on the back.
We go through 20,000 of those invitations.
I think right now it takes us about three or four months to go through 20,000 of those
things.
So how many have we put out since the church started?
Obviously we've ramped up in the last few years, but we have to have put out hundreds
of thousands of those invitations.
Let me just go on the record right now saying that out of the hundreds of thousands of church
invitations that we put out that have the Bible way to heaven on the back, I personally,
Steven Anderson, do not believe that a single person has ever been saved reading the back
of that.
That's my personal opinion.
Now maybe I'm wrong, but my opinion is I don't think anybody's ever gotten saved from reading
the back of that thing.
The purpose of even putting it on there is, number one, as a review so that you can actually
preach the gospel to somebody and then after they get saved, you can say, hey, there's
a review that you could also use to show someone else how to be saved.
You could use this to help you get someone else saved, or at least you can give them
a verse.
You could talk to them a little and then say, hey, read this, and then maybe that could
water the seed, but to just hand that thing to somebody and nothing else, I mean, we go
through tens of thousands of them.
Every month we're putting out many thousands of those, so I don't see droves of people
showing up at church from those things.
I don't see droves of people contacting, hey, I got saved from that.
It's ineffective, and that's why don't you ever go out of here on a soul winning time
and just go leave those on doors without knocking the doors.
If you are not comfortable doing soul winning, just be a silent partner.
You know, we'll pair you up with somebody who knows how to do the soul winning.
This is a soul winning church.
It's not a door hanger church.
It's not a tract passing church.
We will never have a tract passing time.
We will never have a door hanger time, and you know why this preaching makes people mad?
Because churches have replaced soul winning with a door hanger, because they've become
so spiritually weak that they can't even open their mouth and just talk to somebody about
the gospel.
They're so carnal that they can't even muster up enough of the Holy Spirit's power to go
through the Roman's road with somebody, so it's just, let's just put this on the door
and do like a doorbell ditch and run away scared.
The righteous are as bold as a lion.
The wicked flee when no man pursueth.
We got a bunch of door hanger Baptists, visitation Baptists, tract passer outer Baptists.
It's worthless, friend.
It's not working.
It's a bad idea.
There's no substitute for looking someone in the eye with the Holy Spirit inside of
you and a Bible in your hand and giving that person the gospel one on one.
There's no substitute for it.
It's effective.
So you see how you can work smarter and catch more fish.
Oh man, we toiled all night putting out these tracts.
Yeah, but you caught nothing.
But at thy word, we can go soul winning for one hour and if a bunch of us go out soul
winning for one hour, we're probably going to get somebody saved, because we're working
smarter because we're working in accordance with God's word.
So many churches, they're busy.
I mean, they're super busy on the building program.
They're super busy on the Christian school raising someone else's brats.
They're super busy doing this program and that program, but they forgot the first love.
There's no soul winning.
There's no love for the lost.
There's no following of Christ's command to go into all the world and preach the gospel
to every Christian.
So there's a lot of activity going on.
A lot of churches have a lot of movement, a lot of activity, a lot of action, but no
results because toiling all night doesn't really get the job done.
It's doing it according to God's word that gets the job done.
Letting down the net according to his word, that's what's going to get the job done.
That's the way to do it.
you