Grimshaw - Compelling People into Church
Another influential man in the day of Wesley was William Grimshaw, who the author says “was a man of passionate evangelical fervour who earnestly laboured to further the work of Methodism in the countryside.”
Apparently it was this man's custom to leave the church while the psalms were being sung before the sermon, to see if anybody was hanging around the churchyard or the streets, so that he could quickly compel them to come into the church to hear the Word being preached.
A Passion for Reaching the Lost
It is said that he would often go into one of the local pubs and compel the men there to come and listen to him preach, because he believed fervently that anybody's life could be changed by hearing the good news.
Now doesn't that remind you of Jesus' parable of the Feast of the Kingdom in Luke 14? In this story, Jesus talks about a man who prepared a great banquet and invited many people. But when the time came, everyone started making excuses and said they had other things to do instead of coming to the feast.
The master says to his servant, "Go into the streets and the alleys, and bring in the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame" - "go into the roads and the country lanes, and compel them to come in."
Compelled to Share the Good News
God wants everybody to hear the good news and to be saved by it. Friends, what are you doing to get people into hearing the good news?
Maybe like William Grimshaw, we need to leave the church once in a while and go and find people who need to hear it. Maybe there's somebody you know whose life could be changed if you just took the plunge and invited them to hear or to see something about God.
Like Grimshaw, why don't you take the plunge, go into the country lanes, and invite people to hear the good news about Jesus. Perhaps their lives will be changed if you do.
In Russia one day, a missionary’s simple prayer for God to use him led to a powerful encounter on a train.