"Let your speech always be with grace (or “winning”, the Danish rendering) seasoned with salt, that you may know how you ought to answer each one." Col. 4:6
”Don´t you want to become a lawyer?” an officer once asked me as a soldier down in Germany. He meant to flatter me, as he liked my way of arguing. I was stupid enough to bask in that empty kind of flattery. (That doesn´t mean that I look down on lawyers. In fact, I highly admire them!)
It´s one thing to win an argument. It´s a completely different thing to win a soul. It´s stimulating for our pride to disarm an opponent. However, winning a soul usually means loss of your own prestige. Sometimes you may even find yourself in a situation where you must humbly say, “I´m sorry!”
Recently I felt I must do that to one of my toughest opponents in the local newspaper. I had used just one little ”innocent” word against him, but I felt it wasn´t right, so I wrote him an “I am sorry-letter”. Suddenly he was my opponent no longer – he even wanted me to visit him and his sick wife!
The same thing happened when I did that towards another harsh debater. He immediately gave me a ring and the tone had completely changed.
Oh, never mind about ”winning”. Let´s rather by the grace of God overcome our own pride for the sake of some soul won for our Lord Jesus Christ!
"Lead me to some soul today/ and teach me, Lord, just what to say/ friends of mine are lost in sin/and cannot find their way/ few there are who seem to care/few there are who pray/ melt my heart and fill my life/give me some soul today!"
-jn-
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