A SIMPLE WAY TO BEAR REMAINING FRUIT
I would like to present a simple way to bear fruit. First, you should make a vow to the Lord. You can pray, "Lord, as one of Your branches, I realize that I must bear fruit according to Your charge in John 15. If I cannot get one sinner saved within a year, this is a shame. Lord, every week I will spend two or three hours to contact people for their salvation." This is the principle. This does not mean that you have to spend two or three hours at one time in one day. You may spend some time in the morning to consider how to contact and save your unsaved relatives. You may spend twenty-five minutes to pray and make a record of these relatives. These twenty-five minutes should be reckoned as part of your two to three hours of labor in the gospel every week. In the evening you may write a letter to one of your relatives to find out how he is doing, opening the door for you to have further contact with him. The time spent in writing this letter is also a part of your gospel labor. Let us suppose that you have five unsaved cousins. If you labored three hours a week on these cousins in a concentrated way for one year, surely at least one of them would be brought to the Lord.
In order to be fruit-bearing branches of Christ, we need to be revived by the Lord day by day. Our publication called The Holy Word for Morning Revival has been a help to the saints to be revived by the Lord every morning. The most effective way to live the Christian life is by having a vital, living, active morning watch with the Lord. We should get two verses from the Scripture to live on every day and then contact people for the Lord in a definite way. In addition to this, we need to bear fruit. The reason why we do not bear fruit is because we do not practice contacting people directly, personally, and faithfully.
I would beg you elders to learn to have a start in this. You yourself have to do it. Do not expect others to do it. You yourself do this one thing. Practice personally contacting people every week. Contact them individually. You can contact your relatives, friends, neighbors, colleagues, classmates, etc. You need to plan and schedule your time so that you contact two or three individuals every week. You should pray, "Lord, I do not want to contact them in a natural way. I do not want to have natural talk when I meet with them. Lord, show me the vital way, the living way, to bring them to You." If you pray such a prayer, the Lord will show you. Today there is the need of some faithful doers in the practice of fruit bearing.
We need to practice contacting people. We may contact someone without any success or result. Then we can go to the Lord to repent and open to Him for His adjustment. He will impress us to go back to them in a certain way. When we follow the Lord to contact people according to His way, they will be saved. As we go out to contact people one by one, we will find out the proper way from the Lord. We will also find out the right persons to visit. We will learn not to waste our time. We have found that just to knock on doors in a general way can be a waste of time. We must look to the Lord to get a proper candidate for our labor. Then we need to work on him in a proper way. This is the successful way to labor in the gospel. The ones on whom we labor should be those with whom we are acquainted, either directly or indirectly. In this way the time we spend will be worthwhile.
(Elders' Training, Book 10: The Eldership and the God-Ordained Way (2), Chapter 9, by Witness Lee)
