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But Christian witness without power, I say, it's not only inadequate, but it can be altogether injurious if we don't look out. There must be a power-endued witness, and nothing can stand before a power-endued witness. You see, in the day in which we live, here's the way we do it.

Christians lie around and give no witness at all, but they are willing to pay certain gifted men to witness for them. That's why we have evangelists and men of big name who can get crowds to hear them. They give the witness that we should be giving.

They should be giving theirs, too, but the individual should be giving theirs. But instead of letting an evangelist supplement the witness of the individual Christian, the individual Christian foots the bill and pays and lets the other man be his proxy. And that's the trouble in the world now.

A church will sit around and give no witness at all for a generation, but call a man in once a year to give their witness for them. And usually he gives it to the same ones who've heard it before. We'll send the men out, the widely known men like Billy Graham or Billy Sunday or some other man known around the world, and they go giving the witness that we should be giving.

And if the Christian individuals were giving a witness, their witness would be more powerful. And there would be more Christians everywhere because a thousand individuals giving their witness in the Holy Ghost are more powerful under God in the winning of converts than any evangelist that ever lived from St. Paul to the present hour. This is not to speak against the evangelists or to slight them in any way.

It is to say they have their place in the church and the whole pattern of God, but the church should be the witness. This church, you, you who love our Lord, should give the witness. A man writes me a letter on a letterhead of a company in the city of Glendale, California.

And he says, dear Joseph, orthodox evangelical Christianity would say I belong to a fine church, and then he names it, but I won't. He says, yet 95% of the members of my church, 95% of its team goes up to blow the whistle. Committees, suppers, services, special speakers, chants.

And with these activities, the church membership and the finances keeping up and all, pastor and officers as well as membership seem happy and sleepy. In the church of some 500 members, it's difficult to get 20 out once a month to do calling. The church is out of joint with the army of the Lord, he says, quite content to sit in the pool or to spend most of its efforts in dress rehearsal or in polishing its weapons or attending its social functions within the fort.

And the aggressiveness is left to the Seventh Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons. And yet we often speak of his poor, lost, dying world. I wrote to that man and said, please write me an article and say the same thing, I want to publish it.

But he wrote back and said he couldn't possibly write, he was no writer. But I think he said something there, brother. I think he said something.

That we, the soldiers of the Lord, spend most of our time sitting out the war. We're sitting out the war. The fight is on and we're taking our girl to the function one night and going to the men's group the next night and to a camp week in the summer and off here somewhere.

We're praying instead of fighting. We are sitting about instead of getting up and being witnesses. We are witnesses, he said.

We are to be witnesses unto me. A witness says, I saw and I heard and here's what God did for me and this has happened to me.