Concern For Souls

Summary

Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the YouTube recording's caption track, read through the transcript panel — published in summary form; watch the full sermon at the source.

Because of the Times 1987, The Pentecostals of Alexandria, Alexandria, LA. The sitting general superintendent of the United Pentecostal Church International preaches the conference's own theme — because of the times — as a recovery of the shepherd's heart: the soul is the one eternal thing in this world, God seeks His scattered flock the way a shepherd seeks sheep, and revival comes only to preachers who love souls more than reputation, money, or ease. He was introduced by the host as the movement's general superintendent, and he preaches as an elder looking back on a lifetime, to a house full of preachers.

The men who carried the truth

He opens by honouring the sermon Anthony Mangun preached earlier that night, then tells of a three-minute record his own father made when Urshan was a boy of eleven or twelve — a message on the new birth his father wanted preached after his death, with the charge to throw away the record but never the truth on it. He has the house look at an elderly couple in their nineties, the stock the young host pastor came from: at the dedication of their church the old man's prayer put goosebumps on him, and every church that family started has kept the fervour and sensitivity of prayer it began with — a strong prayer colony, he says, cannot fail to have revival. He thanks James Kilgore, the assistant general superintendent, for his deep concern for the young ministry of the movement.

The shepherd who seeks His sheep

He stands and reads his two texts aloud himself. From Isaiah: the herald on the mountain, the Lord God coming with a strong hand, and above all the shepherd who feeds his flock, gathers the lambs in his arm, carries them in his bosom, and gently leads those that are with young — he reads the shepherd verse twice. From Ezekiel: the word against shepherds who fed themselves and not the flock, and God's own promise to search out His sheep and deliver them from every place where they were scattered. This is the sermon's foundation: souls matter because of how God Himself regards the flock.

Scriptures: Isaiah 40:9-11; Ezekiel 34:8, 11-12

The soul, the one eternal thing

Middle Eastern shepherds greeting each other ask first after the flocks and cattle, then the wives, then the children — care for the sheep is the uppermost thought, and so it must be with souls. He confesses he stood in pulpits for years talking about souls without fully understanding one, until preparation for this message broke him to weeping: buildings will be torn down, nations fail, generations pass, and what remains is the soul, the one thing in this world that is eternal because God breathed it. Preachers will answer for carelessness with what God has entrusted to them; a label pinned on — preacher, minister, evangelist — settles nothing.

A burden that sees a church in a crowd

He tells of days in New York City with a young pastor from the Tennessee hills now serving the church Urshan's father once pastored. At a red light, watching the avalanche of people cross the street, the young man saw not a crowd but a whole church. A restaurant keeper put an arm around him and said he loved him because he always talked to him about God. His little chapel, enlarged as far as it can go, overflows — people on the basement steps, extra chairs out. Preachers talk about hobbies and recreation, Urshan says; a man conscious of souls talks souls. Asked to teach the young pastor how to approach people, he told him there was nothing to teach: you have the burden already, and the burden will bring it to pass.

Love for souls in his own house

His late daughter's burden is the sermon's tenderest movement. Her two little girls, motherless, played church as small children and prayed for souls the way they had watched her pray — weeping as she wept. In her last months, her leg swollen to three times its size, she would not stay down: she got her children ready for school so she could talk and pray with them, and one Sunday night, nearly carried into church, she hobbled to a man who had sat under preaching for thirty years without ever making a start, told him she would gladly die if he could find God — and watched him break, weep, and receive the Holy Ghost at the altar. At her casket the man wept, not for her loss, but because this woman had cared for his soul. Then Indianapolis: a woman working in a family's home won their high-school son, a basketball player, praying him through in the parents' absence and sending him to church to be baptised. Steered away for three months, the boy called Urshan to hear a revelation — a pouring out of scripture on the oneness of God that left no doubt — came back, and eighteen members of his family followed him into the church. His father charged that the church had ruined the boy's planned future; Urshan answered that the Lord had met him, and warned the father not to lay a hand on a vessel of righteousness. The young man still carries his city on his heart.

No church without a shepherd's heart

He puts hard questions to the preachers: are we under a threat of affluence, reputation seekers, asking a church how much money it has before we will take it? You will not have to worry about finance if you have a love for souls. The Lord came into the world owning everything and owning nothing, and the only thing He ever bought was the church, paid for with His own life's blood; there will be no church until we are willing to pour ours out after His pattern. Ezekiel's charge against shepherds who feed off the flock returns here as the sermon's rebuke. Against it stands an old family doctor, dying at eighty-three, who testified that he never once put a price on his services — he asked patients only what they could afford — and made more than all who sought after money, because God honoured what he gave in feeling for people. Then the discipline of the ministry: first, love the truth. Hold your head up, he says, when they laugh at the name of Jesus and at the one God — truth is indestructible because it belongs to a never-dying God, and nobody has ever stopped it by stopping a man. And David's help came from the hills — not the scenery, but the secret place where, with nobody watching, the lion and the bear had already been beaten; that is why he could step out in public and win.

Scriptures: Psalm 121:1-2

The Christ mind and the pioneer spirit

The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep, and the shepherd spirit in a man reverses every earthly priority: an assistant pastor who declined a hospital call to see his wife first is answered gently — the appreciation is real, but when somebody needs you, every earthly relationship takes second place. He expounds the mind of Christ: the servant who subjected himself to death and was given the name above every name, every knee bowing — that is the mind to be in us, and we cannot back up from it. His own father is the pioneer portrait: a man who wore second-hand suits with wide lapels so the rest of the money could go to the work of the Lord, teased by a lady's will into monthly instalments lest he give it all to the missionaries at once. The hireling flees when the wolf comes; the shepherd stays. He tells of a teenage boy in Africa who threw his own body between a lion and his flock and, waking in hospital, asked first whether his sheep were all right.

Revival is scriptural

The close is a chain of directed readings, the house answering antiphonally as the texts are read at his direction. The harvest first: do not say four months — lift up your eyes, the fields are already white, and this fourth and fifth generation of Pentecostals is sent to reap where others laboured. Then the word of God likened to the rain: it does not return void, and preachers who have preached pitiful sermons and great sermons alike learn it is not them, it is the word. Then sowing in tears and reaping in joy, doubtless. Then the return unto the Lord who has torn and will heal: after two days He will revive us, in the third day raise us up, and come to us as the latter and former rain — and Urshan presses the nearness of it, for the patience reading that follows fixes the frame: be patient unto the coming of the Lord; the coming of the Lord draweth nigh. Do not be among those whom the preaching of His coming no longer stirs. He was eleven when word came home that his oldest sister had received the Holy Ghost and he cried all night under the covers, not ready; the tenderness of a child felt what stoical adults no longer feel. In Amarillo a man under home Bible study could not wait until tomorrow — he came to the prayer meeting that hour and was filled and baptised. God still surprises His people, as He surprised the church that prayed for a prisoner's release and could not believe the knock at the door. A prophetic passage sounds over the closing altar moment, and he calls the house to stand and praise; his final charge rides inside the closing song: do not go back to your place of ministry without falling in love with the Lord all over again, and without a consciousness of the needs of souls.

Scriptures: John 4:35, 38; Isaiah 55:10-11; Psalm 126:5-6; Hosea 6:1-3; James 5:7-8