“A soul winner is someone who prays for the lost and show love to the unchurched,” says Pastor Aries Zulkarnain.
Christmas is a season of harvest, a season for salvation, says Aries Zulkarnain, City Harvest Church’s executive pastor. Over the weekend of Dec 1 and 2, he shared a motivating message on being soul winners.
“There is only one soul Savior, but we are all called to be soul winners,” said the pastor. “While it is God’s job to save their souls, it’s our job to gather them into the house of God.”
He shared that in order to be effective soul winners, one needs to be able to first present the Gospel well.
Pastor Aries then drew on the analogy of a cross: the vertical beam represents a believer’s relationship with God through prayer, and the horizontal beam, which represents one’s relationship with others.
“A soul winner is someone who prays for the lost and shows love to the unchurched.”
LIFT UP YOUR EYES AND LOOK AT THE HARVEST
John 4:34-35 is a verse often used to talk about soul winning. Pastor Aries explained that back in Jesus’ time, people adopted an agricultural mindset: to wait for the right season to bring in the harvest. Jesus wanted them to have a change in perspective. He wanted them to see the harvest through spiritual eyes, and realise that the harvest is always present.
The verse says to “lift up your eyes” and “look at the fields”. Pastor Aries shared that oftentimes, the thing that preventing people from seeing the harvest, is not its potential, but their perspective.
In order to change one’s perspective, one must first “look up”, that is, to see the harvest through God’s perspective. Secondly, for a change in perspective to happen, one must “look at them”, that is, to reach out to the lost and love them.
Outreach to the lost “must not be motivated by passion, but by compassion, as passion is temporary, and therefore unsustainable,” noted the pastor. “Compassion cannot be forced. Compassion only comes when God sovereignly places His heart into your heart, and you begin to see the lost through His eyes. When someone has compassion, they don’t need to be instructed to win the lost.”
In Matthew 9:35-38, Jesus instructed the disciples to pray not for the harvest, but for laborers to be sent out into the fields.
Pastor Aries asserted that the real issue is not a lack of laborers, but a shortage of compassionate laborers—believers are in a state of apathy and lethargy when it comes to soul-winning. “The only antidote to apathy and lethargy is compassion, and the best way to build compassion is through prayer,” he said.
The Bible says that when Jesus saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion. Jesus viewed the multitudes differently from the way the disciples saw them. Jesus saw the multitudes as sheep without a shepherd, whereas the disciples saw the multitudes as problems.
“True compassion is both pity and mercy, accompanied by a desire to change things,” said Pastor Aries. “True compassion moves us to do something.”
He added that being a soul winner requires the ability to show love to strangers, to the unloved. When Jesus told the disciples to look up and see the harvest, the group of people he wanted them to see was the Samaritans.
“To the Jews, these were unclean people, unfit to enter the Kingdom of God. But true soul-winning is showing love, even to people you don’t like,” he explained.
“On Christmas, God decided to make peace with man. Luke 2:14 says He made peace by giving goodwill, which means a disposition to kindness and compassion. No strings attached.”
In closing, Pastor Aries encouraged the church to show reach out to that “Samaritan” in one’s life—someone who may seem like he would never come to church—and to see him through God’s eyes and love him with God’s heart. He ended the service by getting the congregation to think of people they would invite to CHC’s Christmas services, and to commit them to the Lord on prayer cards.
