Winning souls is not what you think. It is
not something that happens on Lottery day, with a soul being the prize. Many
sermons have been given over the years that miss the point of this verse.
Let’s start with a refresher course in
Hebrew poetry and the parallel structure. These two phrases are connected. They
are not independent. The meaning of the first phrase ties into and helps us
understand the second. So lets start with the first phrase.
When someone lives a righteous life, a life
that honors the LORD and seeks His will here on earth, then there is a
particular kind of fruit their life produces. The opposite is also true. If we
live a life of selfishness and anger, our lives will have a particular flavor
to them.
The righteous person gives off life. They
are experiencing it and others who happen to be around them can taste this
fruit. You can’t help but be positively influenced when you are in their
presence for any period of time.
And the fruit of their life is something
that will produce even more fruit in the future: a tree. It is not that their
influence stops when they die, their influence has produced a tree that will
continue to give life as it grows.
Winning a soul is about exercising positive
influence on someone’s eternal destiny. It is not about passing out a tract, or
shouting on a street corner. It is about investing in the life of another in a
way that their life becomes that tree, feeding future generations. The fruit of
our life in the soul of another is not just life for them. That is a given. It
is about reproduction. The life we experience gets passed on to others in a way
that they can pass it along to the next generation.
The seed that grew in us (the fruit) gets
planted in another’s soil and it grows to the point that it produces life (a
tree). That is what “winning a soul” is about. It is about investment in another
to the point of reproduction and maturity.
In whom are you investing like this?