living in the midst of godless people, do not try to heal them, they
will infect you. If you do not seek to impress your conviction that
Christ is the Messiah upon an unbelieving generation, the unbelieving
generation will impress upon you its doubts whether He is; and your
lips will falter, and a pallor will come over the complexion of your
love, and your faith will become congealed and turn into ice.

Notice again the simple word which is the most powerful means of
influencing most men.

Andrew did not begin to argue with his brother. Some of us can do that
and some of us cannot. Some of us are influenced by argument and some
of us are not. You may pound a man's mistaken creed to atoms with
sledge-hammers of reasoning, and he is not much the nearer being a
Christian than he was before; just as you may pound ice to pieces and
it is pounded ice after all. The mightiest argument that we can use,
and the argument that we can all use, if we have got any religion in
us at all, is that of Andrew, 'We have found the Messias.'

I recently read a story in some newspaper or other about a minister
who preached a very elaborate course of lectures in refutation of some
form of infidelity, for the special benefit of a man that attended his
place of worship. Soon after, the man came and declared himself a
Christian. The minister said to him, 'Which of my discourses was it
that removed your doubts?' The reply was, 'Oh! it was not any of your
sermons that influenced me. The thing that set me thinking was that a
poor woman came out of the chapel beside me, and stumbled on the
steps, and I stretched out my hand to help her, and she said "Thank
you!" Then she looked at me and said, "Do you love Jesus Christ, my
blessed Saviour?" And I did not, and I went home and thought about it;