The church was established as the evangelizing agency of the Kingdom. The chief reason for the existence of the church is that it might be a recruiting station for the armies of Prince Immanuel. Within its walls, in its services, the saints were to learn the message of salvation, to be inspired by its ordinances, its rituals, its songs, to go afield to batter down the gates of hell, to rescue precious souls from the doom and damnation, the curse and condemnation of their sins. A church that is not evangelistic cannot be in the full sense of the word evangelical. A church that is not striving with all of its interests for the salvation of immortal souls, no matter how fundamental its doctrines, how orthodox its practices, is backslidden, disobedient, dishonoring, and dishonored.
Hyman Appelman (1902 - 1983)
Hyman Appelman was born in Russia to orthodox Jewish parents who moved to America in 1914. Appelman became a trial lawyer in Chicago. At age twenty-eight he was converted to Christianity, causing his parents to disown him. His father said to him, "When your sides come together from hunger and you come crawling to my door, I will throw you a crust of bread as I would any other dog."Feeling a definite call to preach, he attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and became one of the greatest evangelists of his generation. Dr. Appelman made eight or nine trips around the world and several trips to Russia as an evangelist. It was hard to find a day in his long ministry of fifty-three years that he was not preaching somewhere. He was the author of some forty books.
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