Individual Work
Individual Work
Service is not merely meeting with groups or delivering lessons in classes. There is also individual work, which has its importance and its seriousness.
The Lord Christ met with the multitudes, and He also had His individual work.
When He delivered the Sermon on the Mount, He delivered it to the multitudes. Likewise His words to the five thousand men, besides women and children, whom He hosted. In the miracle of healing the paralytic, the house was crowded and could not contain them. The crowds also pressed upon Him at the time of His meeting with Zacchaeus, when the woman with the flow of blood touched Him, and when He was preaching from the boat…
All this crowding did not prevent the Lord from individual work.
He had His individual work with Nicodemus secretly at night. He had His individual work with Zacchaeus, with Mary Magdalene, with Mary and Martha the sisters of Lazarus, with Simon the Pharisee and the woman who washed His feet with her tears. Likewise His individual work with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well. This also includes His meeting with the man born blind after they cast him out of the synagogue, His meeting with the sick man at Bethesda, and His search for the lost sheep.
His individual work also included His meeting with each of the holy apostles, whether in their calling or in private conversations.
After the Resurrection, as He appeared to more than five hundred brethren, He appeared individually to Peter because he needed that meeting; He appeared to Mary Magdalene and to the two disciples of Emmaus. He also appeared to Saul of Tarsus in an individual work…
Likewise, the holy apostles had both their general work and their individual work.
Even the epistles they wrote—some were to all the believers in general, and some were to individuals, such as the Epistle to Philemon and the two Epistles to Timothy. These epistles also had their general impact.
You also, in your spiritual and evangelistic work, have your general work, and you have an important duty in individual service toward persons…
What, then, is the importance of this individual work in service?
General work contains general words addressed to all, and you do not know the extent of their effect.
But individual work is specific work that touches particular cases, addresses a specific problem, and strives to solve it. It is therefore focused work.
Individual work is often a frank and realistic session, more effective than general speech. There is also another great benefit.
In public lectures, people come to the church. But in individual work, the church goes to them—especially to those who do not go.
Thus individual work appears as a sign of love and concern, whether you sought the person, or God placed him in your path, or he came to you. Your mere concern for him, your attempt to solve his problems and lead him to God, is evidence of care and love…
It is also evidence of your appreciation of the value of a single soul.
Individual work contains humility, because it is unseen work.
Public sermons are visible and known to all, but individual work involves hiddenness and humility, for it is giving time and attention to one particular case and being content with it without seeking the multiplied fruit that appears in large meetings.
Yet individual work may lead to general work…
The one with whom you succeed in individual work will enter into the life of the Church and its meetings, and perhaps even serve in its activities.
And sometimes an individual work may have a tremendously powerful result…
It was an individual work that the Lord Christ did with Saul of Tarsus when He met him in a private encounter on the road to Damascus. Yet that meeting had a profoundly deep impact on the history of the Church, for it brought forth the Apostle Paul, who labored in preaching more than all the apostles, and through whose hands the Gospel spread with abundant power.
Individual work may at times have a greater reward because of its difficulty.
It is very easy for a person to deliver a sermon or a lesson, but the difficult thing is to meet in individual work with a soul that has its own circumstances and practical obstacles in the way of the Lord. He may spend a long time with that soul, discussing, searching, answering thoughts, seeking solutions, and confronting problems. Therefore his patience in this work has its reward, because the solution was not achieved easily.
He may not even find a solution, and thus his soul becomes humble if it had been self-confident, or the problem may lead him to more prayers.
Thus we see that individual work is a school in which a person is trained in many virtues, because it brings him into the heart of practical life, far from theoretical talk and abstract ideals.
Individual work may be with one person, one family, two friends, a small group of friends, or any small group sharing one common situation…
And you, blessed son, do you have experience in individual work?
Have you practiced this service with a relative, a friend, a colleague at work or study, or someone you have met?
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