Paul's great goal was not just to teach or improve people. He wanted to save them. Anything less would have been failure to him. He wanted hearts made new, sins forgiven, lives made holy. Saved! That was the word that drove him.

Have we aimed for anything less in our Christian work? Then let us change course immediately. What good will it do on judgment day to have educated and moralized people if they stand before God unsaved? Blood-red will our hands be if we spent our lives on lesser goals and forgot that people are perishing.

Paul understood the absolute ruin of humanity's natural condition. He didn't try to educate people out of it. He tried to save them from it. He saw men and women sinking into hell, and he didn't waste time talking about refining their manners. He talked about rescuing them from the wrath to come.

To reach them, he threw himself into the work with relentless energy. He spread the gospel everywhere. He warned people. He pleaded with them to be reconciled to God. His prayers were desperate and his work never stopped. Saving souls was his consuming passion, his driving ambition, his divine calling. He became a servant to everyone, working himself to the bone for the human race, feeling actual pain in his soul if he wasn't preaching the gospel.

He set aside his own preferences to avoid putting up barriers. He bent on matters that didn't matter. As long as people would receive the gospel, he didn't argue about forms or ceremonies. The gospel was everything to him. Everything! If he could save even some, he would count himself satisfied. This was the crown for which he strove, the only reward that mattered after all his labor and sacrifice.

Dear reader, have you and I lived to win souls at this same costly price? Does this same consuming desire burn in us? If not, why not? Jesus died for sinners. Can't we at least live for them? Where is our compassion? Where is our love for Christ, if we don't burn for what burns his heart—the salvation of lost people?

O Lord, saturate us through and through with an undying zeal for the souls of men!