A gospel meeting had just been held at a prison. At the close of the service one of the wardens came to the speaker and told him that a man on death row would like to see him. When a meeting had been arranged, the Christian found himself facing a man he thought he had never seen before. But the prisoner told him, “You don’t know me, sir, but I know you. I recognized your name as soon as I heard it.”
“Where did I meet you?” he asked.
“Do you remember speaking at a seaman’s mission and a man staying behind to talk to you? He was real anxious about his soul, and you urged him to accept Jesus as His Savior. I am that man. I put it off, and as I left the building, I met two men in the street who were out of work like myself. They said that if we went to Harlem we might get work.
“In the evening we noticed a peddler going home and thought he might have money with him. We decided to rob him. One of us hit him-just to knock him out-but he died from his injuries. The three of us were tried and convicted of murder, and we are to be executed on Friday. If I had accepted Jesus that night, I would have saved my body as well as my soul!”
How sad. How terribly sad! The man had been awakened to a sense of his guilt and peril by the speaker at the mission, but he delayed accepting God’s pardoning mercy and was overcome by Satan.
The worst sin one can commit is to disbelieve the Lord Jesus Christ. The crowning sin is the fact that God, by His servants, offers His great salvation as a free gift through simple faith in the finished work of Christ, and they will not accept it. They say it is “too easy” or “too simple” a way of being saved, and they must “do their part.”
The unbeliever does not need until the Day of Judgment to be condemned; like the murderer on death row, he is already under condemnation. Why not now believe on the Savior and be eternally saved? Why continue calling God a liar: “He that believeth not God hath made Him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of His Son” (1 John 5:1010He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself: he that believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of his Son. (1 John 5:10)). Is that true of you?
But God has no pleasure in your death. He desires that you should believe on Christ and be rescued from eternal sorrow. Believe on Him who loved you and gave Himself for you, and you will be “justified from all things.”