A Scotch botanist went out to the hills one bright day to study his favorite flowers. Presently he picked a heather bell and put it upon the glass at his microscope. He stretched himself at length upon the ground and began to look at it through the microscope. Moment after moment passed and still he lay there gazing, entranced by the beauty of the little flower.
Suddenly a shadow fell upon the ground where he lay. Looking up he saw a tall, weather-beaten shepherd looking down with a smile of half-concealed amusement at a man spending his time looking through a glass at so common a thing as a heather bell. Without a word the botanist reached up and handed the shepherd the microscope. He placed it to his eye and began to look. For a long time he gazed in enraptured silence.
When he handed back the glass, the botanist noticed that the tears were streaming down his bronzed cheeks and falling on the ground at his feet.
“What’s the matter?” asked the botanist. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Beautiful?” said the shepherd. “It is beautiful beyond all words. But I’m thinking of how many thousands of them I have trodden under foot!”
I wonder how many opportunities to accept Christ you have trodden under foot in your lifetime.
You have sixty NOWS every hour of your life. That means a thousand for the waking hours of each day.
Opportunity, with her millions of NOWS, will be against you in that last great day of judgment, if you reject Christ. I seem to hear her voice on the witness stand:
“A thousand times a day I came to him. I was with him in the tender hours of youth. I came to him in the pleadings of his mother. I drew near to him in the hours of bereavement and sorrow. I spoke to him in the tender solicitations of devoted friends. I touched him in the prayers and pleadings of his dearest ones. I sounded the warning hundreds of times from the gospel meeting. I whispered to him in the night watches as he lay in the silence of his own thoughts and the convictions of his own conscience. Yet for all these years he has unceasingly trodden me under foot.”
There are souls in the awful place of the lost who would give a million worlds for just one more of the precious NOWS you are treading under foot. And when you see these trampled NOWS in the light of eternity you too will weep with unspeakable agony in the realization that not one of them will ever return.
Dear reader, do not trifle with that little word, “NOW.” NOW is God’s time to be saved!
“Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life.” John 5:2424Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life. (John 5:24).
ML 12/23/1956