THERE are some cases of conversion to God through His grace that one almost fears to relate, lest it should lead souls to indifference about their condition before God until they come to a sick or death bed. We would affectionately warn the unconverted reader not to allow what we are about to relate to have that effect. In the first place, you do not know that you will have a sick-bed, and it was only last week, in this town where we are living, that there were three funerals one afternoon, all sudden deaths: all young men launched into eternity without a moment’s notice. Then, again, the Lord has said that He is coming QUICKLY, and it is only those that are ready who will be taken up to be with the Lord. We would therefore earnestly press upon you the importance of being READY. “Behold, now is the accepted time; behold, now is the day of salvation.”
T., whose conversion we would briefly relate, had lived sixty years without Christ, and had frequently given very decided expression to the enmity in his heart to God. This world was everything to him, and though God broke in upon him from time to time, and took one after another from his family circle, yet his conscience was not reached by these dealings of God, nor did he turn to God in his troubles. It is well, dear reader, to remember that when God speaks to us in various ways, it should exercise our conscience. If we take no heed to these things, He sometimes uses very severe measures to bring us to Himself. Thus it was in the case of T. He had just retired, as he thought, to spend the remainder of his days in a comfortable little country home, but the first night he arrived there he was taken with a serious illness, from which there was no hope of recovery, and it was during this illness that he was brought to face his condition as a lost sinner before God. His disease soon reduced him to a poor emaciated wreck, and when we first saw him he at once said it was a “thorough break up.” When asked what was to come after the break up, he said he was earnestly crying to the Almighty, and hoped it would be “all right.” This delusion is a very common one, that if we are only earnest in our crying to God, this is enough, but it really means that we would like to forget our past life, and hope God will forget it too. This ground, we assured T., would not do, and that it would not be “all right”; that God was just and holy, and that the long dark history of his life must be faced, and his sin and guilt cleared away, before he could be fit for God’s presence.
We would earnestly press this upon the unsaved reader. That it is a very real thing to have to do with God about our state as lost sinners, and that it is on this ground alone that Christ can become a Saviour to any of us.
But to return to T. The next morning we saw him again, when he referred to the conversion of the previous day, and, with deep emotion, he said the review of his past life was a painful one, and asked the question if I thought the Lord would save him, adding, “Jesus did come to die for sinners, didn’t He?”
It was, indeed, quite a new sound to hear the precious name of Jesus come from his lips, to hear him speak of the Lord Jesus, who came down from heaven to die for sinners, to suffer for sin, “the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.”
Circumstances took me away from poor T., so that I did not see him again; but not many days after I learned the good news that he was full of peace and happiness, not on the ground of his earnestness in crying to God, but through simple faith in the Lord Jesus.
A Christian friend had called to see him a few days after my last visit to him. He found him rejoicing in the Lord, with a deep sense of the grace that had met him, and of the preciousness of “that blessed Saviour,” as he said, “who had taken in hand, and saved such a poor, helpless, wicked old wreck as he was.” But this is just like the blessed Lord! He saves fully, freely, and eternally all who come to Him as poor, hopeless, helpless sinners. Has He saved you?
W. H.