IT was not until the age of Will: forty-four that Brownlow North was converted. He was playing cards one night, when he was seized with sudden illness, which he himself believed would prove fatal. Turning to his son, he said, “I’m a dead man. Take me upstairs.” Having reached his bed, he threw himself upon it, and began to say to himself, “Now, what will my forty-four years of following the devices of my own heart profit me? In a few minutes I shall be in hell, and what good will all these things do me for which I have sold my soul?”
It was after many days of soul-anguish the light dawned upon his soul. It was in this way. He had risen from his bed, and was reading his Bible. The third chapter of the Epistle to the Romans attracted his attention. “By the deeds of the law shall no flesh be justified in His sight.” This he believed; but the scripture continued, “But now the righteousness of God without the law is manifested, being witnessed by the law and the prophets; even the righteousness of God which is by faith of Jesus Christ unto all, and upon all them that believe: for there is no difference.”
“Striking my book with my hand,” he said when telling the story, “and springing from my chair, I cried, ‘If that scripture is true, I am a saved man! That is what I want, that is what God offers me, that is what I will have!’ God helping, me, it was what I took: ‘The righteousness of God without the law.’
IT IS MY ONLY HOPE.”
On the first page of the New Testament which he began to use on New Year’s Day, 1855 is the affecting inscription, “B. North, a man whose sins crucified the Son of God.”
Thus he learned to rest alone upon the atoning death of Christ for his salvation, and rejoiced in the righteousness of God which was now upon him as a believer.
Could you write beneath your signature,
“My sins crucified the Son of God"?
ML-01/18/1920