A PREACHER was once telling forth God’s message of love, when he noticed several restless children sitting on a front seat, and, in the hope of gaining their attention, he thus addressed them: “I have never seen you before, but I can tell you your names, children.” Immediately they were all attention. “Your name,” he continued, addressing the foremost girl, “is in here,” and he held up his Bible. “It is S.I.N.N.E.R. (sinner), for God says, ‘All have sinned.’”
The service concluded, and the child ran straight home to her father, who was a hardened sinner, saying breathlessly, “Father, I can tell you your name, for it is in the Bible.” “Nonsense,” he replied. “But it is, father,” persisted the child. “What is it, then?” he asked. “It is ‘sinner,’ for God says that ‘all have sinned’: the preacher said so tonight.”
God often uses the feeble things to confound the wise, and that simple, artless message was an arrow of conviction, and was the means of leading that godless father to acknowledge, as the prodigal of old, the solemn but true fact, “I have sinned.” And through God’s boundless grace he shortly afterwards had the glorious knowledge that the Lord had put away his sin by virtue of the all-atoning “blood of Jesus Christ,” which “cleanseth from all sin.”
Have you had personal dealings with God about your sins? Have your lips ever uttered the confession “I have sinned”? Have you ever truly desired the forgiveness of sins? If so we would remind you that:—
“Whoever receiveth the Crucified One,
Whoever believeth on God’s only Son,
A free and a perfect salvation shall have:
For He is abundantly able to save.”
God’s universal remedy for your ruin is Christ: and God’s great, full, and free salvation may be yours, sinner, if you rely upon the work He at Calvary wrought, that the courts of celestial joy and glory could be peopled by sinners—sinners saved by divine grace—those who will shine to the praise of His grace throughout eternity.
A. G.