A SERVANT of the Lord Jesus Christ, much used in the gospel of the grace of God, was preaching in a Village in one of the midland counties. The passage he preached from was “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” The Lord owned the word, and one of the hearers went home rejoicing in Jesus Christ. She turned to the text in her Bible and read it over. The words which follow struck her attention; they are “and thy house.” Receiving the whole passage in the simplicity of faith, she counted on the Lord for her whole “house.” The Lord had said, “Thou shalt be saved and thy house,” and she believed Him. She was saved now, but her “house” was not. She did not stay to reason, nor to question; but taking God at His word, she expected the salvation of all who were of her “house.” She prayed for them in the confidence which a full persuasion of the immutability of God’s word alone can give, and which reasoning only weakens. As soon as opportunity occurred, she went in her simplicity to her aged parents, who lived in a distant village; but when she got there she could not open her mouth. They knew not “wherefore she had come,” but the Lord knew, and if she could not speak she could pray for them. Her sense of her own weakness only served to cast her more entirely on the Lord; and the fact that on her first visit she was unable to speak, shows she was not one of those bold, talkative persons, who too often mistake the energy of the flesh for that of the Spirit. “A meek and quiet spirit is in the sight of God of great price.” But she soon repeated her visit to her parents’ home. In that same village she had, beside her aged father and mother, four brothers and two sisters, one of the latter being married and having children. She herself, also, had a husband and children at home. All these, with the exception of herself, were unconverted, but what cannot a Divinely implanted faith affect? One after the other, in what order or succession the writer knows not, nor is it of much importance, father and mother, brothers and sisters, the sister’s husband and eldest child, her own husband and eldest daughter, were all brought to Christ. Subsequently her second daughter believed and was saved; and last of all, an aged uncle living in the same village as herself, was “added to the number:” All these are probably still living, witnesses to the power and grace of him who said: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved and thy house.”
Who in the prospect of that most solemn moment, when the trumpet shall sound, and the “assembling shout” shall fall upon our ears, and the archangel’s voice shall summon the sleeping saints from the dust of centuries, —who can hear of such an instance of the power of faith and prayer without earnestly desiring grace to “go and do likewise?”
ML 01/10/1904