"Yes, in a few months it will be forty years ago that I was brought to know the Lord; and I have told my children that if I were to die the only legacy I have to leave them is forty years of prayer. I have been praying for them that long.”
So said a dear old saint to a friend the other day. I thought how beautiful, how grand, how sublime! Think of it—forty long years of a mother's prayers, forty years of pleading with God for her children! How faithful, how diligent! Surely such prayers will be answered.
"Yes," she said, "several are already in the good old way, and I trust the Lord to bring in the others in His own time." Favored children to have such a mother who, though poor in this world's goods, is rich in faith, and rich in communion with God.
Oh, mother, are you thus pleading with God for your children? I see you shake your head and say, "I have never done that"; and, it may be, you never have really prayed for yourself yet. You have never felt your need or seen your condition, if unsaved.
What a dreadful thing, for a mother or a father of a family to be unsaved, and bringing up their children in all the follies and vanities of this wicked world—a whole family going on in the broad road that leadeth to destruction! If this should meet the eye of such, let me entreat you to consider your ways; for "there is a way that seemeth right in the sight of man; but the end thereof are the ways of death." What an end, I say, to all the toils and difficulties, the anxieties and testings of having a family! Death, eternal death!
Oh, how can you, how dare you, bring up your children without Christ? Mothers, fathers, I beseech you, flee from this broad, easy path. It leads to destruction. Look to the Lord Jesus Christ for your own salvation. He alone is able and wiping to save you from eternal death, and to give you eternal life through faith in Him.
Have you heard how earnestly Rahab, the harlot of Jericho, persuaded her father, mother, sisters, and brothers to come into her house as the only place of safety from the destruction that was about to come on the city? They all went in, and were all saved at the taking of the place! I see her earnestness, and I hear her cry: "Father, mother, sisters, brothers, come in, come in!”
Look, believe, and live. You answer me, "Where? What? How?" I say, "Look away unto Jesus. Believe on Him who was nailed to the cross—the One who died in your, the sinner's stead; life eternal will then be yours as a present possession; and in eternity glory with Him forever and ever.”
May the Lord then, my unsaved reader, give you to see your position and condition as before Him—a lost, guilty sinner. May He lead you to trust in and accept the Savior as yours; for it is written in John 3:3636He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him. (John 3:36), "He that believeth on the Son hath everlasting life: and he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the wrath of God abideth on him.”