There was a penny, lying on the floor, a little brown penny. Andrew had not often had a penny of his own, and so he quickly slipped it into his pocket, and went back to his play.
But what a weighty penny it was! Surely a little boy never had such a heavy pocket before. Even with his hand over that little round lump, it was still more than he could bear. He slipped out to the end of the garden, scraped a hole at the foot of the apple tree, and buried the money. Now the weight would be gone.
But it wasn’t. It must have been his conscience that bothered him so much, for even when he went to bed, that penny still weighed heavily upon him. Maybe you have taken a penny, or something more than that, in your life, and it scarcely bothered you at all. Maybe you think Andrew was a foolish child. Let me tell you this, dear reader, that if your sins do not bother you now, they will bother you in hell for all eternity.
Andrew lay in bed, thinking of the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew, which his Mother had read to him in the morning, and these were the words that troubled him, “He... digged in the earth, and hid his lord’s money” (verse 18). Over and over again the words repeated themselves with the awful sentence which follows later. “Cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (verse 30).
At last, Andrew could bear it no longer. It was a warm summer night, and the little fellow climbed out of bed, slipped out the back door, and down the stone path in the moonlight. He scraped up the penny, crept in softly on his little bare feet and laid it on the floor, right where he had found it.
Now, was the sin all patched up? Oh, no! Even that does not undo what we have done. No one in the world knew of Andrew’s sin, but God did. And so the little fellow confessed it at once to the One he had sinned against. Andrew knows that God has blotted that sin out, because the Lord Jesus bore the punishment for it on Calvary’s cross.
Andrew told the whole story to his mother in the morning. He is a man now, and a happy man too, but he does not forget the sting of his conscience that night, nor the joy of God’s forgiveness.
Do your sins trouble you, my reader? Our sins troubled the Lord Jesus when He suffered and died for sin at Calvary. if you shake off the thought of them now, you will know the misery of a stinging conscience forever and ever.
ML 02/28/1954