ONE day, not very long ago, I met Ethel, and after we had known one another a little while, she told me that she was a very different person from the Ethel of six months before, and that a summer holiday had changed her whole life.
She was employed in a convalescent home, and was given a fortnight's holiday in the year, but being an orphan and having no home she went each summer with a friend to some seaside resort.
One year she and her friend decided to go to a holiday home at Brighton. When she arrived she was given a welcome and found herself in nice surroundings. The time passed pleasantly enough, though Ethel heard things at morning prayer-time which very much surprised her.
There seemed to be two classes of girls in the home. One class read and studied their Bibles, and loved going to the meetings held in the house. They were to all appearances very happy, and were often round the piano singing hymns together. The other class was always out; they did not want to be bothered with meetings, they would say. Ethel belonged to this latter class. Not being happy she and her friends spent their time trying to find happiness, whilst the other class were so happy that they loved to do as the Bible says, Is any merry? let him sing psalms." (James 5:1313Is any among you afflicted? let him pray. Is any merry? let him sing psalms. (James 5:13).)
Ethel's great idea was to get as much fun out of her holiday as she could. She forgot that she might die one day, and that she had no passport for another world, and that no one will ever enter heaven with one spot of sin. She forgot, too, if ever she knew, why she was born into the world. "For thy pleasure," we read, "they are and were created." (Rev. 4:11After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven: and the first voice which I heard was as it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will show thee things which must be hereafter. (Revelation 4:1).) But in spite of trying to get away from the meetings Ethel was much impressed with what she heard of the love of God, and began to think that there were good things to be had which she was missing.
She began to see what a senseless, useless life she was living, just amusing herself and doing her own will, when God's thought for her was that her sins should be forgiven, and that she should do His will, and glorify Him in her pathway here. So she looked on the good things, much as a hungry child without a penny looks in a baker's window, longing for, and really needing food, but unable to buy the smallest bun.
But little by little God's light began to shine into her dark heart, she saw the free-giving of God, and found out that forgiveness was to be had for the asking, because the Lord Jesus had paid such a tremendous price for her salvation that there was nothing left for her, to pay. It was as if a rich gentleman had come along, and seeing the hungry child looking in at the buns and bread in the window, had said, "You look starving, my child, but I have paid for everything in the shop, go in and take what you like; it is all for the hungry and I am sure you are one of them.”
Just as Ethel was about to return to work a letter came from the matron where she was employed saying that she might have another week's holiday, but when she asked the superintendent if she could stay she found that her bed was booked and there was no more room. This was a disappointment, and the superintendent noticing 'her look, said that if she cared to share a room with two others she might stay. This she agreed to do, and found herself in good company, for both of them loved the Lord Jesus Christ, and had found peace and joy in believing on Him. The morning she was leaving, one of them said to her, "Ethel, have you ever given yourself to the Lord?”
“No," she replied.
“You know that He died to put away your sins, won't you give yourself to Him now?’
“I will," Ethel answered from the bottom of her heart, and together they knelt down while she told the Lord Jesus that, as He had given Himself for her, from that moment she would give herself to Him, to belong to Him forever.
It says of the Macedonians that "they first gave their own selves to the Lord" (2 Cor. 8. 5), and this was Ethel's beginning as a child of God. She, like them, definitely gave herself to the Lord.
Later on, one Sunday evening, when she had returned to her work, she told her friends when together what she had done, so that she believed in her heart and confessed with her mouth the Lord Jesus and she was saved from judgment and made a child of God forever.
She knew that she had changed masters, and had passed from Satan to Christ, that she had stepped over the line from darkness to light, and that from being "dead in trespasses and sins" she had been made, by the Spirit of God, alive to Him.
I wonder if you who are reading this have known such a change and can say truthfully—
I thank Thee, Lord, Thou hast revealed
Thy grace, and what Thou art:
And now I come, to Thee I yield
A trusting heart.