I FIND it exceedingly happy, as I write on this 4th of January, to cast my mind back on a day exactly forty years ago, when, by God’s rich grace, the greatest joy and blessing which mortal man can know, was made my own. On that day — to His eternal praise be it said — He saved and made known to me His Son, as my own blessed Saviour. “And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3).
The 4th of January 1862 was the dawn of that life in my soul.
And believe me, dear reader, there can be no moment of more profound importance in our personal history than that in which God thus makes Himself known as a Saviour-God. Not to know Him thus is to be in spiritual death and darkness as well as in constant danger of banishment from His presence under the judgment of “the Great White Throne”!
Again I say this moment is of supreme importance to everyone.
The last breathings of that great revival of ‘59 and ‘60 were just passing away, leaving, nevertheless, hundreds if not thousands of souls who had been truly “born again,” many of whom remain to this present, many have fallen asleep and are now “absent from the body but present with the Lord,” and not a few, alas! alas! who have turned back, like the dog or the sow, only to bring discredit on the Name in which they had professed to believe.
When I first heard of that revival I regarded it, as did many, with suspicion and contempt. It seemed only a bit of religious fanaticism — an ephemeral craze which would soon die out. But, with all its defects, God was in it! Very much of the work was that of His Spirit.
Personally I saw but little of it. I was urged to attend evangelistic meetings. I only attended one, and received no divine impression. It appeared to me only excitement. Still, God was moving outside of meetings. “The wind bloweth where it listeth.” He acts in a grace that is sovereign. So in my case.
“Are you converted?” was the question put to me by one who had a very deep interest in my whole life and conduct.
“No,” I replied, with a feeling of anger — nor did I want to be. Conversion meant, I fancied, the possibility of heaven at last, by the sacrifice of every worldly pleasure meanwhile. And that no young man could dream of. I, of course, wanted the world, and not God. Sorry preference! And yet that plain question, so kindly meant and tenderly uttered, was God’s arrow of conviction. “Except ye be converted... ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3), reverberated in my now awakened conscience, demonstrating the awful and only alternative, viz., “the damnation of hell,” until I felt that I stood on a point where decision for Christ or the world was imperative. To halt between such opinions is fatal. To choose the world is to be damned forever — to turn by grace to the Lord is, not the mere possibility of heaven by-and-by, but present pardon and the assured knowledge of God, and therefore incomparable joy.
That evening, as I came all alone from a walk in the country to the camp at Colchester, where I happened to be quartered, God brought home to my conscience the word — “What shall a man give in exchange for his soul? “A serious question indeed!
Reader, what shall you give for yours? Were you to gain the whole world, or any fraction of it that you might desire, at the cost of your soul, you would be left at the end in poverty, in hell, and in misery! The risk is far too fearful.
And thus I felt that evening under God’s solemn appeal. What should I give in exchange?
Did I attain to the height of my military ambition, and die without Christ, my “castle in the air” would prove to be, I clearly foresaw, but bitter disappointment, and my expectations a delusion at the close. Then which should it be? Christ and His cross, or the world and its pleasures — one or other it must be. The issues were for eternity!
But would He take one who now felt himself a guilty sinner. The question of choice was not all on my side. I was the beggar, the suppliant! Would He show mercy? I recalled the words — “Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out.” Light overspread my troubled heart. “The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 12:10). So He made even me welcome And never did a sinner, young or old, rich or poor, thus fly to Him but surely to find Him a perfect and blessed Saviour.
God’s grace and man’s guilt are divinely correlative. The love of God, the blood of Christ, and the grace of the Holy Spirit, win the heart, purge the conscience, and sustain the spirit of him who believes.
Hence we are “kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation” (1 Peter 1:5). And for this keeping power — the power of God which keeps the believer, whether for one year or forty, in our journey across the desert to the bright heavenly Homeland, the Father’s House, and the presence of the Lord at His coming — we are as much indebted to Him as for the saving grace which met us at first, and brought us “out of darkness into His Marvelous light,” weaning us from “the pleasures of sin which are but for a season” for those which are at God’s right hand for evermore.
May I appeal to you, dear unsaved reader, to consider your eternal future. If you follow the “course of this world,” then you must accept its awful doom. If, by the power of divine love and grace, you would follow the Lord Jesus, then seek to do so wholeheartedly, humbly, and faithfully. You have but one brief life! It flies apace. Your day must speedily close.
Remember that “the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared to the glory that shall be revealed to us” (Rom. 8:18), and that the life which carries the greatest moral dignity — the brightest, most useful, most calm and joyful — is that which has Christ for its grand commanding object.
J. W. S.