Gertie and May were cousins and they lived in England. They had been playmates from their earliest years and were the best of friends. When school days came, they started off together, tripping merrily along the country lane, strewn with daisies, to the little schoolhouse on the corner. They were classmates, and often on their way home they lingered long, talking of the things they planned to do when they grew up to be big girls.
May’s parents decided to emigrate to Canada, to live on a farm in Manitoba where some of their neighbors had already gone before. It was a great sorrow to the girls to have to part, and many a long talk they had planning how their friendship might be kept up, while they were far away from each other. They would write a weekly letter to each other, and then one day Gertie would call up her cousin on the trans-ocean telephone, or some such communication. Such were the daydreams of the two girls.
May and her parents crossed the ocean and settled in their new home, when an event took place in Gertie’s life that neither of them had counted on. What do you think this was? I will tell you: it was her conversion—the greatest event that can possibly take place in any boy or girl’s life.
Do you not think so? If not, then I am sure you have not yet experienced what real conversion is. Gertie was saved. She had received Jesus Christ as her Saviour, and she openly confessed Him as her Lord among her classmates. The very first one she thought of after she was saved was her cousin May in far-off Canada.
“I wish I could telephone her now,” she said to her mother. “Wouldn’t I ring up May and give her a surprise! And I wouldn’t hang up and let her go until I had told her how to be saved and happy too.”
However, in the absence of a telephone, a long, earnest letter was written by Gertie and sent to May, telling her the whole story, how that she had been made anxious about her soul’s salvation, by hearing an address on “The Great White Throne.” She told of how she had tried to make herself love God and could not, and then she learned that God loved her just as she was, and gave His Son to die for her. She closed with an earnest appeal to May to trust herself to Jesus “and He would save her.”
How beautiful to see a girl so newly saved desiring the salvation of her companion! This is what happens when the love of God fills the heart. There is nothing else that can produce it. All who have been saved by the Lord Jesus long to see others, especially their friends and companions, saved. I wonder if you have been converted? If not, why not? The way is clear; Jesus has died, God welcomes you, the door of heaven is open. The terms are easy: come just as you are, with all your sins, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” The time is Now. See that you do not linger or put it off. There is danger in delay.
ML 01/24/1965