At the conclusion of a gospel hour at a convalescent home near a large city, I greeted some of my audience individually, and asked if they knew the Lord Jesus Christ as their own and only Savior. After receiving vague answers from many, I at last spoke to a quiet, elderly man. At my question a bright, happy smile passed over his face and he replied quite decidedly, "I do, sir; and what a change that makes in everything in this world!"
The conversation that ensued convinced me that he was a truly converted man. A few days after this we met at a Bible-reading, and on our way homewards he expressed surprise that the chapter chosen for the reading was the very one he had had at home that morning and from which he was seeking instruction—Romans eight.
"Have you long been converted?" I asked.
"Oh, no, sir; only about five weeks," he replied. Then he told me how it came about.
He had been a religious and moral man all his life, gone regularly to meetings, occasionally to hear the gospel, read, his Bible frequently, and had a respect for divine things. He had always enjoyed excellent health until a few weeks before we met, when he was suddenly seized with an attack of congestion of the lungs and removed to the hospital. His case was a most serious one, and he was told that it might end fatally and quickly.
As he lay awake that night in the hospital he reflected on his alarming condition, made more disturbing by the fact that he might very soon have to meet God. The verse in Hebrews 9 came before him: "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment."
"How can I stand before God?" he asked himself. And then in rapid succession his religion, his morality, his fancied good works passed before his mind; but, brought into God's very presence, they were as quickly dismissed as totally unfit for His holy, all-discerning eye. And in that solemn moment, seeing as God sees, his sins were not more intolerable to him than his fancied good works. There was no presumption about the former, but there was about the latter. His "righteousnesses" were indeed then seen by him to be but "filthy rags." (Isaiah 64:66But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away. (Isaiah 64:6).)
Thus he found that he had absolutely nothing to rest his poor stricken soul upon in God's presence. And thus he was brought to that most blessed crisis when the poor sinner finds out for the first time that there is nothing good in "self," that there is naught that "self" can do to merit life eternal.
He thought to himself, "I must get a Bible." In an agony of mind, expecting momentarily to die and be forever lost, he got out of bed, only to be forced back and carefully restrained by the attendants. He lay there throughout the rest of the night in deep distress until, towards morning, like a ray of light from heaven, that most precious verse in John three stole into his recollection: "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
Ah, it was the Spirit of God in those lonely hours presenting the Word to the poor, fainting soul. As a drowning man clutches the rope cast to him by a friendly hand, this conscience-stricken man asked himself the question: "Why should I not make that verse my own? It says whosoever. I therefore have a right to it. It is the word of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself; He would never deceive me. I will take it," he said; "that 'whosoever' means me. I do believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as the One whom God gave as a ransom for me—His only begotten Son! And, blessed be God, I have everlasting life."