At 11:40 p.m. Sunday night, April 14, 1912, the great ocean liner, S. S. Titanic, on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York, with 2,223 passengers and crew aboard, struck an iceberg in the North Atlantic. At 2:20 a.m. the mighty ship, hitherto declared “unsinkable,” went down carrying with her 832 passengers and 685 of the crew.
The vessel seemed to go down stem first and finally to sink in almost a vertical position with her propellers out of the water. The band played “Nearer, My God to Thee” on the deck as the ship went down.
The S. S. Carpathia, fifty-six miles away, picked up the S.O.S. wireless call, and steaming at full speed to the rescue, arrived about 5:30 a.m. She picked up the survivors in lifeboats and rafts, while a few were still clinging to wreckage.
Some three or four years after the Titanic went down, a young Scotchman rose in a meeting in Hamilton, Canada and told this story. He said: “I was on the Titanic that night she sank. Drifting alone on a spar in the icy water on that awful night, a wave brought John Harper of Glasgow near me. He, too, was holding onto a piece of the wreck.
“Man, are you saved?” he shouted. " ‘No, I’m not!’ I replied.
" ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved,’ he called back.
" The waves bore him away into the darkness; but, strange to say, a little later he was washed back alongside of me again.
" ‘Are you saved now?’ he called out.
" ‘No!’ I replied. ‘I cannot honestly say that I am.’
“Once more he repeated the verse, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.’
There and then, alone in the darkness with two miles of water under me, in my desperation I cried to Christ to save me. I believed on Him and was saved. I was John Harper’s last convert.”
“A few minutes later I heard this man of God exclaim, “I’m going down; I’m going down! No, I’m going up!’ Then loosing his hold he sank and was gone.”
What does it mean to “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ"? It is to take Him as your Saviour, realizing that your sins are taking you down to judgment and eternal woe, and that He is your only hope of salvation. But He has died in your stead, and if you trust Him as your Saviour, God will forgive and blot out all your sins and give you eternal life. Christ is the lifeboat, waiting to save, and there’s room for you, too.
John Harper’s niece, one of the passengers saved when the Titanic went down, gives the following account of her uncle: “When we went to look for him at about six o’clock, we found him earnestly talking to a young man That evening, before we retired, we went on deck and there was still a glint of red in the West. I remember him saying, ‘It will be beautiful in the morning.’ We then went down to the staterooms; we read from the Bible and prayed, and so he left us.”
ML-03/25/1979