PASSING along the highway towards a large county town, I was met and accosted by a strong-looking young man of the navvy type. Though confessedly “on the road,” his dress and manner marked him as no mere mendicant.
It was raining at the time; but feeling an interest in the poor fellow, I halted with the hope of being enabled to say a few words that God would be pleased to bless to his soul.
After speaking of his distress through want of work, he mentioned that he was “making for Deptford,” where he thought he might obtain employment.
“Are you making for heaven?” I inquired.
Evidently taken a little by surprise by such a question, it was with some slight hesitation that the young man replied, “I don’t know. I have not been able to go to any place lately.”
Perceiving that, in his opinion, going to a “place of worship” (so called) was somehow connected with going to heaven, I said, “It is not so much a place as a Person that we have to go to. When you were at home, what made the place home to you? Was it not the presence of your mother?”
He acknowledged that it surely was; and I continued, “So heaven would not be heaven to us, if there were no Saviour to welcome us there.”
The young man listened very thoughtfully while, in a few brief sentences, I spoke of the love of God in giving His own Son to die for us, and of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ in becoming the sacrifice for our sins. I likewise set before him the necessity of a change of condition in the sinner; and having in my hand a copy of the Gospel by John, open at the third chapter, upon which I had been meditating as I walked along, I read to him some of the words of the Lord Jesus to His nocturnal visitor Nicodemus: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again [anew], he cannot see the kingdom of God.... Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (verses 3, 5, 6).
With another remark or two, after putting into the young man’s hand the trifle for which he had asked, I parted from him; not without a prayer, as I proceeded on my journey, that God would graciously guide his feet into the way of life.
To set a value, however small, upon place-going, commandment-keeping, or ordinance-observing, as a supposed means of the soul’s salvation, is a snare and a delusion. Let me affectionately urge any one who has been doing what I have just alluded to, to read and ponder for himself that same precious third chapter of John’s Gospel. But do not approach it, like Nicodemus did the Lord of glory, with a “We know.” Rather seek to receive, with a believing, child-like mind, those unspeakably gracious words of the One who “knew all things,” and who there presents Himself as the sent Saviour, the sole Saviour, and the all-sufficient Saviour. “He that believeth in Him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” C.