As I was visiting one afternoon, I found a man at home on the sick list. After the usual preliminary salutation and sympathy, and hope for his recovery, I got a straight talk with him.
“Do you ever read the Bible, my friend?”
“No,” he said, “that isn’t much in my line.”
“Have you a Bible?”
“Yes, somewhere, I think.”
“Well,” I said, “let me have a look at it.” He went to a cupboard, rummaged among some rubbish which looked like paper for lighting fires. He found the Bible and handed it to me. I opened it and looked at it. It was well thumbed and marked.
“Whose Bible was this?”
“It was my mother’s.”
“Then your mother was a godly woman and read and loved her Bible?” To which he agreed. “Now, my friend, I want you to begin to read your mother’s Bible. I will mark a few passages and turn the leaves down so that you can find and read them after I am gone.” One was:
“Come unto Me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”; and another:
“Him that cometh to Me I will in no wise cast out.” Having explained to him the way of salvation, I said:
“Do you ever pray?”
“No,” he said.
“Salvation is worth having, but you must accept it.” It is a free gift from God through Christ.
I wished him good afternoon and left him to think the matter over, intending to go and see him again. Strange to say, I entirely forgot him, and I can only account for it, not to excuse myself, but as the after-result proved that God, by His Holy Spirit, might perfect His work Himself.
It was some time after, and I had been away from home and just returned, that my maid said a man had sent to ask me to come and see him. I could not recall his name. I set off at once to visit, as I thought, an entire stranger. When I arrived, it was the man who had found his mother’s Bible. He had moved from the street where I first saw him. He said with a radiant face:
“I am so glad to see you. I sent for you because I have some good news to tell you. I thought over what you said the day you visited me. I read the passages you marked for me, and as I was in bed one night something seemed to say to me, ‘Salvation is worth asking for, get out of bed and pray.’ It was in the middle of the night, and I got out and knelt down by my bedside and asked the Lord to save me, and He has done it. This is the good news I wanted to tell you.”
We had a thanksgiving meeting then and there. He never lost the joy of salvation, and went to rejoin his dear mother some time after.
Now, for the encouragement of mothers who are praying or do pray for their children, I have related the above case. It was in answer to his mother’s prayers. It was God who sent me that afternoon to remind him of his mother’s Bible. That was all He wanted me to do, and His Holy Spirit perfected His work.
I will add just one other wonderful instance of a mother’s prayers reaching her son in the interior of Australia. I received a letter one day. It bore the postmark of Australia. It was from a man in the bush asking me if I could tell him if his parents were still alive. He left home many years ago and never wrote to them, and now he wanted to tell them he had been converted out there. I traced his aged father and told him the joyful news, but his mother had died only a few months before, and her last prayer with almost her last breath was for that lost son. She had been the means also of the conversion of her husband, who at one time was a slave to the demon, strong drink. Neither of these mothers lived to see their prayers answered, but they were.
Mothers, pray on, read your Bible and let your faith rest upon the promises made to you there. Heaven will reveal how they were answered. His promises are signed in the name of Jesus and with His blood.
You may have heard of a woman who used to put the letters “T. P.” in the margin of her Bible opposite the promises. When asked what they meant:
“O,” she said, “Tried and Proved.”
Mothers, make time to read it. I know how difficult it is for busy mothers who work more like sixteen hours a day than eight. As I write this I can seem to see the happy face of a dear mother who used to get up at five o’clock to have an hour with her Saviour and her Bible before she got the breakfast for her husband and boys, who in those days had to start for work at six o’clock.
Perhaps you cannot preach, but you can pray and practice. A young man said that is what his mother did, and it led him to his mother’s Saviour.