Jim Davis was a young man who had a beautiful home in the country, but he cared for nothing of the things of God until his dearly-loved young wife died after a short illness.
His heart was broken, and he was bowed with grief as he followed her to the grave. As usual, part of 1 Corinthians 15 was read at the funeral. For the next six weeks that young husband, whether it was wet or fine, went day by day and sat on her grave thinking about her, and quietly reading the last words of a scripture he had heard there. They seemed stamped upon his memory. He kept repeating and reading them to himself over and over again as he sat on the grave.
At last one day he was pondering once more the words, “If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.”
“Yes!” he said, “that’s true, I know I’m in my sins.”
Then he went on in his little Testament: “But now is Christ risen,” and as he read these words he jumped up from the grave and said, “Why, then I must be out of my sins.”
He thanked God that His Spirit had lightened his soul with the real meaning of that sentence, showing him as in a moment that if Christ had not been raised, he was in his sins; but if Christ were raised and he believed it, he was “out of his sins.”
From that day he became an earnest Christian, seeking to live for Him who died for us and rose again.
ML-10/15/1978