I WENT to see a poor woman, who was said to be very ill and quite unprepared to die. After speaking a few words to her, and finding her indifferent as to her state of soul, I turned to her husband who was sitting by, and prevented from going to his work at the coal-pit by slight indisposition. I had never seen him before, but I knew the cottage bore a bad name, so I told him solemnly of his danger in going on without God. But again and again he gave me the same answer, “Yes, we’ve all got a preparation to make.” And when I attempted to show him the terribleness of sin, his guilt in the sight of God, and the folly of doing anything but owning his state as a lost sinner, and accepting God’s grace in meeting him with a Saviour, he would say, “Yes, it’s all quite true, miss,” and the next moment the same words would be on his lips again, “We’ve all got a preparation to make.”
A few weeks afterward I saw a funeral go by, and to my surprise I learned it was this man’s body being carried to the grave; in his end, as far as I could hear, there was no hope. How little he could have thought how short a time he would have to make his preparation, and how awful to have to stand before the great white throne unprepared, and to feel throughout an eternity of misery that he knew whilst on earth, that he was not ready to die. A death without Christ is a terrible thing. It is well to be warned in time.
If you have any thought left of making a preparation to meet God, it skews you have not taken the low place of being good for nothing at all. “The Son of man is come to seek and save that which was lost.” And God says, “I have prepared,” “All things are ready.” May God in His mercy bring you down to own your true state before Him, so that you may prove the wondrous value of the blood of Christ, the only preparation which God has provided for the sinner to fit him for His presence, and may you know what it is to be low enough to accept God’s grace like “little children.”
C. A. W.