One rainy, dreary day I had walked some little distance, distributing tracts as I went. I was about to turn back, when my attention was arrested by two neat cottages standing side by side. Hesitating at first as to whether time would permit, I determined to hurry on to them and leave at least a simple tract, showing God’s way of salvation.
I knocked at the door of one, and a woman came forward, saying,
“I don’t know you, but will you kindly step inside?”
“I did not mean to stay,” I replied, “but just came to leave you a little paper about the Lord Jesus Christ. Are you saved?”
“I hope so,” she said.
“But on what ground do you hope so? If your soul is not saved, God says you are `without hope and without God in the world.’ What makes you hope?” Looking up, she replied sadly:
“I really can’t answer you, I wish I could.”
“How do you think of getting to heaven, then, for surely no sin can ever enter there. What are you going to do about your sins?”
“Well, I try, I strive and pray.”
“But do you think for all this God will pass over your sins? He is a righteous God, and will ‘by no means clear the guilty.’ “
“O! then, I don’t know what I shall do, for I’m sure I’m a sinner. O, yes, I know that, and I know He wouldn’t pass over my sins: which is the way then?”
O! the poverty of words, to tell out, at such a moment of eternal importance, the value of the Person and Work of the glorious Christ of God. Looking to the Lord to speak through His feeble child, I told her the sweet story of the Father’s love in giving His Son—of the love of Jesus in taking the sinner’s place, and bearing the punishment for sin, “the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:1818For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit: (1 Peter 3:18)). It was joy to tell her there was no more need of her prayers, her strivings, her tears to obtain immediate salvation, for Christ had done the work, He had paid the debt, and that God had accepted the payment.
I left her then, and stepping up to the next cottage, handed a tract to the young woman who answered the door, saying,
“Here is a little paper about the Lord Jesus. May I ask you, do you know Him?”
“Know Him!” she replied, “I should think we do. Do you think we are all heathens? We have heard as much about religion as anybody.’ Alas! How manifest that here was a heartless, hopeless professor.
Ah! My reader, if you are a mere professor, beware, lest your profession carry you down to the pit; or, it may be, that you are a hoper—a broken-hearted, convicted sinner, afraid of God, yet hoping in His mercy.
It is ever so where grace works in the soul. The holiness of God terrifies; yet grace, like the presence of Jesus, draws to the very one of whom the soul is most afraid. Cast away then, every doubt. Let these eternal things be a solemn reality to your soul. Let Christ have the only place in your heart. Let that blessed Savior who died on Calvary become the rock of your salvation, and you will cease to be a mere hoper or professor.