JOHN Bunyan walking one day through the streets of Bedford, following his trade as a tinker, came to some poor women who were sitting at a door, talking of the things of God. He stopped to listen.
They were Christians, and knew well who he was. They had likely seen him coming near, and lifted up their hearts to God, and asked Him to enable them to say something that He could carry home to the tinker’s soul.
Bunyan tells us their conversation. It was about the new birth, and the love of Christ, and the promises of God, and their unbelief, and the deceitfulness of their hearts, and the temptations of the devil, and how they were enabled to overcome them—religious conversation indeed.
And what was the effect?
“I left them,” Bunyan says, “and went about my employment again, but their talk and discourse went with me: also my heart would tarry with them, for I was greatly affected with their words, both because by them I was convinced that I wanted the true tokens of a truly godly man, and also because by them I was convinced of the happy and blessed condition of him that was such a one.”
Reader, would you not like to be the means of convincing a Bunyan? Then speak to sinners by the way, and who knows but you may have such an one as a crown of rejoicing!