It was bitterly cold that Tuesday afternoon in January. I wasn’t looking forward to waiting outdoors for my friend, Betty, as I’d done every Tuesday since school started in September. I enjoyed walking with her on the long walk home, but on Tuesdays she stayed after school along with some other students for a Bible study. If students weren’t actually involved in an after-school activity, they were not allowed inside the building. So I would wait for Betty on the front steps, because I didn’t go to the Bible study. I simply wasn’t interested in “religion”.
But that day it was just too cold to wait outside for her. “What do you do in there anyway?” I asked.
“Oh, we pray... ” Betty answered, and then hesitated, wondering how to continue.
But before she finished I exclaimed, “Baloney! You stay in there for a whole hour! You can’t tell me you pray that long.”
“Come and see,” she said.
I wasn’t too eager, but I went with her to the classroom where the students met. It was better than waiting outside in the cold.
They sang some songs I’d never heard before. The chorus of one stuck in my memory:
He lives, He lives,
Christ Jesus lives today!
He walks with me and talks with me
Along life’s narrow way.
He lives, He lives,
Salvation to impart!
You ask me how I know He lives?
He lives within my heart.
Then they prayed and several of them spoke from the Bible for a few minutes each.
I don’t really remember what they said, but the Lord Jesus imprinted two verses from the Bible permanently on my mind: “All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23), and, “The wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23). In my heart I admitted that the first of these certainly applied to me; I knew I was a sinner.
As we walked home from school that afternoon, we didn’t talk much. Somehow I didn’t feel like talking. As I look back on it, I’m sure Betty was praying for me.
That night when I was ready for bed I went to lie down, but first I felt I must kneel before the Lord Jesus. When I knelt He brought a memory vividly to my mind. The memory was of an Easter dinner at our house when I was younger.
My grandparents, aunt, uncle and several cousins were seated around the table with our family. I was sitting at the end beside my father, and I turned to him and said, “Boy, am I glad Jesus was born so we can have this good meal together.”
But my father answered, “This isn’t the day when we remember His birth; this is the day we remember that the Lord Jesus rose from the dead.”
I looked at my father, not believing what he had said. Standing up, I pounded my small fist on the table and said, “He couldn’t rise from the dead. If someone’s dead, they’re dead. No one can come alive again!”
My father didn’t argue with me, and dinner continued as though I had never spoken.
For 11 years I had not thought about what I had said that Sunday. But God says, “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised Him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” Romans 10:9. And as I knelt beside my bed, He brought my sin of unbelief before me. With true thanksgiving I confessed that the Lord Jesus Christ had truly risen from the dead and was even now living and calling me to Himself. As I knelt there a great peace and joy flooded my soul. My sins were gone! I belonged to the Saviour.
Now, 50 years later, I still belong to Him and I will belong to Him forever. And it’s not because of anything good I’ve done, either before or since He so graciously saved me, but because He died on Calvary’s cross to wash away my sins. He paid the penalty for all my sin and unbelief, and now I am His, and His forever!
Have you confessed to Jesus that you are a sinner and truly believed that He died for your sins and is alive now in heaven? If you can say yes, God’s Word promises that you are saved from your sins and have everlasting life.
ML-05/17/1992