Six Weeks Without God

 •  2 min. read  •  grade level: 11
 
SUCH was my purpose and desire, as I traveled towards Worthing, one early July morning a few years ago, for six weeks' rest and restoration to health after a severe illness. God's word had taken firm hold of my mind, and for some months past, the divine truth, "ye must be born again," had been disturbing my hitherto utterly careless life. Divine truth I have said, and such from the first I had believed it to be; but the unregenerate heart had rejected and now strove to forget that word, lest its entrance, giving light, should reveal and reprove the darkness within.
The goodness of God led me to repentance within a few days of the time when, in my folly, I had desired to be left alone, One Sunday evening, after hearing an earnest address from the text "He must increase, but I must decrease" (John 3:30), my rebel heart was broken and began to seek Jesus. Yet fifteen months more I lingered, through indecision and unbelief, near the kingdom, but not in it, till another Sunday evening found me an anxious enquirer during a special mission to young men. There and then my eyes were opened, and I found peace and rest through believing in Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Saviour of men.
“Six weeks without God 1" What an awful condemnation that prayer would have become, but for the mercy and longsuffering of Him whom I thus blindly and wickedly resisted! Writing at this later date, the brightness of the love of God in Christ is cast over that dark page of my past history, and shows that the sin is put away by the atoning blood of Christ in whom through grace I have found "life-everlasting life.”
Reader, have you, too, resisted the strivings of the Holy Spirit? Oh, repent now and be converted, that your sins may be blotted out! It is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptation, and therefore of yours, "that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners." “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." S. E. R.