Years ago an infidel lecturer gave an opportunity to anyone to reply to him after his oration. He expected that one or two rashly zealous young men would rise to advance the common arguments in favor of Christianity; and he was quite prepared, by hook or crook, to argue with them or laugh them down.
Instead of debaters, an old lady carrying a basket and an umbrella and dressed in a style indicating both age and poverty, came upon the platform.
Putting down her burdens she began: "I paid three pence to come in here to hear of something better than Jesus Christ, and I have not heard it. So let me tell you what Christ had done for me. Then you tell me of something better, or else you've cheated me out of the three pence I paid to come in here.
"Now," she said, "I have been a widow for thirty years. I was left with seven children, and I trusted in the Lord Jesus Christ. In my poverty He has sustained and comforted me. He has helped me to bring up my children in the way they should go. Now they are all grown and have turned out God-fearing and respectable.
“None of you can know what the troubles of a poor, lonely woman are; but the Lord has made His grace all-sufficient. I was often sore pressed; but my prayers were heard by my Father in heaven, and I was always delivered out of my troubles. Can you tell me of something better than that—better for a poor woman like me?
"I have been to the Lord sometimes when I was very low indeed, and when there was scarcely anything for us to eat. I've always found that His providence has been kind and good to me. And when I lay so ill that I thought I was dying, and my heart was ready to break at leaving my poor fatherless boys and girls, there was nothing kept me up but the thought of Jesus and His faithful love to my poor soul. Do you tell me that was all nonsense? The young and foolish may believe you; but after what I have gone through I know there is reality in Christ! It is no fancy. Can you tell me of something better?”
The lecturer was a good hand at an argument, but this mode of controversy was new to him. He had no answer, and merely said: "Really, the dear old woman is so happy in her delusion that I would not like to undeceive her.”
"No," she said, "that won't do. Truth is truth, and your laughing can't alter it. Jesus Christ has been everything to me. I could not sit still in the hall and hear you talk against Him. I ask you whether you can tell me of something better than what He has done for me. I've tried Him and proved Him, and that's more than you have done.”
Herein is power, logic invincible, reasoning not to be refuted. The testing and proving of God— knowing His love is shed abroad in the heart: this is the great internal evidence of the gospel.