The doctor didn’t give me much hope. The only chance was an operation, an operation so risky that the chances would still be only about one in a hundred. After agreeing to go ahead with the surgery, I lay in my bed and thought: What will it mean to wake up in eternity? Where will I spend it? How can I meet God?
The questions demanded an answer, and quickly too. All I had trusted to in the way of religion was giving way under me, for I realized that it had left the questions of my sins unsettled. Going into the presence of God, and my sins unforgiven! This was reality!
Oh, how I longed for some little bit of the Word of God on which I could rest for peace and assured salvation! But who could give it at that moment?
God Himself gave it! Quick as a lightning flash an old and familiar Bible verse shot into my mind, The blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin. (1 John 1:7.)
I gripped it with all the eagerness that a drowning man would grip a life belt that had been thrown to him, knowing there was no time to lose. I said to myself, “I will meet God with that!” As I clung by simple faith to God’s testimony to the virtue of that precious blood, a sudden peace filled my troubled soul, such as I had never known before. I went to the operating table as calm as I would have been had I been going to my breakfast.
Through God’s mercy I was the hundredth case and I was brought safely through. I have come back from the very gates of death to say that trusting in the precious blood of Jesus, the worst sinner can meet God without a quiver of the conscience or doubt in the heart.
“ Behold, I lay in Sion
a chief corner stone, elect, precious:
and he that believeth on Him
shall not be confounded.
Unto you therefore which believe
He is precious.”
1 Peter 2:6-7