In the days immediately preceding his conversion, Richard Weaver was a drunken and dissolute coal miner. His life, we are told, was a rough, almost repulsive story. He tells how, after his revels and fights, he would go home to his mother with bruised and bleeding face. She always received him tenderly, bathed his wounds, helped him to bed, and then whispered in his ear the words that seemed inseparable from the sound of her voice: "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
The words came back to him in the hour of his greatest need. His soul was passing through deep waters.
Filled with misery and shame, and terrified lest he should have sinned beyond possibility of Salvation, he crept into a disused sand pit. He was engaged to fight another man that day, but he was in death-grips with a more terrible adversary.
"In that old sand pit," he says, "I had a battle with the devil; and I came off more than conqueror through Him that loved me." And it was the text that did it. As he agonized there in the sand pit, tormented by a thousand doubts, his mother's text all at once spake out bravely. It left no room for uncertainty: "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." John 3:1616For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16).
"I thought," Richard Weaver tells us, "that `whosoever' meant me. What faith was I could not tell, but I had heard that it was taking God at His word, and I trusted in the finished work of my Savior. The happiness I enjoyed I cannot describe; my peace flowed like a river."
End