I had been brought up in a Christian home and had heard the Bible read both at home and at Sunday School, but I never really knew God’s love until, at nineteen, I was sent overseas in the service.
Arriving late at my station, I soon went to my bedroom. The thought came, “I will say my prayers.” It had been my habit in childhood, but neglected for many years.
I knelt down beside my bed, but found I had forgotten what to say. I looked up, trying to remember. My mind was a blank. Suddenly there came to me something I had never known before. Could it be, I thought, that Someone infinite and Almighty—Someone all-knowing, yet full of the deepest, tenderest interest in me—was making known to me that He loved me?
In the lonely quietness around me I waited expectantly. My eyes saw no one; my ears heard no one; but in my inmost heart I knew assuredly that the One whom I did not know, and had never met, had met me, and that He was making me know that we were together.
His was a Presence that no sense or faculty of my own human nature had ever known, and this was a knowledge of infinite Greatness, a Person altogether apart and supreme. God was making Himself known to me in a way that I, as a human being, could thoroughly appreciate and enjoy.
For the first time I knew God as infinite love itself, and—wonder of wonders!—I was loved individually by Him. The exquisite tenderness and fulness of that love claimed me for Himself, although in the revealing light of that love I now saw myself to be the unworthy object of His plan and purpose. I was condemned.
I wept there on my knees, for how long I do not know. The deep sense of my guilt and lost condition overwhelmed me, and I cried to God for mercy, pardon and peace. At last the warmth of His love enfolded me, and the precious sense of His forgiveness and acceptance of one so unworthy as I entered my sin-darkened heart. I was saved!
With joy unspeakable and full of glory, I could now claim for myself these lines as descriptive of that night’s experience:
“Christ, the Father’s rest eternal,
Jesus once looked down on me,
Called me by my name external,
And revealed Himself to me.
With His whisper, life, light-giving,
Glowed in me, the dark, the dead,
Made me live, Himself receiving,
Who once died for me and bled.”