SOME months have passed since I was asked by a Christian friend to call and see a dying man who, she told me, she felt was ready to take the place of a lost sinner. I found it was so. I took with me a little book, and thereby I learned a solemn lesson, for I found it had no message for him, and the Lord showed me by it that I should only have brought His own Divine Word. “The entrance of thy words giveth light, it giveth understanding unto the simple.”
Next day I called, feeling the Lord had given me that blessed message for him contained in John 5:24. At first he began to reason on the impossibility of knowing now that you were saved, but finally he bowed to the Word as the Word of God.
I then said, “Mr. S—, the Lord Jesus thus speaks: — ‘He that heareth my word.’ You have often heard it?”
“Yes,” he said, “I have.”
“‘And believeth on him that sent me.’ Do you believe on God who sent Him?”
“Yes, indeed I do,” he replied.
“Well, then, it is not what I say, but what God’s Word says; and it says that the one who hears and believes hath everlasting life, shall not come into condemnation, but is passed from death unto life.”
After a few more words on the Divine authority of the Word, I left him. When I called the next day he told me he had received the Lord, adding, “Now I lie down on the pillows of certainty, I have Christ’s work, and God’s word for it.” Once when seeing him and speaking of this blessed assurance, he remarked, “It is wonderful, and yet when you look on the cross of Christ it is not wonderful.”
Two hours before he was taken he said to his nurse, “He has forgiven me all my sins, Jesus has tight hold of my hand, and He will not let me go.”
This nurse said she too had accepted God’s gift at the same time. Reader, have you?
A. H.