Willie was an apprentice ship carpenter, a Christian boy of seventeen, who worked in a large ship-building yard. The man who worked alongside him was a hardened scoffer, who neither feared God, nor regarded man. He could scarcely speak without using foul language, and fearful oaths, at which many others, from whom better things might have been expected only laughed. Our young friend, Willie, was greatly pained to hear the name of God and Christ used so blasphemously, but being the youngest in the shop, he feared to speak.
The scoffer seemed only to get worse, and to excel in blasphemy, and the heart of the young believer was burdened with him. He made him a subject of daily prayer to God, and asked strength and wisdom to speak the right word to his fellow workman. One afternoon the carpenter was swearing fearfully, and Willie, who was working next to him, quietly laid his hand on his fellow workman’s arm and said, “Jimmie, it grieves me much to hear you speaking that way about my Master.”
“Who’s your master?” said the carpenter gruffly, as he turned to look at the apprentice, whose flushed face and tear-filled eyes showed what it had cost him to speak that simple word. Willie wiped the tear from his eye with his sleeve, and in broken accents replied, “The Lord Jesus, who loved me and died for me, and for you too, Jimmie, I wish you would believe it.”
That was all that passed. The clang of many hammers forbade any further words passing between them. But there was no more bad language used that day, by Jimmie the carpenter.
The effect of that simple, honest word, was to make the blasphemer ashamed. Nor was this all. When work was over that day, the carpenter came alongside Willie on the way home, and spoke more frankly than ever he had done before. Willie laid hold of the favorable opportunity to ask him to a gospel meeting in a tent that night, where two servants of Christ were faithfully preaching the Word, and Jimmie, hardened sinner as he was, at once consented.
That night the arrows of God entered his conscience. He was awakened deeply about his soul, and bore many days had passed, he was saved. The hardened scoffer was a disciple of Christ, and no one rejoiced more over his conversion than Willie.
“SHOW ME THY WAYS, O LORD.”
Lord, make me from this hour,
Thy loving child to be,
Kept by Thy power,
Kept by Thy power,
From all that grieveth Thee.
ML 04/21/1968