PART 1
Last week I told you about wee Benny, the boy who wished to be a horse, and I think you would like to hear a story today about his brother, Charley. Charley was a good deal older than Benny. I think he must have been twelve or thirteen years old, and he could take one of the ponies Benny loved so much out of the stable, and jumping on its back, trot over the wide prairies. He enjoyed this more than going to school, or, I am sorry to say, than going to Sunday school.
There was no regular Sunday school in the little town, near which they lived, but the kind lady, of whom I told you before, used to gather all the children she could, to her house, on Sunday afternoon, and teach them to sing sweet hymns, and then she would read to them out of the Bible. Charley’s mother liked her children to go, for she loved the Lord Jesus, and knew that He had saved her, and washed away her sin, in His own precious blood, so one bright summer afternoon she got them all ready, and away they went.
The lesson that afternoon was taken from the Gospel of Matthew, the first fourteen verses of chapter twenty-two. If you read it, you will find that it is a beautiful story of a king, who made a marriage for his son. One would suppose that everyone who got an invitation to such a wedding would be glad to come; but the story goes on to tell that not one person who was asked was found there.
“Was not that strange?” the lady asked her little class, and then she went on to tell them that it is just the same now, that people are so busy with their work, and with their pleasure, that they cannot find time to accept God’s invitation to come to Jesus, His Son, and to be made ready for that glorious Home. He has gone before to prepare. “If’ she added, “you believed that it was Satan, who tempts you to disobey God, and longs to destroy you, both body and soul, perhaps you would not be so ready to listen to him.”
I once read a story about a boy called Alexander. He was a disobedient boy, and one Sunday when his widowed mother told him to go to Sunday school he went off with two evil boys to spend the afternoon in boating. Ah, Alexander did not know that Satan was saying to him, “Alexander, come out and be drowned,” but so it proved, and that poor deluded boy never came home to his mother again.
“Children,” said the teacher, “beware of listening to Satan, when he comes with tempting promises to you, but open your ears and your hearts to the voice of the loving Saviour, who is longing to save and to bless you.”
All the children listened attentively, and they said to one another, as they walked home in the pleasant sunshine, that they would never be like Alexander, and listen to Satan.
How little we know of our own hearts. God, who sees right into them, says, they are “deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked,” but we do not know the quarter of the evil that is in them. We often think we can be good, if we wish, without any trouble; as these children did.
Next week I will tell you how our little friend Charley succeeded.
ML 06/19/1938