He had been a religious and moral man all his life, gone regularly to church, occasionally to gospel meetings, read his Bible frequently, and had a respect for divine things. He had enjoyed excellent health until a few weeks before we met, when he was suddenly seized with an attack of congestion of the lung and was taken to the hospital. His case was a most serious one, and he was given to understand that it might end fatally in a very short time.
As he lay awake that night in the hospital he reflected on his alarming condition, and with it came the overwhelming fact that he might very soon have to meet God. The verse in Hebrews 9 came before him: "It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment."
"How can I stand before God?" He asked himself the question. And then, in rapid succession, his religion, his morality, his fancied good works passed before his mind; but brought into God's very presence they were as rapidly dismissed as utterly unfit for the all-discerning eye of God. In that solemn moment his sins were not more intolerable than his fancied good works. There was no assumption about his sins, but there was about his fancied "good works." His "righteousness" were indeed then seen by him to be but "filthy rags" (Isa. 64: 6). Finding thus that he had absolutely nothing to rest his poor stricken soul upon in God's presence, he was brought to that most blessed crisis when the poor sinner finds out for the first time that there is nothing that self can do for salvation.
He thought to himself, "I must get a Bible." But where? He got out of bed in an agony of mind, expecting to die at any moment and be lost. As he lay back down, suddenly like a ray of light from heaven, that most precious verse in John 3 stole into his recollection: "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life."
Ah, it was the blessed Spirit of God in those lonely hours presenting the Word to the poor fainting soul. As the drowning man clutches the rope cast to him by a friendly hand, this conscience-stricken man asked himself the question: "Why should I not make that verse my own? It says 'whosoever.' I therefore have a right to it. It is the word of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself: He would never deceive me. I will take it," he said. "That 'whosoever' means me. I do believe in the Lord Jesus Christ as the One whom God gave for me; and blessed be God, I have everlasting life."
From that night this man's conscience was set at rest about his sins through Christ's death for them. His heart's affections had gone out to that blessed One who had so loved him and given Himself for him, and whose precious announcement he had received with such simple, childlike faith.