A preacher was once telling forth God’s messages of love when he noticed several restless children sitting on a front seat and in the hope of gaining their attention; he thus addressed them,
“I have never seen you before, but I can tell you your names, children.” Immediately they were all attention.
“Your name,” he continued, addressing the foremost girl, “it is here,” and he held up his Bible. “It is S-I-N-N-E-R (sinner) for God says,
‘All have sinned.’”
The service concluded, and the child ran straight home to her father, who was a hardened sinner, saying breathlessly, “Father, I can tell you your name, for it is in the Bible.”
“Nonsense,” he replied.
“But it is, father,” persisted the child. “What is it, then?” he asked.
“It is ‘sinner,’ for God says that ‘all have sinned’; the preacher said so right.”
God often uses the feeble thing’s to confound the wise, and that simple, artless message was an arrow of conviction, and was the means of leading that godless father to acknowledge, as the prodigal of old, the solemn but true fact,
“I have sinned.”
And through God’s boundless grace he shortly Afterward had the glorious knowledge that the Lord had put away his sins by virtue of the all atoning blood of Jesus Christ, which “cleanseth from all sin.”
ML 09/24/1939