“How is your husband, Mrs. P—?”
“He is home, ma’am. They sent him home from the hospital, and he seems much more comfortable here with us. Won’t you come in and see him? He has just had a bad turn, but he would like to see you.”
The visitor entered the clean, comfortable little room where the invalid was sitting up in bed. After a few words of kindly greeting on both sides, she said: “Mr. P—, I had a dear relative who, when lying ill, said she had a little pillow on which she could rest, and it was this text: GOD COMMENDETH HIS LOVE TOWARD US, IN THAT, WHILE WE WERE YET SINNERS, CHRIST DIED FOR US. She could rest happily on those words.”
“Yes, ma’am. But I am feeling too bad to talk now. When I am better I should like to have a nice talk with you, but I cannot speak much now.”
“No, and I don’t want you to. But you can think of these words”; and again she repeated: “God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us,” and shaking his hand she bade him “Goodbye,” and left the room.
Ah, it was a last message! But fourteen hours after, the invalid who could talk about getting “better” so glibly, was ushered into the presence of God! Very ill his visitor had known him to be, discharged from the hospital as incurable; but she was not prepared to hear how very near the end of the journey he was when she brought that last message from God to him. Did he receive it? The day of eternity will declare.
Have you received it? Do you set to your seal that God is true, and that He means what He says when He tells you that “God commendeth His love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us?”
It may be God’s last message to you, as it was to P—; but it IS His message: “see that ye refuse not Him that speaketh.”
T.