When I was young—before I was a Christian—I was in a field one day with a man who was hoeing. He was weeping, and he told me a story, which I never forgot.
When he left home, his mother gave him this text: "Seek first the kingdom of God." But he paid no attention to it. He said that when he got settled in life, and his ambition to get money was gratified, it would be time enough to seek the kingdom of God.
The man went from one village to another and couldn't get work. When Sunday came he went into a village church, and to his great surprise, the minister gave out the text: "Seek first the kingdom of God."
The text went to the bottom of the man's heart. He thought his mother's prayer had followed him, and that someone must have written the minister about him. He felt uncomfortable, and when the meeting was over he could not get that sermon out of his mind. Then he went away from that town, and at the end of the week went to another church and heard the same text, "Seek first the kingdom of God." He felt sure it was the prayers of his mother, but he said calmly and deliberately, "No, I will get wealthy first."
For a few months the man said that he didn't go into a church, but the first place of worship he went to afterward, a third minister preached from the same text. He tried to stifle his feelings; tried to get the sermon out of his mind, and resolved that he would keep away from church altogether, and for a few years he did keep out of God's house.
"But," he said "the text kept coming to my mind. I said I will try and become a Christian, but I could not; no sermon ever touches me; my heart is as hard as that stone," (pointing to one of the stones close by to us in the field).
I left the man to his labors. I couldn't understand what it was all about but when I went to Boston and got converted, my first thought was this man. I asked my mother if he was still alive.
"Didn't I write to you about him?" she asked. "They took him to an insane asylum. When ever anybody goes to see him he points with his finger up there and tells him to 'seek first the Kingdom of God.' "
I thought about the old man with his eyes now dull with the loss of reason, but the text had sunk into his soul. When I got home again, my mother told me that the same old man had come for a visit. I found him in a rocking chair, with a vacant look upon him. Whenever he saw me he pointed at me and said: "Young man, seek first the kingdom of God." Reason was gone, but the text was there.
The old man has been dead some time now but last month when I was laying my own brother in his grave I could not help thinking of the poor man lying so near him, and wishing that his mother's prayer had been heard, and that he had found the kingdom of God.