One mild spring evening 18-yeald Ernie Williams hunched miserably through a gospel meeting. As the Scottish evangelist, John McNeil, closed his message with a powerful appeal for souls to decide for Christ, the great congregation rose and began singing, “Oh happy day that fixed my choice On Thee my Saviour and my God...”
Fighting stubbornly against prickings of conscience and conviction of his sins, and anxious to avoid having any one speak to him, young Ernie darted out a side exit and boarded the street car for home. Just as he began to congratulate himself for making a clean getaway, the passenger sitting next to him leaned over and asked him, “Oh I say there, didn’t I see you at McNeil’s meeting tonight?”
Ernie deeply resented the intrusion and glared at the other passenger. The next moment he had stalked off the street car and boarded the next one. Here on the second car he had scarcely slid into a seat when he felt a hand from the seat behind laid on his shoulder. Then someone in a very kind voice said, “I believe I saw you leave McNeil’s meeting tonight, didn’t I?”
This was too much. Thoroughly annoyed and not a little alarmed, Ernie hurried off the car at the next stop without trying to see who had spoken. He hailed a cab and climbed in. Surely now he’d go home without any more personal workers.
Minutes later the cab driver stopped at a side street, and leaning over said very earnestly, “It seems to me I saw you go into John McNeil’s meeting tonight, young fellow, and you don’t look very happy.” Right then Ernie decided that he couldn’t get away from God.
Overwhelmed by his spiritual need, he felt all his resistance ebb away. He could only sit there choked by the lump in his throat. Sizing up the situation, the cab driver climbed into the seat beside him. From a well-worn Bible he pointed out passages which explained how a sinner could have peace with God through Jesus Christ. A few minutes later Ernie Williams, realizing how tragically wrong he had been to try to run from God, left the cab a new creature in Christ Jesus.
As time went by, Ernie himself became a faithful personal witness of Christ. He went to Canada and settled in Winnipeg, became the manager of a large department and the oldest employee in the store.
God had given him many trophies of grace. There is, for instance, an elevator girl named Ethel. One day he prayerfully offered her a copy of the booklet, “Safety, Certainty and Enjoyment.”
A day or two later Ernie recalls, “she walked up boldly and told me she had received Christ for herself.”
And God has used Ernie as far away as the jungles of Africa. As a pastime he began painting brightly-colored gospel texts on large canvas posters in various foreign languages and sending them overseas to missionary friends.
One interesting result: an African chief from a jungle tribe was attracted by one of Ernie’s painted posters while visiting a mission station in French Equitorial Africa. He went home but sent his son back to learn the meaning of the words painted on the poster. The son received the Lord as his Saviour and returned to the tribe with the gospel. Many of that tribe became earnest Christians.
Who would have guessed many years ago the chain of blessing that would result because a godly cab driver stopped and took time out to talk to an 18-year-old boy about the love of Jesus and of his relationship to Christ. Ernie is eternally grateful to God that he blocked all ways of escape that night after the gospel meeting.
ML-06/18/1978