In a small room, scrupulously neat and clean, sat a young man. His emaciated form and labored breathing told but too plainly that consumption was fast doing its work, and that his days were numbered.
When I first called to see him, at the request of a friend, he was restless and unhappy; fear of the all uncertain future haunted and harassed his mind. I visited him several times, reading, and seeking in the most simple form to present the love of Jesus in dying for sinners. He said he knew he was a sinner, and also that Jesus died for him, but could not believe that his sins were forgiven, unless he could feel differently.
This was his invariable answer. In vain I tried to show him that, as soon as he believed God’s word, his sins were forgiven, and he would feel.
He was fast sinking. Anxiety for his safety took me much to the Lord for wisdom, that it might not be my own words, but a message from God Himself; and just at this time a tract, entitled “I have my ticket,” was put into my hand. Upon calling I found him much in the same state, still wanting to find something in himself to present to God.
How slow we are to find out that there is nothing in us to recommend us to God; that we can do nothing to please Him until we have life in His Son. Dear reader, are you clinging to something that you are or hope to be, to your feelings or ought else? Ah, it must all go sooner or later; like the foolish man who built his house upon the sand, the rain descended and the floods came, and beat upon that house, awl it fell. There was no foundation; it looked fair outwardly, respectable and loveable perhaps, but without Christ to rest upon. It was so in the case before us. I read the tract to him, and again pleaded with him to let go everything, and take God at His word. He said little, but promised to do so, and I left him hopefully. The case of the young man in the tract was his, only he was dying; his opportunity to try to be or to feel anything would soon be gone.
I was not disappointed, for on calling next, day he greeted me with, “It’s all true, I believe, and I feel. I know now that my sins are all washed away in the blood of Jesus.” His face was changed, the restless anxious look had given place to a quiet peace, and in a few days more he was with the Lord.
It may be that one who reads this says, “It is just my case too,” and in the full flow of health you think you shall improve as you grow older; nay, do not deceive yourself any longer; own yourself to be what God says you are, “Dead in trespasses and sins.” What can a dead man do? An aged woman of more than seventy years stopped me the other day, with “You was the first woman that ever showed me I could not do anything to make myself better, I remember how hard you tried to make me understand, and I do now.” “It’s all Christ, it’s what He is; I am nothing, and never shall be.”
But oh, how much better to learn this at the commencement of our life than at the end. “It’s all Christ.” Do you know Him, dear reader? The One whose heart yearned over sinners. The One who left the glory for this world of sorrow and of sin. Have you ever traced His lowly life of patient suffering, and unselfish love for three and thirty years, and then His death? Those hours of agony in the garden, and those still more bitter on the tree.
Think you it was the death He dreaded? Ah, no; that were but leaving a scene of suffering and sorrow; it was the sin, sin that was not His own for He was the “sin bearer,” “who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree.” Sin that a pure and holy God could not look upon, and hence that terrible cry, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
May God in His mercy teach you what it is, then in the very joy of your heart you too will exclaim, “It’s all Christ,” what He has done and what He is. “The blood of Jesus Christ, His Son, cleanseth us from all sin.” H.