GEORGE WAS the son of a praying mother. Again and again she had pleaded with him to give his heart to the Saviour, but all in vain. His Sunday school teacher prayed with him and for him, but his words seemed to fall on deaf ears. George plunged deeper into sin.
His mother still prayed for her wandering boy, who had grown utterly reckless. Then she died with this prayer on her lips, “Lord, save George.” George received the news of her death unmoved, and rambled from place to place, drinking and gambling.
One day as he tramped across the country, without money and friends, he fell suddenly ill, and lying down under a hedge he thought he was going to die. All night he lay there in a burning fever.
Thinking he was going to die, he remembered what a bad young fellow he had been, and he tried to recall what his Sunday school teacher used to tell him. But somehow his brain was muddled and he could remember nothing right. It was, he said, as if God shook him over the fire as he lay under the hedge. All the sins of his life came before him, and he felt he was the blackest sinner out of hell.
In the early morning some gypsies came by and one of them asked him what he was doing there. He had just enough strength to murmur, “I’m dying.”
“Poor fellow! Here, give us a hand!” said one to another, and they carried George away to their tent where they treated him as if he had been a brother. One little girl, named Vic, would often sit by his side, and bathe his head. Then one day as he lay there he thought he heard his mother singing him to sleep. He opened his eyes and there was little Vic by his side, singing. When she saw him awake, she stopped.
“Go on, sing that again,” George pleaded. “I think I’ve heard that bore.”
Then she sang ever so sweetly,
“He breaks the power of canceled sin,
He sets the prisoner free;
His blood can make the foulest clean,
His blood avails for me.”
“Yes, that’s just what my mother used to sing,” George exclaimed. “But now she’s safe up yonder, and I shall never see her anymore.”
“Oh yes, you may, if you will only come to Jesus,” said the gypsy girl.
“No, no, little girl; I’ve been too bad altogether. I can’t come to Him.”
“Yes, I’m sure you can, for you know the hymn says, ‘His blood can make the foulest clean,’ and that means the very worst, doesn’t it?”
“Sure it does; but it seems too good to be true, for I knew the right, but did the wrong. It cannot be; I’m lost.”
“See,” said the girl earnestly, “it says in my Testament the lady gave me that Jesus came to seek and to save that which was lost; so that must be you!”
“Well, it looks like it, doesn’t it?”
“Yes; and here again, ‘I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.’ "
“Thank God for that. Yes, I see it all now, that my mother and my teacher used to tell me, and I will now take the Lord Jesus as my Saviour, and ask Him to take all my sins away, and to make me His.”
There was rejoicing in heaven that day, as well as in the gypsy tent, over one sinner that repented. Dear young reader, we were all prodigals once, wanderers from the Father’s face. But has there been joy in heaven over you yet? Have you repented of your sins and turned to the Lord?
George proved afterward that Christ is a present salvation, One who not only cleanses from the guilt of sin, but saves from sin’s power. One day in the tent the awful craving for drink came upon him and he cried to the Lord to save him from that thirst, lest he be drawn back into his old ways. Then the little gypsy girl read to him, “According to your faith be it unto you,” and George cried, “Lord, Thou wilt, and Thou dost save me from this awful thirst.” The desire for drink left him.
George showed by his altered life that his repentance was sincere. He was able to hold down a steady job, and it was his joy to spend his spare hours seeking to bring others to that wonderful Saviour, who is mighty to save — mighty to keep.
The little gypsy girl has since gone to be with the Saviour she loved and served here. One day, when He comes in the clouds and all His own meet Him in the air, she will meet the man in whose blessing she was so greatly used of the Lord.
“Will you be there, and I?”
“If you take the loving Saviour now,
Who for sinners once did die,
When He gathers His own in that bright Home,
Then you’ll be there and I.”
ML-04/14/1963