“I DON’T trouble about it now.”
The words were carelessly spoken, and the light laugh which accompanied them seemed to show that they stated a fact. The speaker did not trouble. Yet it had not always been so. There was a time when as a boy in my Sunday-school class he had been impressed by the word of God, and the knowledge of his guilt before God. But, when a youth, he had left his home for employment at a distance, and, as happens with many boys, his father’s care and the influence of school gone, he gave way to the follies of this world, and, alas! to its sins also.
Yet even so, he was not suffered by God to go unchecked. While attending a ball, the remembrance of a truth he had learned at school―the coming of the Lord―flashed in upon his mind, and the knowledge of his unreadiness for that event, so solemn for the unsaved, made him very wretched. He confessed that he could not pray, and that it seemed a mockery to read the Bible. He felt somewhat of the misery and want of the prodigal son, but, I fear, not his sense of sin. He did not “arise”; there was no returning to God. Nay, he tried still to satisfy himself with the husks that the swine did eat, for he said the only thing that relieved him was pleasure!
Some months later, meeting him unexpectedly, I turned to the subject of our letters, his unhappiness, and his sins. Then it was that he gave the answer I have quoted: “I don’t trouble about it now.”
Alas, the deceitfulness of sin blinds the eyes and hardens the heart He did “not trouble,” as tough “not troubling” removes the terrible danger. Sin lulls the mind, and those who raise the warning voice seem, as in Lot’s days, only “like those that mock.” Dear boys, be warned by this young man, lest your history be like his. Do not “begin life” without Christ, but while He speaks now, harden not your hearts, or His voice, if unheeded, may cease to sound in your ears. Jr.