Morning by morning a group of men may be seen around the office of a large engineering plant seeking employment. Among them are a few decent, hard-working men who, owing to slackness of work, have been laid off there and in other plants. These are usually the first to be re-employed, and find the work they seek and are willing to do. The greater number who comprise that morning crowd are of the class who only work at times, and are always reckoned as "the unemployed." Many of them, alas! spend the greater part of their wages in drink, and no solution of the "Labor Question" will meet their case. They need Christ and His salvation. Nothing else will ever fully meet their need.
Among the men who stood at the gate one morning, haggard and hungry after a week's debauch, was Bill. Bill had been a skilled workman in earlier years, but drink had driven him to the position of a day laborer, picking up jobs wherever he could find them. Nobody cared for the poor fellow, further than giving him his day's wage when he earned it. Things looked gloomy in the extreme for Bill, both for time and eternity. But God cares for His fallen creatures, and in the ways of His divine wisdom has instruments in all spheres for the accomplishing of His purposes of grace.
Bill was working one afternoon with a country gardener. The gardener's wife, instead of letting him go back to town, possibly to spend his wages for drink, gave him a good supper and a comfortable bed, formerly used by a gardener no longer with them. It was the custom in the gardener's home to have reading of God's Word and prayer each night, to which all the servants were invited. Bill, although somewhat shy, attended with the rest, and said after it was over he had "never heard the like" since he was a child in his grandfather's home. For days he worked in the nursery, keeping perfectly sober and spending his evenings about the place. An apprentice gardener, who was a decided Christian, took a special interest in him, never failing to put the Gospel and his need of it before him.
On Sunday nights this young gardener attended a simple Gospel service held in a farmhouse nearby, and Bill went with him. There the Lord met him. Under the power of the Gospel of Christ Bill was melted to tears, and as a guilty sinner he yielded himself to the Savior.
The news of Bill's conversion soon spread. Some of his old friends, healing of it, came out to the gardens to see him. To all their questions his reply was, "I'm no longer among the unemployed, lads. I've got a new master, and His name is Jesus Christ. I served the devil too long and too faithfully, to my cost, but the grace of God met me as I was, and by that grace I will seek to serve the Lord as faithfully as I once served the devil.”
Bill has for many a long year been enabled to do it, showing by his godly and earnest life that he is "saved by grace." And the same grace waits to save you, and to keep and help you after you are saved to live a new life in Christ. You, too, need a Savior! No reformation or outward change will give you what you need. Jesus Christ alone can save. He alone can keep. Only trust Him.