Effie was asked one autumn day to go and see a farmer who was very ill. He was thought to be in a decline. He was still up and about, but he had a bad cough and other ailments which were very serious.
Effie found him sitting in his little parlor. It was a gloomy, dreary-looking room, and the poor farmer looked gloomy and dreary likewise. He had a great deal to say about his aches and pains and had little hope of getting well.
Effie said she was very sorry he suffered so much, but, after all, the great matter was not whether the body was well, but whether the soul was saved. The farmer smiled in a bewildered manner and said nothing. Then Effie talked to him about the Lord Jesus Christ, who not only healed the sick and pitied the sorrowful, but whose heart yearned over the lost souls of men. He knew that there was something the matter with them worse than their sickness and suffering, namely their sin, and that they were just as unable to save themselves from their sin as to cure themselves of their diseases, or even to raise themselves to life again when they died. And as all are born with this dreadful and hopeless disease of sin, the great question for us all is whether we have gone to the great Physician who alone can save our souls.
Then Effie told the farmer how the Lord Jesus saves sinners; that He first died Himself to bear the curse due to them, and then, having thus taken their punishment, He not only gives them perfect, full, free forgiveness, but a new eternal life, and a place with Himself in heaven.
The farmer smiled again and moved restlessly in his chair; then he said—
“That’s all very nice for those that can understand all that sort of thing, but I never could; I never had a head for it. So, it’s no use to think about things one can’t make head nor tail of. It’s a terrible thing what a number of cows die nowadays of lung disease. Why, I’ve had more than a dozen ill with it, and I’ve lost—let me see!—how many have I lost?”
And he then took out of a drawer a large account-book and explained to Effie how much money he had lost upon the cows already and how much more he was likely to lose.
It was plainly impossible to say anything more to him about the soul he seemed to value so little. Effie determined to try to get him to listen another day, but the next time and the next it was just the same.
“I think it very kind of you to trouble to come and talk to me,” he said, “but it all goes over my head like. There’s some can understand those things, and there’s some that can’t. I’m one of them that can’t. I’m not as good as I ought to be, no doubt, but I’ll try my best.”
Then Effie explained to him that it was no use for him to try his best, for the very best he could do could never satisfy God. Therefore, God took account not of our doings, but of the great work done by His Son on the cross, and He was satisfied with that, and saves us on account of that, not because of anything we have done or can do.
“It’s all very nice,” repeated the farmer, “I haven’t any doubt, for those who have had time to read books and get to understand what all those things mean. But I have the farm and the cows to look after, and it isn’t in my line. Thank you all the same.”
Effie was leaving the neighborhood, and this was her last visit. She went away feeling very sad. It was a dark, damp afternoon, and the yellow leaves were lying scattered over the wet road, and the sky was dull and gray. But nothing outside the house looked to her so sad and wretched as the poor man in his dark parlor and with his dark soul.
Six months afterward, when Effie was in London, she got a message from the farmer. It was this—
“I know you will be glad to hear that I am saved.”
She went at once to see him. He was looking well, and his face beamed with joy and gladness.
“I am truly glad to see you,” he said, “I wanted to tell you that the Lord has healed my body and saved my soul.”
“Do tell me about it,” said Effie. “How did it happen?”
“Well,” said the farmer, “you remember last autumn, when you came to talk to me, how stupid I was?”
“Yes, I well remember,” said Effie. “I thought you understood nothing that I said to you.”
“Yes, that’s just what it was,” said the farmer. “Well, I went on just like that, dull and stupid. Sometimes I thought about what you said, and then I gave up thinking, because, as I told you, I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Then, just a fortnight ago, I went to bed as dull and stupid as ever. And that night I had a dream. I dreamed that I woke, and lo and behold everything was gone! There was my room, but it was empty, and out of the window there was nothing but empty space. The cows were gone, and the crops were gone—there was nothing anywhere. And the strangest thing of all was, I was gone too! Yes, I was nowhere! I looked for myself, but I was gone, clean gone! ‘Well, now,’ I thought in my dream, ‘what is there left, if I’m gone, and all the rest is gone? Is there anything left? Is there anything that can’t be gone?’ And then, in a moment, just as if God Himself had shown it me, as indeed He did, I saw that the Lord Jesus Christ remained, and that He could not be gone.
“I saw, as it were, the Lord Jesus standing alone before God, and I saw that He must be the delight of God forever. And then in one moment all came clearly to my mind that you had said to me last autumn. I saw that it was not at me that God was looking, for I was gone. He was looking at His beloved Son and was satisfied with Him. ‘Yes,’ I said in my dream, ‘God is satisfied. He must be satisfied with Christ, for Christ is absolutely perfect. And I am nowhere. It is Christ Himself who has satisfied God!’ And in my joy, I awoke, and I called out aloud ‘I am gone, and there is Christ instead of me!’ Oh, what a joy it was to me, and has been to me ever since! You see that when you used to talk to me, I kept on saying to myself, ‘Yes, that’s all very nice, but somehow or other I must do something to satisfy God. I must repent, or pray, or turn over a new leaf, or do or feel something.’ I didn’t exactly know what. Now I saw that not only God didn’t want my doings to satisfy Him, but He didn’t want me. He is perfectly satisfied with Christ. And Christ has done the whole work, there is nothing to add to it. And Christ stands before God for me, in my place, and God looks at Him and is well pleased. Think what wonderful grace and goodness of the Lord to show me that! So ignorant and stupid as I was, I might have gone on blundering in my own way from that day to this, if the Lord Himself had not come to my help. No,” he added, correcting himself, “you see I can’t even talk of it right; He didn’t come to help me, He did it all Himself, and I was nowhere. I see now why it was the Lord saved me in my sleep, for if I had been awake, I should have thought I had had some hand in it. Now I know He did it all. And oh, what a comfort it is to be nowhere! Only Christ, nothing but Christ, before God. What more can God want, and what more can I want?
“You see, it was not only my sin that was a trouble to me, but it was myself too. I used to think sometimes, ‘Well, if God did have mercy on me and forgive me, why there’s myself just as bad as before. It’s myself I want to get rid of, for I’m not fit for God, and can’t make myself fit.’ And now I know that that old self that was such a grief and trouble is, just as it were, nowhere. God sees me no more, He looks at Christ; and it isn’t a question now, What am I? but what Christ is. And Christ is perfect.”
From that day the farmer’s peace and joy seemed only to increase.
“What a comfort it is,” he said one day, “to know that not only I am nothing, but I have nothing, nothing but Christ. I used to walk about the farm and say to myself, ‘Those cows are mine; those crops are mine’; and now I say to myself, ‘None of those things are mine.’ The Lord may call me away from them any moment, or take them from me, and then they will be nothing at all to me; but I have Christ, and I must always have Christ, and my heart is more than satisfied. If only everybody could know what it is to have Christ!”
The farmer was not content with wishing that all his neighbors might have this happiness. He spoke to them all, in season and out of season. He invited them to his house, or he went himself to find them. One of his laborers came home one evening in a state of amazement, and said to his wife, “I’ve seen the strangest thing today that ever I saw. I saw our master, and yet he isn’t our master, he’s someone quite different. I never saw one man so different from another as he is from our old master—and yet he’s the same. I can’t make it out. He came right across the field to me, and I wondered what for, and after all it was to speak to me about Christ, and nothing else! Why, our old master would never have gone within a mile of such matters. I looked hard, and thought ‘Is it you, or isn’t it?’ But it was he, and it’s past my comprehension.”
So years passed on, and the farmer seemed to have but one grief and trouble: it was that many of his neighbors despised the good news he had to tell them, and some of his old friends even kept out of his way and refused all invitations to come to his house.
“As long as I talked folly and nonsense to them,” he said, “they were glad to come, but now they seem as frightened of me as if I wanted to rob them.”
So it is. People talk of being afraid of death, but they are much more afraid of life. And you, who read this, do you know what it is that God taught, in so strange a way, to the farmer? Have you ever known and believed that the Son of God Himself undertook to bear all the judgment due to all your sin? Have you ever believed that He thus “made peace,” made your peace with God, “by the blood of His cross”? Do you remember that on the evening of the Resurrection Day, He came to announce to His disciples that this peace was made? He came, and stood in the midst, and said, “Peace be unto you.” And when He had so said, He showed them His hands and His side: Then they knew how He had made the peace, and that God required no more.
And have you ever believed that having thus put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, He entered heaven as your forerunner, and was welcomed to the Father’s heart—and that welcome is your own?
“God is satisfied with Christ”; and all the delight of God in Him, all the love of God for Him, is also, if you will believe it, for you, for whom He died. How am I accepted before God? “Accepted in the Beloved!” There is no other welcome, no other acceptance, but that of Christ, who calls to you from that glory to share His joy with Him, that His joy may be full.
It was this joy that was to the farmer as a light from heaven beyond the brightness of the sun. The little dark parlor was filled with the glory of the Lord.
Effie one day said to him; “Do you know which side of the Jordan you are on?”
She only asked this question to see what he would say, for she had no idea he would understand what such a question meant. But he looked at her with wonder and said:
“Sure you needn’t ask me that! How can I help knowing that I am in the land that flows with milk and honey?”
He told her that he heard Christians praying sometimes that God would forgive them and deliver them from His wrath.
“But I couldn’t do that,” he said; “it would seem to me like a little child going on asking his mother for what she has given him already. But I can thank Him that He has done it. They may blame me for this, but I can’t help it. The Pharisees blamed the man who said the Lord had given him his sight, and they turned him out; but it was better to be outside with the Lord than inside with the Scribes and Pharisees.”
One day he went to the neighboring town to see a man who was dying and who had just been saved.
“Good-bye,” he said, when he left him; “you’re going straight to Christ in glory, and I’m coming soon; so good-bye till we meet again.”
He then left home for some weeks, for he had relations in another county whom he had not seen for some years.
“I’ve never had an opportunity,” he said, “of telling them of Christ. Perhaps I shall never have one if I don’t go now whilst I can, and, when I’ve done that, I shall have nothing more on my mind.”
He came back very unwell. Not long after he sent for Effie. She found him in bed scarcely able to speak.
“Ah,” he said, “I’m going to the Lord! Only think; perhaps in a few hours I shall be absent from the body and present with Him! Think what it will be to see Him face to face! I have no pain and nothing but happiness. There’s only one thing I mind, and that is I can’t speak loud enough to tell them all round about the love of Jesus. That’s what I should like to do once more; otherwise there is nothing—nothing but happiness!”
And having said this, a few hours later he fell asleep.