Even facing death, faith in Christ brings peace and hope.
“He that believeth … is not condemned.” John 3:18
A number of years ago I was holding special meetings in the First Baptist Church of Los Gatos, California. On my first Sunday morning there, the text was: “Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst again: but whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:13-14). Sitting in the front pew was a young woman whose pale emaciated face and great, dark, hungry eyes attracted my attention. She listened so earnestly.
After the meeting I said to the pastor: “Who was the very sickly but intensely beautiful girl who sat in the front pew?”
“She is a very well bred girl,” he replied, “but some years ago she threw Christianity to the winds. She was brought up in a Christian home. She went in for a worldly career, trying to find satisfaction and peace in the things of the world, but, within the last five months, she has been stricken with that dread disease of tuberculosis, and she has the kind that we call galloping consumption. She has not long to live; she is losing strength day after day, and the doctor says she will soon be gone; and now she is wretched and miserably unhappy.”
I prayed for her, and each night I would find myself looking through that audience, hoping she would be there, listening to the gospel, but I never saw her at another meeting.
About three weeks later a lady came to me and said: “Do you remember meeting Miss H-?” I remembered that it was this young lady, and she added, “She is very ill, dying of tuberculosis. She heard you the first time you spoke, and was expecting to attend all the meetings, but she has been too ill. She has sent for you.”
“I will be glad to go,” was my reply. So we went to the room in which she sat. She excused herself for not standing to greet us, for she was too weak. I said, “I am glad that you have sent for me.”
She looked up and said, “Mr. Ironside, the doctor told me yesterday that I have just three weeks to live, and I am not saved. I would like to know Christ. Do you think He will take a girl who rejected Him, deliberately turned her back on Him in health, now that I am bitterly disappointed, and everything I have counted on has gone by the board? Do you think there is any hope for a sinner like me?”
You know things look different when you realize you have only three weeks to live! Many a one, careless now, would be in dead earnest if he knew that within three weeks he would have to face God and eternity.
“Well,” I said, “I understand that you have had a very happy life in some respects; you have been very much sought after and admired by the world.”
“Oh, please do not talk of that now,” she said, “I am afraid I have been selling my soul for worldly popularity. I thought I was going to find happiness and enjoyment, but now it gives me no peace, no satisfaction, to look back over those years of popularity, those years of worldly pleasure. Only three weeks and I must give an account to God, and I am not saved.”
It was a real joy to my own soul to open the Word of God and show her how the blessed Lord Jesus in infinite grace had come all the way from heaven’s fullest glory down to Calvary’s deepest depths of woe for her redemption, and if she would put her heart trust in Him and confess her guilt, she would have all the past blotted out. Directing her to John 3:18, I read: “He that believeth on Him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” And then I put the question to her, “Tell me, do you believe the Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God?”
“I do.”
Then I asked her, “Do you believe that God the Father sent Him into this world to die for sinners?”
“Yes, it is in the Bible: I do believe it,” she replied.
“Do you believe He meant you when He said: ‘Him that cometh unto me I will in no wise cast out?’” I asked.
“It is for everybody, isn’t it,” she said.
“Yes,” I replied, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). Are you included in that whosoever?”
“Yes,” she said, “I believe I am.”
“Then tell me,” I said, “what does the Lord Jesus Christ say about you? Look at verse eighteen again; notice there are only two classes of people there: the first class, ‘He that believeth on Him,’ and the second class, ‘He that believeth not.’ Notice that there is something predicated of the first class and something of the second class. Of the first it is said, ‘He that believeth is not condemned’; and of the second, ‘He that believeth not is condemned already.’ Now before I ask you to tell me which class you are in, let us bow in prayer.”
She could not kneel, but her friend and I knelt in prayer. We asked God by the Spirit to open His Word and bring it home in power to her soul.
“Read it again,” I said.
“Do you see the two classes? Which one are you in?” She was silent for a long time as we knelt there before God, and then she looked up, the tears glistening in her beautiful eyes, and she said, “I am in the first class.” “How do you know?”
“Because I do believe in Him. It doesn’t say He won’t take me in because I come so late. I have come, and I do believe in Him.”
“And what is true of you?” I asked.
She looked at it again and whispered, “Not condemned!”
I said, “Is that enough to meet God on?”
She replied, “That will do; not condemned!”
Three weeks from eternity, but resting upon the Word of God! I saw her only twice again, and then my meetings ended. About five weeks later I met the Baptist preacher on the street, and he said, “You remember Miss H-? Do you know that just twenty-one days from the day you led her to Christ, I was called to her bedside, and I found her just slipping away? ‘Can you hear me?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Do you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ?’ ‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘And what does He say about you?’ I asked. ‘Not condemned!’ and then she whispered, ‘If you see Mr. Ironside, tell him it is all right.’”
Oh, I tell you, dear friend, that was something real, because that young woman had the Word of the living God to rest upon; but there are many who rest upon their own imaginations instead of resting on God’s immutable Word.
