I remember, when we were in London, they found one old woman who was eighty-five years old, and not a Christian. After the worker had prayed, she made a prayer herself:
"O Lord, I thank Thee for going out of Thy way to find me."
He is all the time going out of His way to find the lost.
He Got Time To Think
I was once preaching on the text, "Be not deceived; G.o.d is not mocked; for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap." No sooner had I read it than a man stood right up in the audience and said:
"I don"t believe it."
I said: "My friend, that doesn"t change the fact. Truth is truth, whether you believe it or not; and a lie is a lie, whether you believe it or not."
He didn"t want to believe it. When the meeting broke up, an officer was at the door to arrest him. He was tried and sent to the penitentiary for twelve months for stealing. I really believe that when he got into his cell, he believed that he had to reap what he sowed.
The Motherless Child
Once I heard of a little sick child, whose mother was seriously ill; and so, in order that she might have quiet, and that the sick child might be no trouble to her, the little one was taken away to a friend"s house, and placed in charge of a kind lady for a time. The mother grew worse, and at length died. The father said:
"We"ll not trouble the child about it; she is too young to remember her mother; just let her remain where she is until the funeral is over."
This was done, and in a few days the little girl was brought back to the house. No mention was made of her mother, or of what had occurred; but no sooner was she taken to the house than she ran first into one room, then into another, into the parlor, the dining-room, and all over the house, and then away into a little room where her mother used to go to pray alone.
"Where is mother?" she cried. "I want mother!"
And when they were compelled to tell her what had happened, she cried out:
"Take me away, take me away; I don"t want to be here without mother."
It was the mother made it home to her. And so it is in heaven. It is not so much the white robes, the golden crown, or the harps of gold, but it is the society we shall meet there. Who, then, are there? What company shall we have when we get there? Jesus is there, the Holy Father is there, the Spirit is there--our Father, our elder Brother, our Comforter.
Converted the Regular Way
I never yet knew a man converted just in the time and manner he expected to be. I have heard people say, "Well, if ever I am converted, it won"t be in a Methodist church; you won"t catch me there." I never knew a man say that but, at last, if converted at all, it was in a Methodist church.
In Scotland a man was converted at one of our meetings--an employer.
He was very anxious that all his employes should be reached, and he used to send them one by one to the meetings. But there was one employe that wouldn"t come. We are all more or less troubled with stubbornness; and the moment this man found that his employer wanted him to go to the meetings, he made up his mind he wouldn"t go. If he was going to be converted, he said, he was going to be converted by some ordained minister; he was not going to any meeting that was conducted by unordained Americans. He believed in conversion, but he was going to be converted the regular way. He believed in the regular Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and that was the place for him to be converted.
The employer tried every way he could to get him to attend the meetings, but he wouldn"t come.
After we left that town and went away up to Inverness, the employer had some business up there, and he sent this employe to attend to it, in the hope that he would attend some of our meetings.
One night, as I was preaching on the bank of a river, I happened to take for my text the words of Naaman: "I thought; I thought." I was trying to take men"s thoughts up and to show the difference between their thoughts and G.o.d"s thoughts. This man happened to be walking along the bank of the river. He saw a great crowd, and heard some one talking, and he wondered to himself what that man was talking about.
He didn"t know who was there, so he drew up to the crowd, and listened. He heard the sermon, and became convicted and converted right there. Then he inquired who was the preacher, and he found out it was the very man that he said he would not hear--the man he disliked. The very man he had been talking against was the very man G.o.d used to convert him.
Crazy from Sin
I was once preaching in Chicago, and a woman who was nearly out of her mind came to me. You know there are some people who mock at religious meetings, and say that religion drives people mad. It is _sin_ that drives people mad. It is the want of Christ that sinks people into despair.
This was the woman"s story:
She had a family of children. One of her neighbors had died, and her husband had brought home a little child. She said, "I don"t want the child," but her husband said, "You must take it and look after it."
She said she had enough to do with her own, and she told her husband to take that child away. But he would not. She confessed that she tried to starve the child; but it lingered on. One night it cried all night; I suppose it wanted food. At last she took the clothes and threw them over the child and smothered it. No one saw her; no one knew anything about it. The child was buried. Years had pa.s.sed away, and she said:
"I hear the voice of that child day and night. It has driven me nearly mad."
No one saw the act; but G.o.d saw it, and this retribution followed it.
History is full of these things. You need not go to the Bible to find it out.
Don"t Swear!
I was greatly amazed not long ago, in talking to a man who thought he was a Christian, to find that once in a while, when he got angry, he would swear. I said: "My friend, I don"t see how you can tear down with one hand what you are trying to build up with the other. I don"t see how you can profess to be a child of G.o.d and let those words come out of your lips."
He replied: "Mr. Moody, if you knew me, you would understand. I have a very quick temper. I inherited it from my father and mother, and it is uncontrollable but my swearing comes only from the lips."
When G.o.d said, "I will not hold him guiltless that takes My name in vain," He meant what He said, and I don"t believe any one can be a true child of G.o.d who takes the name of G.o.d in vain.
The True Sheep Knows
I tell you the true sheep know a true shepherd. I got up in Scotland once and quoted a pa.s.sage of Scripture a little different from what it was in the Bible, and an old woman crept up and said:
"Mr. Moody, you said----."
I might make forty misquotations in an ordinary audience, and no one would tell me about them. Like two lawyers: one said in court that the other didn"t know the Lord"s Prayer. The other said he did:
"Now I lay me down to sleep."
"Well," the first said, "I give it up. I did not think you knew it."
Didn"t either one of them know it, you see.
The Father Knew Best
Dr. Arnot, one of the greatest Scotch divines, was in this country before he died. His mother died when he was a little boy only three weeks old, and there was a large family of Arnots. I suppose they missed the tenderness and love of the mother. They got the impression that their father was very stern and rigid, and that he had a great many laws and rules.
One rule was, that the children should never climb trees. When the neighbors found out that the Arnot children could not climb trees, they began to tell them about the wonderful things they could see from the tops of the trees. Well, tell a boy of twelve years that he mustn"t climb a tree, and he will get up that tree some way. And so the Arnot children were all the time teasing their father to let them climb the tree; but the old sire said:
"No."
One day he was busy reading his paper, and the boys said: