CHANGED ON CHRISTMAS EVE

A YOUNG ENGLISH WOMAN married a man in the Government service. Her husband was a light-hearted young man, who smoked, drank and gambled like the other young men of his set. As the years went on, he was promoted in service, had large responsibilities, but he became a hardened gambler and the leader of a circle who boasted that they could individually drink a bottle of whiskey and be nothing the worse for it. As the husband went deeper into sin, his wife, through anxiety on his account, became deeply worried about her soul, and as a lost, guilty sinner (Rom. 3:9-19), cast herself and all her burdens on the Saviour, and became a new creature in Christ, with one bur-ning desire, to bring her husband to Christ as well. For thirteen years she prayed with never-failing faith that the Lord would convert her husband. Every Sunday she would ask him to accompany her to church and he as often refused. He would say: "If you will go with me and my friends once, I will go forty times to church with you." She refused. One Christmas Eve the husband went to dinner with his friends before going home to his wife and children with his usual Christmas presents. He was in good spirits and laughingly distributed the gifts. To his horror he found that he had for the first time since he was married, forgotten to buy his wife a present. He was utterly at a loss to account for this, and said to her: "I don't know how this happened but to make up for it, you may ask what you like, and I will give it to you." She quietly and earnestly said: "Come with me to the Church service tonight. That will be my present." "Oh, no," he said, "I cannot do that; come on, ask for some present." But she stood firm, and reminded him that he had promised. When the time came for his wife to go to the service, he overheard the children say to her: "Do you think father will go with us?" "Yes," she said, "your father has never broken a promise to me." He had no choice! Later that evening, after they had returned from the service, one of the pictures in the hallway caught his eye. It was a picture of Christ on the Cross of Calvary. He never liked the picture, but tonight it smote him to the heart. Words he had long forgotten came to mind: "He was despised and rejected of men; a Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with grief... He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities... the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed" (Isaiah 53:3-5). His wasted past and the prospect of an awful Eternity rolled in like billows over his soul. He realised that his only hope for peace was in this One, Who was despised, rejected, wounded and bruised. He looked and looked, until it seemed to him as if it were Christ Himself hanging on that Cross, and saying: "I died for you." "For me, Lord?" and there, in soul agony, he called on the Saviour to save him and to put away from him forever the desire for all sin. Like the "chief of sinners he fell to the earth" (Acts 9:4) and upon his knees in his own house, with no one near but God, he acknowledged his "manifold transgres-sions" (Amos 5:12), and accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as his own and only Saviour. He believed on Him "Who was delivered for our offences, and was raised again for our justification" (Rom. 4:25), and rose from his knees, a free man, with Christ as his Saviour and almighty Deliverer! That very night he went to his old companions and told them what the Lord Jesus had done for him. At first they thought he was joking, and laughed at him, but eventually they had to admit that if God can save a drinking, gambling, swearing sinner of the deepest dye, and make him a new creature in Christ, He can save anyone! HE IS ALSO BOTH ABLE AND WILLING TO SAVE YOU! [From: The Railway Messenger, December 1996].