| On January 6, 1850, a snowstorm almost crippled the city of Colchester, England, and a teenage boy was unable to get to the church he usually attended. So he made his way to the nearby Primitive Methodist Chapel, where an ill-prepared layman was substituting for an absent preacher. His text was Isaiah 45:22 – “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.” For many months this young teenager had been miserable and under deep conviction, but though he had been reared in church (both his father and grandfather were preachers), he did not have the assurance of his own salvation.
The unprepared substitute minister did not have much to say, so he kept repeating the text. “A man need not go to college to learn to look,” he shouted. “Anyone can look – a child can look.” About that time, he saw the visitor sitting to one side, and he pointed at him and said, “Young man, you look very miserable. Young man, look to Jesus Christ!” The young man did look by faith, and that was how the great preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon was converted. You think you are not qualified to share the gospel with another. You think you do not have all the answers to the questions that may be asked of you as you share the gospel. Do you think you are less prepared than that layman was when he preached the message when Spurgeon was saved? We should understand that it is the power of God that will save another; you are only a mouthpiece, and perhaps a poor one at that. Let God do through you what He did through that layman on that snowy Sunday more than 150 years ago! |