THE KING’ S BUSINESS
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love and friendship. I felt bitter and mis anthropic. Taking down my New Testa ment that night I began reading John’s Gospel, the only Gospel with which I am really familiar. For months, you know, I have been wholly receptive and that night my heart, torn by disappointment, must have been like tinder. I prayed the Holy Spirit to give me the chapter and opened the book at the tenth chapter o f John. I couldn’t get away from it. Over and over I read it. I entered by the ninth verse. In a minute or two my soul was suffused with peace and love. I had always hoped that when “my time came” (I always knew it would come) I would be. swept into the kingdom on a tidal wave o f tears and emotion. After a long life o f sin it doesn’t seem just right that one should go in so easily. It was'so' easy! Jesus Christ is as dear, as near and as real to me at this very minute as He must be to you. I am standing oh the promises, and have a friend now. That is why I wantecj to write you this evening.” we had made plain the way o f salvation, when asked if he wanted to be saved, said “ Yes.” Then after we were down on our knees, and he had offered the “publican’s prayer,” we opened the Scripture to him further, so that he was sure of what he was doing, and as we read to him how Jesus had borne our sins away, he immedi ately exclaimed, “Yes, it is true; Jesus has borne my sins. I do not carry them now, and I feel the burden is all taken away. I feel so much lighter and happier than ever before in my life.” Truly, a miracle o f God’S Holy Spirit. He then told how he was brought up a strict Catholic, and to our surprise, as we were leaving he handed us twenty-five cents.- W e told him we did not do this for money. “Well,” he said, “take it for the work.”
was our surprise and pleasure when he invited us to his home to talk over these things with himself and wife, and one of the other boys and his wife. Will you not pray for the conversion o f these four? And now here comes a letter from one o f our boys in prison. Let me share it with you, that we may all rejoice together. In commenting on a letter which he had received and which had caused him con siderable distress, he writes: “ How little did my outraged friend know that there was ‘honey in the rock* in that letter. It is so wonderful! I am all impatience to tell you, so you mustn’t mind my inco herency. In their zeal they would have given me over to reprobation, but, glory to God, they pushed me into the kingdom. It was like this: After the poignancy o f that Parthian shot (which at first struck me with all the stinging novelty o f a calamity), had somewhat abated, and I was recovering from my dazed condition, I found myself soliloquizing on the fallability o f human I T is with a grateful heart that we are able to again recount the faithfulness o f our God and Saviour Jesus Christ. With humility we exclaim, “Not unto us, but unto thy name be all the glory.” As we go from camp to camp, we come in contact with a new set o f people, only a few remain to whom the Gospel has already been' given. On one oi our rounds we met a man wh,o said that there was one thing certain, our preaching in the camps was the means o f many becoming enlightened, because we gave them the truth which the priests do not, ' This only emphasizes that Scripture which says, “ The entrance o f thy word giveth light.” Oh, how often we have seen it verified in the hearts and lives of those tp whom we minister. For instance, a young man in one of the camps, to whom
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R. H. Bender, Supt.
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