I Close With A Story With A Story From The Life ...

I close with a story with a story from the life of the great British preacher, Brownlow North. He had lived a wicked life before he was saved. One evening as he entered a church where he was to preach, a stranger walked up to him in a hurried manner, and said, "Here is a letter for you of great importance, and you are requested to read before you preach tonight." Thinking that it might be a request for prayer, he immediately opened it, and found that it contained a detail of some of the things he had done in the past. The letter concluded with the words, "How dare you, being conscious of the truth of all above, pray and speak to the people this evening, when you are such a vile sinner."

He put the letter in his pocket and when it came time for him to preach; he pulled out the letter and told the people what it said. He said to the crowded congregation, "What is here said is true, and it is a correct picture of the degraded sinner that I once was; and oh how wonderful must the grace be that could quicken and raise me up from such a in trespasses and sins, and make me what I appear before you tonight, a vessel of mercy, one who knows that all his past sins have been cleansed away through the atoning of the Lamb of God."