Are You Ready for Death

Three months before I was converted I was in a ballroom, and in the middle of a waltz with a young lady, we paused before a cheffonier, where there were some lovely flowers.

“Are not these flowers lovely?” she said.

“Yes, they are beautiful,” I replied, “but they are very like us.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

I replied, “They are cut, will wither and soon be dead.”

“Oh! what do you mean?” said she, perfectly alarmed.

“Never mind,” I answered, and we got into the whirl of the waltz once more.

The fact was my conscience was at work, and the word dropped so unexpectedly stuck to the young lady. She saw death ahead of her. Death and damnation were before me, and I knew it full well.

Three months after I was converted, and still the remark rankled in the young lady’s conscience. She could get no peace.

Some months after I was preaching in the town where she lived. She came to the meetings, found Christ as her Saviour, and then told me how she had been awakened in the ballroom.

You may have your fill of pleasure here, take all that the world can give you, and what then?

You pass into eternity. You have no lease of life. Life is often short. The call to eternity is often sudden.

Just the other day, the son of one of my oldest friends was out riding, his horse shied and he struck his brow against an overhanging branch of a tree. He fell to the ground insensible, and within four and twenty hours was in eternity. Tell me, if within the same space of time you were to pass into eternity, where would you spend it? Don’t shirk the question.

Christ died for you. He “gave Himself a ransom for all” (1 Tim. 2:6). “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

W.T.P.Wolston

The Gospel Messenger 1921, p. 13