Saturday, May 12, 2018
Proverbs 22:6 Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.
WHAT DID YOUR MAMA SAY?
(The following is based on an actual event from a retired pastor's ministry.)
In his younger days John had been a womanizer and a gambler, turning his back on his family and his church. John's yellow skin and sunken eyes told a tale of decades of self-abuse. Lying in his hospital bed, he appeared delusional, as he rambled in disjointed German, his mother tongue.
"Johann!" a visitor said, also in German. "I'm the pastor.” The sallow man looked blearily into the clergyman's eyes. "Johann! You haven't got much time! What do you believe?" With a snarl the sickly man tried to take a swipe at his questioner, but could manage only a feeble wave of his arm.
"It's a hopeless case," the pastor thought. But then, with a flash of insight, he pulled his chin forward in order to look at him directly, and shouted "Johann! As a boy you learned about Jesus . . . Johann! WHAT DID YOUR MAMA SAY?"
At this the old man began to shake and his eyes welled up with tears. With the pastor's gentle reminders, the words that his mother had spoken to him so long ago came tumbling out, from the Bible, catechism, and hymnal: "For God so loved the world that He gave His only-begotten Son . . . He has redeemed me, a lost and condemned creature … Chief of sinners though I be, Jesus shed His blood for me." That shell of a man who had been broken by his own life of sin was made whole -- by remembering what Mama had said about Jesus.
John was dead within days, but in the case of this formerly lost soul, the Scripture passage had rung true: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it" (Proverbs 22:6). We may well be surprised to find out just how many will be standing in the glorious company of the saints on the Last Day because of "what Mama said" about Jesus!
-- From the "Lutheran Spokesman"
