Settled in Time

A young fellow heard a preacher from the olden days, and was greatly moved, and the preacher said: “When you have a religious impression, the time to act upon it is right then. The time when you hear God’s call, in which you ought to respond is right then.” And the young fellow walked down the aisle and publicly made his surrender to Christ, saying: “It shall be right now that I take Christ as my Savior.” He went back to the sawmill in the mountains where he worked, and the boys said that next morning he sang continually. Religion in the heart makes men sing. The boys said that he sang all the morning, and they moved the great logs to the sawmill, and as he went singing all that morning—the first morning that he had ever known what it was to be Christ’s trusting disciple and follower—about noon his body was caught somehow in the machinery and crushed and mangled, so that a little while thereafter he went away into dusty death. When they got him out he faintly said: “Send for the preacher, that preacher in the church at the foot of the mountains that I talked to last night.” The preacher fortunately was soon found and hurried up the mountain to the mill, and he bent down by the side of the dying fellow and took his hand and said: “Charley, I have come. What would you like to say?” And with a smile on his face that was never on land or sea, he faintly pressed the minister’s hand and said: “Wasn’t it a glorious thing that I settled it in time?” Oh, men and women, my men and women, I beg you, in the great Savior’s name, turn your boat upstream before it is too late! “Now is the accepted time. Now is the day of salvation” (2 Cor. 6:2).

—George W. Truett