Drawing Nigh to God....series

"Drawing Nigh to God"

by Minnie E. Dauphinee

Supreme Love...The Supreme Question

 

A young man who excelled in mathematics liked to challenge his fellow students with hard problems. One day a classmate who was a Christian said to him, "John, I have a very important problem for you to solve." He handed him a folded paper, then left the room. Instead of the expected question in mathematics, John read-

 

"What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

 

This unexpected problem was finally solved by his conversion. The necessity of every individual's answering this supreme question is sorely urgent. O that all would answer it as did that student! But they do not.

 

"How much is that estate worth?" asked a man of his friend as they passed a beautiful mansion with extensive grounds.

I do not know how much it is worth," was the reply. "But I know what it cost its owner."

"How much?"

"It cost him his soul," was the startling response. Then he proceeded to tell how the owner had lived exclusively for one purpose- to built himself a home on earth-and had died suddenly with no hope of eternal life.

 

Esau bartered his soul for a mess of pottage; Gehazi, for "2 talents of silver..., with two changes of garments"; Achan, for a "Babylonish garment, and two hundred shekels of sliver, and a wedge of gold of fifty shekels weight"; Judas, for "thirty pieces of silver." We are amazed at the folly of the uncivilized natives who accepts some worthless trinket in exchange for priceless jewels that would grace a royal crown. Yet what is that compared with the folly of him who exchanges the pearl of great price for the worthless things of this earth? Even if it were possible for him to gain  "the whole world," what would that profit him in comparison with the loss of his own soul?

 

"One soul is of more value to heaven than a whole world of property, houses, lands, money."

 

Many have been converted by the solemn appeal. "What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?" John Williams was one of these. He was an ungodly young man when he heard a sermon on this text. He gave up the world, took up his cross, and followed Christ. Later he lost his life at the hand of savages in one of the islands of the New Hebrides, where