It's No Use | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 18, 1875

It's No Use.

It is said that a country woman went into a store on Hanover St., Boston, one day, and, putting four dollars on the counter, remarked to a clerk: “There; fourteen years ago—’twill be fifteen this fall—I bought something next door, and gave them a dollar bill; but they couldn’t give me the change, so they sent a boy into the next shop, and he brought me back the change for five dollars instead of one. I took it, but ’tain’t no use; I ain’t going to keep it any longer; so there it is, all back again.” And before the astonished clerk had time to make any inquiries, she was gone.

Poor woman. She had endured fourteen years of trouble for a single sin, and at last had to confess and make restitution. It was well that she had courage and grace to do it finally.

We heard of an old, gray-headed man who took a returned missionary aside one day, and confessed to him how fifty years before, when they were boys together he picked up and kept a quarter of a dollar which the missionary lost, and tried in vain to find. “I have carried the load on my conscience,” said he, “for fifty years, and I would not carry it fifty years longer for the whole world.” And so he paid him back a silver dollar, and begged that he would forgive the sin committed so long ago.

It is of “no use” to sin. If you have done wrong, make it right; and the quicker you do it, the better; life is uncertain; time is short, sin is a heavy load here, but it will be heavier still to bear it before the judgment-seat of Christ. Make haste, then, to get rid of every sin; fly to Christ for pardon and for peace, and make ready to stand accepted and blameless in the Judgment-day that is “near and hasteth greatly.”