This true story from the life of David Paulson might encourage someone reading: "One night I was in the Life Boat mission that we maintained on State street in Chicago. A man in the audience was so drunken that he kept on jumping up trying to say something, and this tended to break up the meeting. I took him by the arm and persuaded him to accompany me upstairs. I tried to impress upon him the importance of becoming delivered from the liquor habit. He said something about being a drunkard for forty years and that it was no use. I felt impressed that the Lord could do something for the poor fellow that I could not. In spite of his objection I succeeded in getting him down on his knees and I earnestly prayed the Lord to deliver this poor man, and told him he must pray. He said he couldn’t, he didn’t know how. I told him just to ask the Lord to deliver him from the liquor habit and finally he blurted out these very words: [42] “Lord, If you can do anything for a poor broken-down bum like me, I wish you would. Amen.” That did not sound like a very remarkable prayer to me, but evidently God saw a bigger prayer in the poor man’s soul for he arose from his knees practically sober. I took him down again to the mission meeting and intended to see him when it was over but he slipped out unobserved. Six weeks later he came back well dressed and clothed and in his right mind. He wanted to see “the doctor with whiskers,” but I was not there that night. When opportunity came to testify he rose and said that six weeks previous he had come into the mission a drunken outcast; his wife had left him in sheer despair, his employer had discharged him, his tools had been pawned for drink, but the doctor took him up stairs and got him down on his knees to pray and something happened to him: he went out of the mission with a new power in his life. He hunted up his wife and told her that if she would come back and live with him he would [43] give her no further trouble. He told his employer that if he would help him to get his tools he could keep sober now, and he said from that hour he had no appetite for whisky. In other words, he had gotten some pollen from another world and it had fertilized his soul. That represents what every man needs who is a victim of some enslaving habit. He does not need merely talk, he needs a new impulse, and that from a higher source."
Posted on: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 10:41:36 +0000
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