Converted The Regular Way
He believed in the regular Presbyterian Church of Scotland, and that
was the place for him to be converted.
The employer tried every way he could to get him to attend the
meetings, but he wouldn't come.
After we left that town and went away up to Inverness, the employer
had some business up there, and he sent this employee to attend to
it in the hope that he would attend some of our meetings
One night as I was preaching on the banks of a river I happened to
take this for my text: "I thought; I thought." I was trying to take
men's thoughts up and to show the difference between their thoughts
and God's thoughts. This man happened to be walking along the banks
of the river. He saw a great crowd, and heard some one talking, and
he wondered to himself what that man was talking about. He didn't
know who was there, so he drew up to the crowd, and listened. He
heard the sermon, and became convicted and converted right there.
Then he inquired who was the preacher, and he found out it was the
very man that he said he would not hear--the man he disliked. The
very man he had been talking against was the very man God used to
convert him.
Whilst Naaman was thus wavering in his mind, and thinking on what
was best to be done, one of his servants drew near and made a very
sensible remark:
"My lord, if the prophet had bid thee do some great thing, wouldest
thou not have done it? How much rather then, when he saith to thee,
Wash, and be clean?"
There is a great deal of truth in that.
If Elisha had told him to go back to Syria on his hands and knees,
one hundred and fifty miles, he would have done it and thought it
was all right. If he had told him to go into some cave and stay
there a year or two, he would have done it and thought it was all
right. If he had told him that it was necessary to have some
surgical operation performed, and that he had to go through all the
torture incident to it, that would have suited him. Men like to have
something to do about their salvation; they don't like to give up
the idea that they can't do anything; that God must do it all. If
you tell them to take bitter herbs every morning and every night for
the next five years, they think that's all right, and if he had told
Naaman to do that he would have done it. But to tell him merely to
dip in the river Jordan seven times, why, it seemed absurd on the
face of it! But this servant suggested to him that he had better go
down to the Jordan and try the remedy, as it was