Sowing and Reaping by Dwight L. Moody (freda ebook reader .txt) 📖

Where is my wandering boy to-night-—

The boy of my tenderest care,

The boy that was once my joy and light.

The child of my love and prayer?

Once he was pure as morning dew,

As he knelt at his mother’s knee;

No face was so bright, no heart more true,

And none was so sweet as he.

O, could I see you now, my boy,

As fair as in olden time,

When prattle and smile made home a joy,

And life was a merry chime.

Go for my wandering boy to-night,

Go, search for him where you will;

But bring him to me with all his blight,

And tell him I love him still.

My dear friends, God may forgive you, but the consequences of your sin are going to be bitter even if you are forgiven.

A few years ago I was preaching in Chicago on that text, “Arise, go up to Bethel and dwell there.” After the meeting a man asked to see me alone. I went into a private room. The perspiration stood in beads on his forehead. I said:

“What is it?”

He replied: “I am a fugitive from justice. I am in exile, in disguise. The government of my state has offered a reward for me. I have been hidden here for months. They tell me there is no hell, but it seems as though I have been in hell for months.”

He had been a business man, and having, as he thought, plenty of money, he forged some bonds, thinking that he could give his check any time and call them in, but he got beyond his depth and fell.

He said, “I have been here for six months. I have a wife and three children, but I cannot write to them or hear from them.” The poor man was in terrible mental agony.

I said, “Why don’t you go back and give yourself up and face the law, and ask God to forgive you?”

He said, “I would take the first train to-morrow and give myself up, except for one thing. I have a wife and three children; how can I bring the disgrace upon them?”

I, too, have a wife and three children, and when he said that, the thing looked very different.

Ah! if we could do our own reaping, it would not be so bitter, but when we make our little children or the wife of our bosom, or our old gray-haired mother, or our old father reap with us, isn’t the reaping pretty bitter? I don’t fear any pestilence or any disease as much as I fear sin. If God will only keep sin out of thy family, I will praise Him in time and in eternity. The worst enemy that ever crossed a man’s path is sin.

If a man comes to me for advice I always try to put myself in the place of the one to whom I am talking, and then to give the best advice I can. I said to this man,

“I don’t know what to say, but it is safe to pray.”

After I had prayed, I urged him to pray; but he said:

“If I do, it means the penitentiary.”

I asked him to come the next day at twelve. He met me at the appointed hour, and said:

“It is all settled; if I ever meet the God of Bethel I must go through the prison to meet Him, and God helping me, I will give myself up. I am going back, and I should like to have you keep quiet until I give myself over into the hands of the law; then you may hold me up as a warning. Little did I think when I started out in life that I was coming to this! Little did I think when I married a girl from one of the first families in the state that I should bring such disgrace on her.”

At four o’clock that afternoon he went back to Missouri. He reached home a little past midnight, and spent a week with his family. In a letter he said that he didn’t dare let his children know he was there, lest they should tell the neighbor’s children. At night he would creep out and look at his children, but he couldn’t take them in his arms or kiss them. Oh, there is the result of sin! Would to God we could every one of us just turn from sin to-day!

One day, when this man was in hiding, he heard his little boy say:

“Mamma, doesn’t papa love us any more?”

“Yes,” his mother replied. “Why do you ask?” “Why,” the little fellow said, “he has been gone so long and he never writes us any letters and never comes to see us.”

The last night he came out from hiding and took a long look at those innocent, sleeping children; then he took his wife and kissed her again and again, and leaving that once happy home he gave himself up to the sheriff. The next morning he pleaded guilty, and was sent to the penitentiary for nineteen years. I believe that God had forgiven him, but he couldn’t forgive himself, and he had to reap what he sowed. I pleaded with the governor for mercy, and the man was pardoned.

Some time ago I was telling this story, and some one doubted it, but the governor who pardoned him happened to be in the meeting, and rose and said, “I pardoned that man myself.” The governor pardoned him, and he lived a few years, but from the time he committed that sin he had to reap. Oh, reader, I plead with you, overcome your besetting sin, whatever it is.

I can imagine some one saying, “I am glad Mr. Moody hasn’t tried to scare us about the future state. I agree with him that we shall receive all our reward and punishment in this life.”

If you think I believe that, you are greatly mistaken. One sentence from the lips of the Son of God in regard to the future state has forever settled it in my mind. “If ye die in your sins, where I am, there ye cannot go.” If a man has not given up his drunkenness, his profanity, his licentiousness, his covetousness, heaven would be hell to him. Heaven is a prepared place for prepared people. What would a man do in heaven who cannot bear to be in the society of the pure and holy down here?

It is not true that all reward and punishment is reaped in this life. Look how many crimes are committed, and the perpetrators are never caught. It often happens that the worst criminal uses his experience to escape detection, while a more innocent hand is captured. A man ruins a girl. Does he always reap punishment here? No. He holds his head as high as ever in society, while the unfortunate victim of his lust, who, perhaps, was innocently beguiled into sin by him, becomes an outcast. His punishment, however is, at the latest, only adjourned to another world.