In the first revival I ever attempted to conduct in a little country church near Decatur, Texas, I remember a man for whom his wife and daughter prayed. One night as the invitation song was being sung under the little brush arbor, I heard someone call for me. In a thicket of plum bushes beside the tabernacle, the daughter and a girl friend knelt beside the gray-haired man. He said to me, "Brother Rice, tell these girls to leave me alone. I am all right."
I told him that if he was really all right, it was strange that his wife was so burdened about him, that his daughter was continually praying and crying about his salvation .
He replied, "Why, Brother Rice, I used to be superintendent of a Sunday school. I have prayed in public. I am as well off as these other church members."
"But that does not make a Christian," I said. "Praying in public, doing church work, living a good moral life is not enough. You are a lost sinner if you have not been saved."
"I have never done much of anything wrong," he said. "About all I have ever done is to cuss a little bit. I am as good a Christian as the others are."
I told him that he might just as well say that he had only killed a few men as far as being a lost sinner was concerned. That seemed to astonish him, and I asked him plainly, "Now I am not asking you whether you live a good life, whether you are a moral man. I am asking you whether you have ever been born again. Did you ever trust Jesus Christ to change your heart and to forgive your sins and make you a new creature?"
Very gravely be looked me in the face and then he answered, "No, I guess I never did!"
"Then don't you think it is time you got that settled?"
He assented and came with me to the front. There he knelt down on the oat straw under that simple brush arbor, and by the light of gasoline torches, lifted up his face and with tears said, "O God, if You will forgive me and save me, I will do anything You want me to do!" He was happily saved and had the assurance in his heart that God had forgiven him just as He promised in His Word to forgive all who trust in Christ. But I have often wondered if he might not have gone until death and then have discovered himself eternally lost had I not pressed the question into his heart that night!
In Dallas, Texas, in 1932 in an open air revival, a woman in a great crowd sent me a note. "Brother Rice, I have been a member of a church twenty-two years. Most of that time I have known I was never converted. I am not a child of God. But I cannot stand the shame of confessing that I have been in the church unsaved. It would break my husband's heart. He would think I have been a hypocrite, and perhaps I have."
I sent her word that both she and her husband had better have the shame over with now, that she had better confess her lost condition and turn to Christ for mercy and salvation now, rather than wait until she faced the Lord Jesus Christ and hear Him say, "I never knew you. Depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
The next night she came weeping to trust in Christ. She told me that she had been in the church unsaved. She was baptized and has made a happy Christian.
In Fort Worth, Texas, some years ago in a great revival service, a young woman came weeping to say, "My name has been on the church roll, but I think it has never been written in the Lamb's book of life." How happy that she found it out in time!
I remember another who came to tell me, "I have been baptized, but now I want to be born again!"