Taken from Practical Christianity November 1951, pages 13-17, published by the Officers’ Christian Union, now the Armed Forces’ Christian Union.
On Thursday, 5 October 1933, I was on a train approaching Oxford to begin my university life. Opposite me sat an elderly man who had known me from childhood and he took the opportunity to advise me, “Find out about sin, David.”
Sunday morning came and I scanned the array of announcements on the college notice board. The one that appealed to me was headed ‘St Aldates,’ and so to St Aldates I went at 11am on Sunday.
I half dreamed my way through the sermon and at the end I had to pass a small table on which were a number of leaflets. One of these I casually picked up; it contained an invitation to revisit the same church the following night for some special kind of service. Being at rather a loose end I resolved to go.
At least three hundred others had the same idea, and I sat inconspicuously near the back. In the middle of the first hymn, the parson stopped the organ and announced we were all sitting too far back. He suggested that we should leave our pews and move up to the front. I made for the front pew. When it came to the sermon, he preached from a few yards from where I sat. I was thus compelled to listed with an attention I had not before granted to any speaker.
He spoke for thirty minutes with conviction and warmth, telling us that we could have the Lord Jesus as our own personal Lord and Master from that evening if we wanted Him. I had always thought of Christ as external to me, a benevolent power to be summoned in emergencies. He said you could know Christ in your heart as a friend. I knew at once that this was what I had lacked and vaguely groped for since I was ten.
At the close he suggested that there might be someone present who had never accepted Christ as Saviour and Lord. It was as though he could read every thought in my head. He said the time to accept Him was now and suggested one should deliberately do that during a minute of silent prayer. In that brief space an entirely new life began for me as I turned with all sincerity to Jesus Christ, coming as a sinner who needed Him, asking Him to enter and control my heart.
Seventeen years have passed since that night and of the reality of that transforming encounter I cannot have a moment’s doubt. When I returned from the Far East at the conclusion of the war I went back to that front pew in Oxford and gave thanks to God for what He did for me on the fourth day of university life. I had not found out about sin; I had found out about Christ! *Photo Credit: https://www.pexels.com/@jordan-besson-2051439001