The following is adapted from Going Home by Charles Spurgeon.
I received last night a short epistle written with a trembling hand by one who is past the natural age of man, living in the country of Essex. His son, under God, had been converted by hearing the Word preached, and the good man could not help writing to the minister, thanking him, and blessing most of all, his God, that his son had been regenerated.
“Sir,” he begins, “an old rebel writes to thank you, and above all to thank his God, that his dear son has been converted.” I shall treasure up that epistle. It goes on to say, “Go on, and the Lord bless you.” And there was another case I heard some time ago, where a young woman went home to her parents, and when her mother saw her, she said, “There, if the minister had made me a present of all London, I should not have thought so much of it as I do of this—to think that you have really become a changed character and are living in the fear of God.”
Make Their Hearts Glad
Oh, if you want to make your mother’s heart leap within her, and to make your father glad—if you would make that sister happy who sent you so many letters, which sometimes you read against a lamp-post, with your pipe in your mouth—go home and tell your mother that her wishes are all accomplished, that her prayers are heard, that you will no longer chaff her about her Sunday School class, and no longer laugh at her because she loves the Lord, but that you will go with her to the house of God, for you love God, and you have said, “Your people shall be my people, and your God shall be my God, for I have a hope that your heaven shall be my heaven forever.”
Oh, what a happy thing it would be if some here that had gone astray, should thus go home! It was my privilege a little while ago to preach for a noble institution for the reception of women who had led abandoned lives—and before I preached the sermon I prayed to God to bless it, and in the printed sermon you will notice that at the end of it there is an account of two persons who were blessed by that sermon and restored.
“What Was the First Thing She Did?”
Now, let me tell you a story of what happened to Mr. Vanderkist, a city missionary, who toils all night long to do good in that great work. There had been a drunken brawl in the street. He stepped between the men to part them and said something to a woman who stood there concerning how dreadful a thing it was that men should thus be intemperate. She walked with him a little way, and he with her, and she began to tell him such a tale of woe and sin too—how she had been lured away from her parents’ home in Somersetshire and had been brought up here to her soul’s eternal hurt. He took her home with him and taught her the fear and love of Christ. What was the first thing she did, when she returned to the paths of godliness, and found Christ to be the sinner’s Savior? She said, “Now, I must go home to my friends.” Her friends were written to; they came to meet her at the station at Bristol, and you can hardly conceive what a happy meeting it was. The father and mother had lost their daughter. They had never heard from her, and there she was, brought back by the agency of this institution, and restored to the bosom of her family.
“Jesus Christ Has Healed Me!”
Ah, if such a one be here! I know not; among such a multitude there may be such a one. Woman, have you strayed from your family? Have you left them long? “Go home to your own people,” I beseech you, where your father totters to his grave, and where your mother’s gray hairs sleep on the snow-white pillow of her coffin.
Go back. I beseech you! Tell her you are repentant; tell her that God has met with you—that the young minister said, “Go back to your friends.” And if so, I shall not blush to have said these things, though you may think I ought not to have mentioned them. For if I may but win one such soul, I will bless God to all eternity. “Go home to your own people. Go home and tell them how much the Lord has done for you.”
Can you imagine the scene, when the poor demoniac mentioned in my text went home? He had been a raving madman, and when he came and knocked at the door, don’t you think you see his friends calling to one another in fear, “Oh, there he is again?” The mother running upstairs and locking all the doors, because her son had come back that was raving mad? The little ones crying because they knew what he had been before—how he cut himself with stones, because he was possessed with devils? And can you picture their joy, when the man said, “Mother, Jesus Christ has healed me! Let me in; I am no lunatic now!”
And when the father opened the door, he said, “Father, I am not what I was! All the evil spirits are gone; I shall live in the tombs no longer. I want to tell you how the glorious Man who wrought my deliverance accomplished the miracle—how He said to the devils, ‘Get out of him,’ and they ran down a steep place into the sea, and I come home healed and saved.” Oh, if such a one, possessed with sin, were here this morning, and would go home to his friends, to tell them of his release, I think this scene would be somewhat similar.
