I never yet knew a man converted just in the time and manner he
expected to be. I have heard people say, "Well, if ever I am
converted, it won't be in a Methodist church; you won't catch me
there." I never knew a man say that but, at last, if converted at all,
it was in a Methodist church.
In Scotland a man was converted at one of our meetings--an employer.
He was very anxious that all his employes should be reached, and he
used to send them one by one to the meetings. But there was one
employe that wouldn't come. We are all more or less troubled with
stubbornness; and the moment this man found that his employer wanted
him to go to the meetings, he made up his mind he wouldn't go. If he
was going to be converted, he said, he was going to be converted by
some ordained minister; he was not going to any meeting that was
conducted by unordained Americans. He believed in conversion, but he
was going to be 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 employe to attend to it,
in the hope that he would attend some of our meetings.
One night, as I was preaching on the bank of a river, I happened to
take for my text the words of Naaman: "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 bank 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.