Why do some people not turn to God until later in life?

It is not the Bible that makes man a guilty sinner; but the Bible is the only key to all, and explains it fully and worthily. This book alone carries conviction for every heart that is willing to bow to God and be saved ; but the truth is that people do not want to be saved in God's way. They prefer the full activity of life to be their own, and to enjoy the world as long as they can. They may wish to be saved at the end, but there are many things that they feel unprepared and unwilling to give up yet. They will turn to God on their death‑bed. But they feel that if saved, they must be saved to do the will of God, and not their own will; and, if saved, they are the servants of Christ. But do you want to be Satan's servants? Remember, you cannot be your own master. You must either be the servants of God or the slaves of Satan; for a man who does his own will is the slave of Satan. You may not believe this, but it is true; and a time will come when your own conscience will make you feel the truth of it, and that too when it will be the distressing harbinger of still worse distress; perhaps, in the moment of dying. What a terrible reality to wake up then with the awful words ringing in your ears — Too late, too late, too late! But I bless God that I have the happier task of pressing on you now the way that God has opened in Jesus for you, and the truth that God proclaims to the simplest soul.

It is not the Bible that makes man a guilty sinner; but the Bible is the only key to all, and explains it fully and worthily. This book alone carries conviction for every heart that is willing to bow to God and be saved ; but the truth is that people do not want to be saved in God's way. They prefer the full activity of life to be their own, and to enjoy the world as long as they can. They may wish to be saved at the end, but there are many things that they feel unprepared and unwilling to give up yet. They will turn to God on their death-bed. But they feel that if saved, they must be saved to do the will of God, and not their own will; and, if saved, they are the servants of Christ. But do you want to be Satan's servants? Remember, you cannot be your own master. You must either be the servants of God or the slaves of Satan; for a man who does his own will is the slave of Satan. You may not believe this, but it is true; and a time will come when your own conscience will make you feel the truth of it, and that too when it will be the distressing harbinger of still worse distress; perhaps, in the moment of dying. What a terrible reality to wake up then with the awful words ringing in your ears — Too late, too late, too late! But I bless God that I have the happier task of pressing on you now the way that God has opened in Jesus for you, and the truth that God proclaims to the simplest soul.

Satan is a great preacher of procrastination. Says he, You have plenty of time. Put it off a little longer. Wait till you get into middle age. And then the cares of business occupy your mind and you do not turn to Christ. "Oh," you say, "it is all very well for you with your black coat, but we have got to work." So have I, my friends. I work all day, and sometimes all night too. I work as hard as any of you. This is often the lie of the devil, viz., that you are too busy to attend to the affairs of the soul. That is not it, my friend, at all. You are not too busy, but you are indifferent. And sin has begun to harden your soul. And when you get old, what then? Satan will tell you that you have missed the day of grace and salvation altogether. Stop, my hearer, that is a lie too. As long as you have a year, day, or an hour left on earth you may be saved. Thank God, you may be saved tonight. Oh; do not halt any longer. Come to Jesus. If you have halted till now, halt no longer.

God has His own way of working in the human soul, and even a godly upbringing does not always take immediate effect, though He can be trusted to bless it in the end: for He has said that them that honour Him, He will honour. This was my own case. In spite of a godly tuition I grew up absolutely irreligious. From my earliest recollections I was sceptical. I wanted, still want, everything proven. It is plain enough that a mind like that can only be caught through a sense of need. It betrays a hardened condition of soul, as well as a haughty spirit. It is not that I was at any time indifferent to the great question of a future state. The very opposite was the case. The question was ever uppermost in my thoughts. Indeed, I never could well understand how any one was able to shelve such a momentous consideration. I ate my food without raising questions about how it could be converted into blood, bone, and muscle; but to the Bread of Life I was able to raise more objections than any one who took an interest in my soul was able to meet. For this reason I have said that such a person can only be caught by his need. To my daily bread I had no objection, but the Bread of Life was not palatable: I had no appetite for it. I should have been thankful could I have been assured either of the favour of God, or of annihilation as the alternative; but no one could assure me of either.

On a Lord's day afternoon in a town hall in the country, not long ago, a person was introduced to me by a christian friend, as anxious about her soul. I found it to be a chronic case of feelings with very little intelligence about Christ, His work, or the word of God, but most sincere and earnest. My point was, that Christ could not be more willing to receive her tomorrow than today, His word could not be truer, or His work more complete; therefore, why not come now, believe and rejoice? The appeal in the afternoon for instant decision for Christ, was founded on these two words, "Come now;" which had greatly interested her, and presented a new line of truth to her mind. Like most of this class, she would be ready to own that all she had heard was true, and that she did not doubt a word of it, but it was not true to her because she did not feel it; she was waiting to experience that change within, which would be her warrant for believing that it was true to her. She acknowledged that she had been waiting for this inward change for years. Hardly anything can be more discouraging or hopeless to an evangelist than this, for the lives of such are generally most blameless; there is conscience enough to make them religious. After pointing out her mistake and assuring her that all her darkness arose from looking to herself in place of Christ, and from trusting to feelings in place of His finished work, we parted. She was back again in the evening, but I did not see her.

Eighteen years of my life I was without Him, I would not have Him; but said, "Let me have my lusts and passions, let me enjoy all the delights of this world." I thought that when I was sixty or seventy years old I would think of religion. God came and knocked at the door of my heart again and again, but I put Him off and tried to drive Him away till He broke it open and brought the light of life to the very bottom of the well.

I pray you to carefully note what Christ says, "Ye must be born again!" You will say, How does it come about? God takes the most wonderful way of reaching the soul. Marvellously diverse is His acting, but it is always by the Word, perhaps heard years before, and lying, like seed, forgotten in the ground. I know of a man who was living at a place four miles from where I was born in Devonshire. When a lad of seventeen he went into Dartmouth parish church one Sunday, and the pious old minister preached from that text, "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha" i.e., "cursed when he comes" (1 Cor. 16:22). He passed out of the church, and God added another eighty-three years to his life. He lived to be a hundred, and was then in the backwoods of America, a very hale specimen of a man one hundred years old. He had felled a tree, and sat down in the heat of the day to rest, and eat his mid-day meal, and as he sat on a log he began to think, "I have had a long life, for I am a hundred years of age today." He then began to think of the past, and travelled back the eighty-three years to that church in Dartmouth, and suddenly remembered the text used by good John Flavel, "If any man love not the Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Maranatha" — cursed when He comes. Then the old man said: "I have not loved the Lord Jesus. I shall be cursed when He comes." He was a convicted sinner, and, thank God, became a converted man. God used that word, which had been buried for eighty-three years in his memory, as the means of his conversion. This is always God's way, for a man is ever born again by His Word and Spirit; but as to the when, and where, and how, "The wind blows where it lists, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it comes, and whither it goes: so is every one that is born of the Spirit," for God is sovereign.

Daylight was fading, but just enough remained to permit me to read from my little pocket Testament the lovely tale of the return of the wanderer, and the welcome he received (Luke 15:11-32.) Dear J- listened as he had never done before; he owned his sin, his misspent life, his often stifled convictions when in health, his ill-treatment of Christ, and of the grace of God. He had "come to himself," on the verge of the grave. "Repentance toward God," was manifest in the way he judged himself, and the whole, past in view of God and Eternity. "Faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ" was as yet, however, wanting.

There are those who live all their life careless and Christless. If the importance of their soul's welfare is pressed upon them, they say they will consider the matter "some day," and thus they put it off again and again, and go on with their sins and their pleasures. At last, when they find themselves upon the brink of the grave, they become alarmed and begin to cry to God for mercy, and make a profession of faith in Christ. That, I suppose, is what is called a "death-bed repentance."

But death-bed repentances are very unsatisfactory things. I am far from denying that a man, even at the eleventh hour of life, if he really turns to the Saviour and puts his trust in His precious blood, will find mercy. The grace of God is infinite, and I have no doubt many will be in heaven who were saved upon a dying bed.

Besides, does it not seem a very mean thing to devote all one's best years to the service of sin and self, and then when strength is failing and life ebbing away to turn to God because one can no longer pursue one's own way?