A DEBTOR TO CHRIST by D. F. Ewen

Seventh-Day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Thursday, February 19, 1880.

FromThe Review and Herald, Vol. 55, No. 8

A DEBTOR TO CHRIST.

By D. F. Ewen

BY D. F. EWEN.

“When I stand before the throne, Clothed in beauty not my own; When I see Thee as thou art, Love Thee with unstinting heart, Then, Lord, shall I fully know, Not till then, how much I owe.”

When I look back on my past life, my love of the world, and my distance from and rebellion against a tender Saviour, I am filled with wonder and gratitude at the way by which he has led me into his fold, and taught my cold heart to bow in adoring homage, uttering the joyful acknowledgment, “How much I owe!” He has indeed shown me, ere too late, that the pleasures of this world are at best a deluding phantom, leading their votaries with remorseless grasp down a rapid declivity into an abyss of darkness and destruction! How many loving messages have I slighted! How many solemn warnings have I put aside or misinterpreted, while my poor soul went on decked with the rose-wreaths and flimsy trappings of a hollow mirth; and I might, amid circumstances least expected, have been called to enter into the dark shadows of death, an exile forever from the presence of the Prince of peace! How easily might I have been among those who will call to the mountains and rocks to fall on them, and hide them from the face of Him that sitteth on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb.

Dear thoughtless one, do not think I am writing romance; it is strict truth. When I read in God’s word of the “worm that dieth not,” and the “fire that never shall be quenched,” Mark 9:44, I long to be the means of bringing some troubled soul to know the blessed privilege and liberty (if I may use a paradox) of being “a debtor to Christ.”