Many years ago, I read a little book by
F. W. Boreham, a New Zealander or Australian man who lived in New Zealand for
many years, in ministry and in one of his very interesting articles that he
wrote, he told a story of Ebenezer Wooten, an earnest but eccentric evangelist,
who was conducting a series of summer evening services in the village green in
England, at Lindford Brook. “The last
meeting had been held, the crowd was melting slowly away and the evangelist was
engaged in taking down the marquee,” he said.
I assume that’s something like a tent.
It is what he had set up on Lindford Brook in order to conduct the
meetings. “And, as he was engaged in
taking it down, a young man approached him and asked rather more casually than
earnestly, ‘Mr. Wooten, what must I do to be saved?’ And the preacher looked up, kind of took his
measure of the young man,’” so Mr. Boreham said. “And replied to the young man,
‘Too late.’ And he said it, in a matter
of fact kind of way, glancing up from some obstinate tent peg with which he was
struggling. ‘Too late, my friend. Too late.’
Well,
the young fellow was startled out of his indifference and he said, ‘Oh, don’t
say that, Mr. Wooten.’ A new note of
pleading coming into his voice. ‘Surely,
it’s not too late just because the meetings are over?’ ‘Yes, my friend,’ the evangelist said,
dropping the cord in his hand, straightening up, looking right into the face of
the questioner. ‘It’s too late. You want to know what you must do to be
saved, and I tell you, you’re hundreds of years too late. The work of salvation is done. Finished.
It was finished on the cross.
Jesus said so with the last breath that he drew. What more do you want?’”
from "Hebrews and the New Covenant: Hebrews 8:1-13" by Dr. S. Lewis Johnson
