The Man in Black

Yesterday on the podcast, I mentioned that I’d like to tell you this week about some of the people who have helped me—helped me especially in the earlier days of my Christian life—in the hope that this will be something of a catalyst for you to reflect on the people who have meant something to you, so that together we can be thankful for these people.

I’m going to call the first person who helped me “the man in black.” No, not Johnny Cash, the American singer who always dressed in black, and as you’ll maybe remember from his song, never wore bright colors on his back. No, this is a man I met only once in my life, very briefly, but I’ve never forgotten him.

I was fourteen and had, as people used to say, come under conviction of sin. Maybe people today would say I was a seeker. Anyway, although we were not a churchgoing family, I’d started going to church morning and evening. And one Sunday night in the dead of winter, I was walking down the hill to our home. There’d been snow the previous week, and it had turned to ice. At one point, I felt my feet slide on the ice and just managed to regain my balance and stop. And as I stopped, I found a shortish man standing right beside me. He was dressed in black from head to toe. If I remember rightly, he even had a black hat on his head. Men wore hats in those far-off days. And I vividly remember seeing his eyes look at mine and glance down momentarily at the Bible I was carrying. And then he said to me, out of the blue: “Are you saved, son? Are you saved?” Looking back, I can still remember tears coming unwillingly into my eyes. And I said to him: “I don’t know, but I want to be. I want to be more than anything else in the world.” And he told me to go home and ask the Lord Jesus into my heart.

We parted, and five minutes later I was home, and I tried to do what he told me. And strange though it may sound, I tried, but somehow, I knew I wasn’t succeeding. It felt too mechanical. And more than that, I had a sense I actually couldn’t do it. But then, four weeks later, I came to faith in Jesus Christ. I think I mentioned one day on the podcast how that came to pass through a sermon on John 8:12: “I am the light of the world. He who follows me will not walk in darkness, but have the light of life.”

Now, maybe you might say this stranger shouldn’t have told me to ask Jesus into my heart, but to repent and believe. But even if he had put it that way, I don’t think that itself would’ve made any difference. In God’s economy, he might have said the same words to another young person, and that young person gone home and become a Christian that very night. I rather suspect that in God’s sovereign purposes, I needed to discover that the one thing I needed to do and knew I needed to do, I wasn’t able to do—that I was dead in my trespasses and sins. And if the gospel invitation was, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock, and if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in,” then I had to learn that I was lying helpless inside the room and couldn’t get to the door. I was beginning to hear the voice, but I wasn’t able to get up.

God’s ways with us are both individual and mysterious, and I’m sure in this the Lord was preparing me for a future service. But this dear man who spoke to me—I didn’t feel he was intrusive; surely, he was prompted by the Spirit—was a steppingstone on the pathway that would soon bring me to living faith in Christ. So, although I met “the man in black,” as I call him, for no more than a few minutes, and never saw him again, I’ve been grateful to him all these years ever since.

One day, years later, I was sitting with a group of men, and we were sharing our spiritual pilgrimage stories. And one of them asked me a little more about where and when this had happened to me, and then he said to me, “You know, I think that might have been my father.” And if it was, the son had discovered something about the way the Lord had used his father that he had never known. And there’s a wonderful lesson there too, isn’t there, about faithfulness?

Well, your man in black might actually be a woman in white, a mom, a dad, a friend, a colleague. It might be somebody you never really knew, who passed through your life briefly, but as they did, you sensed, perhaps without realizing at the time, that the aroma of Christ was present in their lives, and something stirred within you. Almost all of us have somebody to be grateful for when we look back to the beginnings of our Christian life, as well as later on. It’s wonderful, isn’t it, how God weaves together His purposes and people to bring us to Christ.

But perhaps you’ll allow me to sign off today with the question the man in black asked me that winter’s night: Are you saved? Are you saved? Maybe that’s what you too want to be more than anything else in the world. Then listen to this word of God: “Seek the Lord while He may be found, and call upon Him while He is near.”