“He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him” (Psalm 126:6).
Jerry McAuley (1839–1884) never knew his father, who abandoned their home in Ireland to escape the law. The boy soon found himself under the care — if you can call it that — of his grandmother. When she was kissing the floor in penance as her Catholicism instructed her, Jerry threw things at her. She cursed him for it. He recalled: “I was never taught or sent to school but left to have my own way; to roam about in idleness, doing mischief continually.”
At 13, he was entrusted to his sister in New York City, but he soon struck out on his own and boarded with a family on Water Street, in a den of wickedness. “I earned what I could and stole the rest,” he said. He boxed a little and stole a lot. At 19, authorities arrested and sentenced him to 15 years at Sing Sing: “How my heart swelled with rage, and then sank like lead, as I thought of my helplessness in the hands of the law, without a friend in the world.” He said his ride to prison was the “saddest hour” of his life. Words over the prison door read: “The way of transgressors is hard.”
To his amazement, one Lord’s Day, Orville Gardner, an old comrade in crime, spoke in chapel. Known to Jerry as “Awful Gardner” but now “greatly changed from his old rough dress and appearance,” he told the inmates it had only been a little while since he had taken off the stripes they were wearing. “His tears fairly rained down out of his eyes,” and those tears possessed power.
Back in his cell, Jerry found a Bible and began to read it on his knees. “I was in an agony, and the sweat rolled off my face in great drops….In the very height of my distress…these words came to me: ’My son, thy sins, which are many, are forgiven.’”
He jumped up from his knees, shouting, “Praise God!”
Halfway through his sentence, the governor pardoned Jerry, and the ex-con returned to New York City. He went back to drinking and thieving. After nearly dying during a night caper, he again committed himself to God. He stopped smoking, stopped drinking, and started witnessing.
Eventually he began a rescue mission on Water Street. Nightly, the former drunk and thief invited drunkards and ne’er-do-wells to follow Jesus. One night, John Calvin Knox, a gambler and skeptic, struggled with the claims of the gospel. While Jerry prayed and wept over him, a tear fell on the sinner’s cheek. Knox, who later became a pastor, said: “That teardrop of his reached my heart.”
Jerry spent his life building the Kingdom through that mission. When dying of tuberculosis, he stated: “They say I’ve got only one lung and part of another. I am weak and sore, and it hurts me sometimes to talk….But while I’ve got a piece of a lung left, I want to use it to speak for Jesus. I want to praise Him with my dying breath.”
About the Columnist: Paul V. Harrison has pastored Madison FWB Church in Madison, Alabama since 2015. Previously, he pastored Cross Timbers FWB church in Nashville, Tennessee, for 22 years. He was an adjunct professor at Welch College for 17 years, teaching church history and Greek. Paul is the creator of Classic Sermon Index, a subscription-based online index of over 66,000 sermons, with clients including Harvard, Baylor, and Vanderbilt, among others: classicsermonindex.com.