YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE.
It is a great mistake, in dealing with inquirers, to tell your conversion experience. Experience may have its place, but I don’t think it has its place when we are dealing with inquirers; for the first thing the man you are talking to will do will be to look for your experience. He doesn’t want your experience. He wants one of his own.
Suppose Bartimeus had gone to Jerusalem to the man that was born blind, and said:
“Now, just tell us how the Lord cured you.”
The Jerusalem man might have said: “He just spat on the ground, and anointed my eyes with the clay.”
“Ho!” says Bartimeus, “I don’t believe you ever got your sight at all. Who ever heard of such a way as that? Why, to fill a man’s eyes with clay is enough to put them out!”
Both men were blind, but they were not cured alike. A great many men are kept out of the kingdom of God because they are looking for somebody else’s experience—the experience their grandmother had, their aunt, or some one in the family.