An Attorney Who Switched Clients

An Attorney Who Switched Clients

He switched from the practice of law to pleading the cause of Christ.

IN 1818 a twenty-six-year-old man named Charles Finney began a law apprenticeship in an attorney’s office in Adams, New York. Although he had a limited formal education, within just three years he became a junior partner in the law firm.

As Finney studied law, the authors he read often quoted the Bible. Realizing his own ignorance of the Scriptures, he began to study them for himself.

When a new minister came to the local Presbyterian church, Finney began to attend. He got very little from the sermons and was rather skeptical of the whole concept of God answering prayer, but he loved music and volunteered to be the choir director.

Then in the summer of 1821 the pastor took a trip to visit his sick sister and told his replacement just to read sermons from a book. Surprisingly, the Holy Spirit began to move among the church members and Finney sensed that something was about to happen.

One day as Finney was returning from a legal appointment, he walked by a schoolhouse and heard a man praying inside. The words of that prayer stuck in his mind and affected him more than all the sermons he had heard previously. He started to spend a lot of time wondering about his own salvation.

Finney later recounted what happened on a particularly significant day, October 10, 1821:

At an early hour I started for the office. But just before I arrived at the office, something seemed to confront me with questions like these: . . . “Did you not promise to give your heart to God? And what are you trying to do? Are you endeavoring to work out a righteousness of your own?”

Just at that point the whole question of God’s salvation opened to my mind in a manner most marvelous to me. . . . I saw then as clearly as I ever had in my life, the reality and the fullness of the atonement of Christ. I saw that his work was a finished work; that instead of having, or needing, any righteousness of my own to recommend me to God, I had to submit myself to the righteousness of God through Christ. It was full and complete, and all that was necessary on my part was to . . . give up my sins and accept Christ. Salvation, it seemed to me, instead of being a thing to be wrought out by one’s own works, was a thing to be found entirely in the Lord Jesus Christ, who presented Himself before me as my God and Savior.

Instead of going to his office, Finney went into a nearby woods and spent the morning wrestling with God in prayer until he reported, “I found that my mind had become most wonderfully quiet and peaceful.”

The next day a client who was a deacon from his church came into his office and reminded him, “Mr. Finney, do you recollect that my case is to be tried at ten this morning?”

Finney replied, “Deacon, I have a retainer from the Lord Jesus Christ to plead His cause, and I cannot plead yours.”

Stunned by his answer, the deacon only later came to understand what Finney meant when he himself shortly thereafter experienced the same changed life that Finney had.

Charles Finney went on to become the leading revivalist of the nineteenth century with approximately half a million people coming to Christ through the influence of his ministry. Beginning in upstate New York, his revivals swept through New York City, Philadelphia, Boston, and Rochester. In 1835 he became professor of theology at the newly formed Oberlin Collegiate Institute, now Oberlin College. He served as the college’s president from 1851 to 1866, and it all started on that fateful day in 1821 when Charles Finney switched from the practice of law to pleading the cause of Christ.

Reflection

Like Charles Finney, we all face the choice of whether to trust our own righteousness to make us acceptable to God or to accept the forgiveness and righteousness offered by Jesus Christ. In which righteousness are you trusting?

Now I will expose your so-called good deeds that you consider so righteous. None of them will benefit or save you.

Isaiah 57:12