The day Otis Q. Sellers received Christ: November 23, 1919

A century ago today, 18-year-old Otis Q. Sellers (1901-1992) received Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. This future maverick Bible expositor was raised in Wellston, Ohio; when he was 15 the family moved to Cincinnati. Hall of Famer Edd Roush  led the Cincinnati Reds to the 1919 World Series. Evangelist Billy Graham was a year old. Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and D. W. Griffith created United Artists. The United Mine Workers struck the coal industry on the first of the month during the first Red Scare. Wilson was President. The armistice ending the Great War was signed ten days later; on the 19th, the Treaty of Versailles failed ratification in the U.S. Senate.

Below are my lightly edited transcriptions of Sellers’s recollections from recordings made in 1975. My work on his life and Biblical theology proceeds. Thanks are due his daughter, Jane Sellers Hancock (she’s all of six in the second photo below), and her son (Otis’s grandson), Rusty Hancock, for the family photos used here and for other indispensable assistance I cannot summarize here.

—Anthony Flood

I was born in a Wellston, Ohio, small town of about 5,000 people; I lived there for the first fifteen years of my life [until 1916]. That had to do with the shaping of my thinking. When I first went to the big city, I was just a country boy in the big city. This town shaped my thinking and my actions. Sometimes I think that was for the good.

TL148 31:46-32:15

It was a warm afternoon in of August [1919], and I was upstairs getting dressed to go out on a Saturday afternoon. I was just 18. I came downstairs to put on my necktie; it was cooler downstairs.

My father and my brother were sitting near the bay window in our little house, and the windows were open. Dad had his Bible open. I noticed he was talking about a young preacher he very much admired.

My father was a Baptist. He and my brother were talking, and my father was impressing upon him the way of salvation. My brother James said:

Well, I haven’t been a perfect person, but I’ve never robbed any banks. I’ve never killed anyone. I never committed adultery. I’ve honored my father and mother.

And he had.

I think if anything happened to me, I’d be all right.

Then my father said something that I’d never before heard in my life. I was baptized when I was 12. I have a pin to show that I had gone to Sunday School every Sunday without missing for fourteen years. (Then I quit!)

Then I heard my father say,

James, you aren’t saved by what you do, your good works; you’re saved by what Christ does. And you’re saved by believing on Him. The Bible says, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.”

He was quoting Acts 16:31. I turned around and said,

“Well, if that’s true, everybody’s saved,” I interjected. “Even I’m saved! I’m a believer.”

Father gave me a look that said,

I wasn’t talking to you; stay out of it.

I put my coat on, went out, and walked uphill on Paxton Road in Cincinnati, Ohio to get the streetcar. As I walked, what my father said was going through my 18-year-old mind,

“You know, that sounds pretty good.”

I had thought that you try to build ladders: every good deed was a rung on the ladder, and if you built long enough and high enough, in time you got way up there and when you die, you fall over the ramparts and tumble into heaven. Maybe some such thing as that. Salvation came through church membership and church works.

But what my father said sounded more like God: He would provide a way that people could get this thing settled without going through life wondering . . . . That’s sounds good. I wonder where he got that? He’s getting it from that young preacher over there.

That night when I left my friends and came home. The Bible was still there in the bay window. I turned on the light, picked it up and thought “Let me see if I can find where he got ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.’” I started with

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

Well, that didn’t sound much like it.

Let there be light. . . . And God said, Let there be a firmament . . . .

That’s nothing. Oh, I don’t even think it’s in there. I closed it up and went to bed.

This thing kept working in me.

A group of us always met on the corner on a Sunday night. We’d meet there for a while and then go our various ways, girlfriends and so on. They asked me.

Where’re you going tonight, Slim?

“I don’t know. I don’t have any place to go.”

Why don’t you come with us?

“No, I don’t want to go.”

I was troubled. My father went to church on Sunday nights, and that’s where he was hearing it. My sister went with him. My mother was Roman Catholic. My father was a devout Baptist.

“I just don’t want to go anywhere.”

I came back home up the hill over to this church where he was going to, walked in, found him, and sat down next to him. I sometimes wonder why my father didn’t die of a heart attack. There weren’t many people there.

The young minister knew how to declare Christ. But I still didn’t get it quite yet. It was working in me. I’m glad no one pushed me, no one hurried it. My father was satisfied that I had come back and started attending church again.

Then came the time, and as far as I can tell it was November 23, in the year  nineteen hundred and nineteen, when I was 18 years of age, that night when I walked home with my sister and my father from the church meeting, I said

“You know, I’m a believer in the Lord Jesus Christ. I believe in Him. I believe He’s the savior.”

And I went on to make some more boyish remarks. I didn’t know much. And since that day, 56 years ago, I have lived and walked as a believer in, a lover of, and a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. And I thank God for it.”

New York Bible Conference, Holiday Inn, 09.28.1975, 6:50-13:16

I am a perpetual student of the Word of God, and I am a progressive student of the Word of God. I will readily admit that when I became a believer in the year 1919, which would be 56 years ago, I knew next to nothing, absolutely next to nothing. Yet can I say that before the week was over, I did know that the Bible said certain things, because I was doing my best to dig into it and to find what it says.

I made progress the first week I was a believer. Over the first three months progress began to increase, because I was listening to a young man—two or three years older than I was—who very much glorified the Lord Jesus Christ and did point the plan of salvation and did show a measure of love of dispensational truth. Over the next three, four, five or six months, I made some real progress, as he told me what books in the Bible to read and as he attempted to answer my questions, and also told me some books that I could buy that would be a help to me.

I began to haunt the religious bookstores to see what I could find that would help a young believer. I remember quite well that I came upon a book by Dr. James M. Gray. The title of this book was How God Redeems a Soul—it was just a little paperback; I think it only cost me just ten cents then—and I found another paperback book by James M. Gray on How to Study the Bible. Although I was only six months old in the Lord Jesus Christ, I made some progress, some real progress.

Now I look back to that day in 1919, and I can honestly say that that progress has never stopped. When in the year 1934 I came to an understanding . . . understanding and an appreciation and a full acceptance of the Acts 28:28 dispensational boundary line, and saw that a distinct dispensation began with the resurrection of Christ and continued to Acts 28:28, that was a real step in advance. There were hundreds of others on the periphery of this. They were standing, we’ll say, inside the circle of it, and very anxious for help. They looked to me for help.

Inasmuch as I had been to the [Moody] Bible Institute [in Chicago in 1921, during James M. Gray’s tenure as Dean], was a minister, had been the pastor of a church and was able to handle concordances and lexicons and this and that, they began to look to me for help. The insistent demand for help was so great that I had to begin to write things.

At first I thought about some mimeographed sheets, but I came upon a printer in Grand Rapids—it was during the Depression—and this printer said to me, “I very much need work”—he had his press in the basement of his home—“and if you’ll let me print that for you, I think I can print it just about as cheap as you can mimeograph it.” I said, “No, I don’t think I want to put it in print just yet. I’d just rather have something that people can read. Later on, when I get it worked out and get everything clear, then we’ll put it in print.”

. . . He did need the work and needed it badly, as it was in the very depth of the Depression. So, I said, “All right, I’ll let you print it.” And that’s how the first issue of The Word of Truth ever came out. I believe it was then a little eight-page thing, and that was Volume I, Number 1 of The Word of Truth which was published in 1936. And I didn’t know much in 1936. But I had to write, and write for the help of others, and I’m glad that I did.”

(TL277, 13:00-18:09)