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From touchandchange.com Sermon Illustrations Illustrations Vol. 17
Mr Eternity
Perhaps you have heard of the man known as Mr. Eternity who lived in Australia a few years ago. Early in life he was an alcoholic derelict who before reaching middle age was converted through a rescue mission and later himself became a street-corner evangelist, Shortly after his conversion, he heard a sermon entitled "Echoes of Eternity." He was so captivated by the importance of the word "eternity" that he began using his free time to spread the one-word message across Sidney. "Eternity went ringing through my brain. Even though I could scarcely write my own name, I felt the divine urge to write this word."
So, fifty times a day for over thirty years, he wrote "eternity" on the sidewalks of Sidney, usually in the early morning, with white chalk and with faultless script. When he passed away, the Sidney morning newspaper carried a story of this unusual man who had chalked "eternity" on the city streets over half a million times in that metropolis of significant population. The thought of eternity does impress upon us the seriousness with which we must regard our soul.
Echoes of Eternity, Dennis Kastens, CSS Publishing Co.
With or Without People?
A second grader once asked his teacher how much the earth weighed. The teacher looked up the answer in an Encyclopedia. "Six thousand million, million tons," she answered. The little boy thought for a minute and then asked, "Is that with or without people?" Viewed from one perspective, it might very well seem that people don't really matter very much. After all, we are but microscopic inhabitants of a tiny planet orbiting a relatively obscure star in a small galaxy among the billions and billions of stars and galaxies that make up creation. Yet the God of creation has counted the very hairs of our heads. Wow! What a magnificent picture of God.
King Duncan, The Love of a Father, www.Sermons.com
Chrysostom's Commitment
Chrysostom was the patriarch of Constantinople in the fourth century. One of the stories surrounding this faithful witness concerns the occasion when the Roman emperor had him arrested and charged with being a Christian. If Chrysostom did not renounce Christ, then the emperor would have this Christian leader banished from the kingdom. Chrysostom responded to the threat by saying that the emperor could not do so, “because the whole world is my Father’s kingdom.” “Then,” replied the emperor, “I will take away your life.” To which Chrysostom said, “You cannot, for my life is hid with Christ in God.” Next threatened with the loss of his treasure, this saint replied, “You cannot, for my treasure is in heaven where my heart is.” The emperor made one last effort: “Then I will drive you away from here and you shall have no friend left.” But again Chrysostom responded, “You cannot, for I have one Friend from whom you can never separate me. I defy you for you can do me no harm.”
Living as we do in our Western, religiously-tolerant society, we may never face a crucial moment such as Chrysostom 16 centuries ago. We do, however, face similar temptations to renounce our faith, ignore our commitments, or compromise our loyalties. We will be tempted to deny we ever heard of the one called Jesus the Christ. We will be enticed to deny his power over our lives with phrases like: “Come on, everyone else is!” or “It will be fun, and no one will ever know.” We are daily forced to choose between the easy way, the quick fix and the promise of glamour and the way of Christ. Those who choose to acknowledge Christ must do so not just with lips but also with hearts and minds.
Larry M. Goodpaster, Like a Breath of Fresh Air, CSS Publishing.
Living with the Pain
Suffering and pain are integral to life's experience but they need not humiliate, defeat, and destroy us! A Detroit News article some years ago carried the story of Kirk Gibson during his glory days with the Tigers. Few really knew the price of pain and agony paid by Gibson for that glory.
According to the article, Kirk Gibson is a baseball player who knows how to live with pain. In 1980, he tore the cartilage in his wrist. Two years later, he had a sore left knee, a strained left calf muscle, and a severe left wrist sprain. In 1983, he was out for knee surgery, and in 1985 he required 17 stitches after getting hit in the mouth with a wild pitch. In addition, he bruised a hamstring muscle, injured his right heel, and suffered a sore left ankle. His worst injury involved severe ligament damage to his ankle in 1986, a year predicted to be his best. When asked about pain, Gibson was quoted as saying, "There are pluses and minuses in everything we do in life. But the pluses for my career, myself, and my family make it worth it. It's the path I chose."
Carlyle Fielding Stewart, III, Joy Songs, Trumpet Blasts, and Hallelujah Shouts, CSS Publishing Company
The Importance of Rooftops in Jesus' Day
Rooftops were places of great activity in Bible times. The high, open, flat surfaces were perfect for winnowing chaff from grain, drying fruit, storing grain, nuts, and fruit, and sun-bleaching laundry.
Rooftops were also household gathering places because so much work was done there, and they were sleeping places on the hot nights of summer.
But rooftops, because of their height, their openness, and frequent assemblies of people, rooftops were great places from which to shout the news.
Renouncing Everything
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn served in the Russian army during World War II. He was decorated for bravery and rose to the rank of captain. In 1945, while serving on the German front, he was arrested for criticizing Stalin in letters to a friend and was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp. After completing his prison sentence, Solzhenitsyn was exiled to Kazakhstan, but after Stalin's death his position improved, and his citizenship was restored in 1956. His first novels described how grim life could be in the labor-camp system. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was permitted publication in 1962 as a result of the personal intervention of Nikita Khrushchev. In subsequent years, however, he was considered to be a dangerous and hostile critic of the Soviet system. He was again arrested and imprisoned. He was accused of treason, stripped of his citizenship, and forcibly deported to the West. His deportation in 1974 allowed him to personally accept the Nobel Prize for Literature, which he had been awarded four years earlier.
In his book The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn documents the operation of the oppressive Soviet totalitarian system from 1918 to 1956 by using personal interviews and reminiscences from his time in the camps. He tells how prisoners were able to withstand abuse and interrogation even when they had done nothing wrong. This is a small section from the book.
How can you stand your ground when you are weak and sensitive to pain, when people you love are still alive, when you are unprepared? What do you need to make you stronger than the interrogator and the whole trap?
From the moment you go in prison you must put your cozy past firmly behind you. At the very threshold, you must say to yourself: "My life is over, a little early to be sure, but there's nothing to be done about it. I shall never return to freedom. I am condemned to die - now or a little later. But later on, in truth, it will be even harder, and so the sooner the better. I no longer have any property whatsoever. For me those I love have died, and for them I have died. From today on, my body is useless and alien to me. Only my spirit and my conscience remain precious and important to me."
Confronted by such a prisoner, the interrogator will tremble.
Only the man who has renounced everything can win that victory.
Steven P. Loy
Not Peace, But a Sword
A young man from India was brought up in a Hindu household. A very strict one, in fact. Due to a set of circumstances, this man came in contact with Christians. And he was of course repelled by these people. But gradually he realized that what they said was true. In these people, he saw Jesus revealed, and he came to see that he was a sinner who needed a Savior, and that Jesus had died on the cross to save him, and that he must give his life to Jesus. Like millions and billions before him, he fell down helpless before the cross, and repented on his sin.
When he told his parents he was to be baptized as a Christian, they were appalled, horrified, and told him in no uncertain terms that if he went ahead and became a Christian, he would never see them again. On the day of his baptism, his parents, brothers and sisters, and all his extended family held a funeral for him. And, up until the day I spoke to him, he also had never again seen his family.
When I asked the man would he do it all again, he said, of course he would. He would hate to go through the pain again. Yes, he missed his family. But go back? Never! Any cost, any pain was worth it, just to be by Jesus' side. In his joys, in his sorrows, in his laughing and in his crying, Jesus was always there. To know Jesus - to follow Jesus - to sit at His feet, to take up his cross and walk with Him - to climb the mountains with Him - to walk the valleys with Him - this was his life. There was no other. He said, with a twinkle in his eye, and also with a tear, that he prayed daily for all his family to come to know Jesus too.
Ken Shillito, "The Cost"
The Work of the Righteous
In his book, Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman recounts a story of an American soldier in Vietnam. His platoon was hunkered down in the rice paddies locked into the heat of a firefight with the Vietcong.
The rice fields in Vietnam are often separated by an earthen beam, and on this day, a line of six Buddhist monks started walking along the elevated beam separating the field where the American soldiers lay hugging the ground and the field where the Vietcong were also crouched in battle. The monks walked directly toward the line of fire, calmly and steadily. They did not look to the left or to the right, they just kept walking. The soldier reported, "It was really strange because nobody shot at 'em. And after they walked over the beam, suddenly all the fight was out of me. It just didn't feel like I wanted to do this anymore, at least not that day. It must have been that way for everybody, because everybody quit. We just stopped fighting."
Of course, I cannot say what any of us are called to do right now. I can only say that anyone who chooses to walk with God may well be completely out of step with the expectations of the office, the neighborhood or the family. Sometimes, it seems, God's people are called to walk right through the field of fire, faithfully, sacrificially, loyally, doing what we have been called to do.
Dr. Roger Ray, When God Won't Be Nice
Do Not Call It Sacrifice
A couple, visiting in Korea, saw a father and his son working in a rice paddy. The old man guided the heavy plow as the boy pulled it.
"I guess they must be very poor," the man said to the missionary who was the couple’s guide and interpreter.
"Yes," replied the missionary. "That’s the family of Chi Nevi. When the church was built, they were eager to give something to it, but they had no money. So they sold their ox and gave the money to the church. This spring they are pulling the plow themselves."
After a long silence, the woman said, "That was a real sacrifice."
The missionary responded, "They do not call it a sacrifice. They are just thankful they had an ox to sell."
Bishop Ray W. Chamberlain Jr., "Season of Sacrifice" © Copyright 2003 by CCC Ministries |