Our God is a holy God and prayer is the vehicle that
God has given us to approach Him. Indeed, prayer offered by a
Christian harboring sin is akin to a plane without wings, a car without wheels
or a boat without a rudder. Make no mistake about it—God wants to hear our
prayer but flagrant disregard for the commandments of God will quickly stop His
ear.
Submitted by the homiletics class of West Coast Baptist College
Sin
at the door of your life is more persistent than a Jehovah’s Witness, more
tenacious than a vacuum cleaner salesman, more widespread than girl-scouts
selling cookies and more intrusive than a burglar. Sadly, sin has more takers,
meets a higher quota and is more successful than any solicitor or door-to-door
salesman has ever been!
Submitted by the homiletics class of West Coast Baptist College
Christian, beware lest thou think lightly of
sin. Take heed lest thou fall little by little. Sin a little thing? Is it not a
poison? Who knows its deadliness? Sin a little thing? Do not the little foxes
spoil the grapes? Doth not the tiny coral itself build a rock which wrecks a
navy? Sin a little thing? It girded the Redeemer’s head with thorns, and
pierced His heart! Could you weigh the least sin in the scales of eternity, you
would fly from it as from a serpent. Look upon a sin as that which crucified
the Saviour, and you will see it to be exceeding sinful.—Charles Spurgeon
Certain
ants have a passion for the sweet glandular substance given off by the
caterpillar of a large blue butterfly. The ants can
become so enthralled by the substance they carry the caterpillar into their nest
with great delight. What they don’t realize is that the caterpillar gorges
himself on the ant larva. Usually such a threat would be attacked by an army of
ants and destroyed or repelled. However, because they enjoy the caterpillar’s
tasty secretions so much, they become addicted to it. In so doing
they are oblivious to the fact that their young are being destroyed!
When an English robber called Captain Thunderbolt escaped the law and
moved to the eastern US in 1818, he began practicing medicine. He took
on the name Dr. John Wilson. Often he wore three suits of clothes to
escape recognition by making himself look larger and covering up a
deformed leg. Just before the man died, he asked his friends to bury him
without removing his clothes. But to prepare his body for proper
burial, that request could not be honored. The mortician was surprised
to find scars from wounds and a withered leg. A search of “Dr.
A man took his
little boy to a mountain spring for the first time. When they jumped in
the little boy began to shiver with cold and cried, “Oy, Papa, Oy!” His father
led him out, rubbed him down with a towel and dressed him. “Ahh, Papa, ahh!” purred the little fellow, tingling with pleasant warmth.
The father asked, “Do you know the difference between a cold bath and sin? When you
jump into a cold spring you first yell ‘oy!’ and then you say ‘ahh!’ But when you
commit a sin you first say ‘ahh!’ and then you yell ‘oy!’”
The Saint Petersburg Times told about a thief who grabbed some sausages
in a meat market. To his surprise, they were part of a fifteen foot long string.
The police found him tangled up in the stolen sausages.
Many people think they can
enjoy a little sin, but they end up so deeply entwined in it they cannot get
free without the power of God.
Source: Illustrations for Biblical Preaching, Michael P. Green
Submitted by the homiletics class of West Coast Baptist College
A boy went down to the
river for a little swim. As he left the house his father said, “Be careful,
Herbert; the river looks fair and sparkling, but there is an ugly eddy beneath
that may prove too much for you. I have tried it and know it is dangerous. It
nearly overcame me. Be careful, Son; there is danger.” Herbert went on and was
careful for a time, but the river looked so smooth and peaceful he ventured out
farther. His companions admonished him to be careful. But he called back and
said, “I can swim; there is no danger.” So he ventured out still farther.
On February 24, 2001, a one-year old Canadian girl named Erika wandered
out of her house and spent the entire night in the Edmonton winter.
When her mother, Leyla Nordby, found her, Erika appeared to be
totally frozen. Her legs were stiff, her body frozen, and all signs of life
appeared to be gone.
Erika was treated at Edmonton’s Stollery Children’s Health Center
where she was resuscitated. To the amazement of all, there appeared to be no
sign of brain damage, and doctors gave Erika a clear prognosis.
During a tour of a
large manufacturing plant, a visitor noticed a man using a fiery torch of high
intensity to work on huge slabs of steel. Operating from a blueprint on a
nearby table, a pointer traced the pattern and then by a clever system of
levers enlarged the design as it was burned into the metal.
In
1981, a Minnesota radio station reported a story about a stolen car in
California. Police were staging an intense search for the vehicle and the
driver, even to the point of placing announcements on local radio stations to
contact the thief. On the front seat of the stolen car sat a box of crackers
that, unknown to the thief, were laced with poison. The car owner had intended to
use the crackers as rat bait.
A
group of men gathered one Saturday morning to help paint a friend’s large,
two-story home. Toward the end of the day when the job was almost complete, a small
bit of trim, which could not be seen from the ground, remained unpainted. One
of the men said, “Since nobody can see that piece of trim, I guess we don't
need to paint it.” “Not true,” said another of the crew as he went for a
ladder. “God sees it.”
Source: Turning Point Daily Devotional, 5/24/2004
Submitted by the homiletics class of West Coast Baptist College
In 1982, ABC Evening News reported about a new
invention—a chair affixed to a shotgun. It was to be viewed by sitting in the
chair and looking directly into the gun barrel. The gun was loaded and set on a
timer to fire at an undetermined moment within the next hundred years. The
amazing thing was that people waited in lines to sit and stare into the shell’s
path! They all knew the gun could go off at point-blank range at any moment,
but they were gambling that the fatal blast wouldn’t happen during their minute
in the chair.
D. L. Moody visited a
prison called “The Tombs” to preach to the inmates. After he had finished
speaking, Moody talked with a number of men in their cells. He asked each
prisoner this question, “What brought you here?” Again and again he received
replies like this: “I don’t deserve to be here.” “I was framed.” “I was falsely
accused.” “I was given an unfair trial.” Not one inmate would admit he was
guilty. Finally, Moody found a man with his face buried in his hands, weeping. “And
what’s wrong, my friend?” he inquired.
When Leonardo da Vinci was painting his
masterpiece, The Last Supper, he selected as the person to sit
for the character of Christ a young man, Pietri Bandinelli, who was connected with the Milan Cathedral as chorister. Years passed before the great
picture was completed, and when one character only—that of Judas Iscariot—was
wanting, the great painter noticed a man in the streets of Rome whom he selected as his model.
“The term Stockholm Syndrome first occurred
in 1973 at an attempted bank robbery in Stockholm,
Sweden. A man
tried to rob a bank, and the police caught him inside. He took three female
hostages and one male hostage and held them for 131 hours, during which time he
terrorized them. He fired his Russian automatic assault weapon at them. He
threatened to kill them on numerous occasions. He put nooses around their necks
and threatened to hang them. But he didn’t harm any of them.
In her autobiography, My Life, former Israeli prime
minister Golda Meir tells the story of her devout Jewish grandfather who lived in
Russia. He was required to serve in the Russian army for sixteen years. During that time he tried to keep
every Jewish law and custom even though it meant that he faced intense persecution—even being forced to kneel on a stone floor for hours.
Bette Nesmith was a secretary at a bank in Dallas when she decided there must be a way to correct typewriter mistakes without erasing the ink. She cane up with a formula for a fluid that she could use to paint over mistakes. In a short time all of the secretaries in her office were using her correction fluid.
Betty called her product, “Mistake Out,” and began a business selling it full time.When she sold her business to Gillette Company for $47.5 million, it was making $3.5 million every year on sales that grossed $38 million.
