Illustrations

Both the hummingbird and the vulture fly over our nation’s deserts. All vultures see is rotting meat, because that is what they look for. They thrive on that diet. But hummingbirds ignore the smelly flesh of dead animals. Instead, they look for the colorful blossoms of desert plants. Vultures live on what was. They live on the past. They fill themselves with what is dead and gone. But hummingbirds live on what is. They seek new life. They fill themselves with freshness and life. Each bird finds what it is looking for. We all do.

Norman Cousins was hospitalized with a rare, crippling form of arthritis. When he was diagnosed as incurable, Cousins checked out of the hospital. Aware of the harmful effects that negative emotions can have on the body, Cousins reasoned the reverse was true. So he borrowed a movie projector and prescribed his own treatment, consisting of Marx Brothers films and old “Candid Camera” reruns. It didn’t take long for him to discover that 10 minutes of laughter provided two hours of pain free sleep. Amazingly, his debilitating disease was eventually reversed.

Joe Theismann was an outstanding quarterback for the Washington Redskins for twelve years. He led the team to the Super Bowl twice—winning in 1983 and losing the next year. A leg injury forced him to retire in 1985, but he was known as the Redskins all-time leading passer.

Once the devil was walking along with one of his cohorts. They saw a man ahead of them pick up something shiny. “What did he find?” asked the cohort. 

“A piece of the truth,” the devil replied. 

“Doesn’t it bother you that he found a piece of the truth?” asked the cohort. 

“No,” said the devil, “I will see to it that he makes a religion out of it.”

Truth taken out of context and twisted is the basis for many false religions.

We may know sports figures, their statistics, even their personal likes and dislikes, but we don’t really know them. How well do you know God? You likely know all about Him, you likely have studied His book, the Bible, but do you actually know Him?

Submitted by the homiletics class of West Coast Baptist College

There is a tale told of the great English actor, Macready. An eminent preacher once said to him: “I wish you would explain to me something.”

“Well, what is it? I don’t know that I can explain anything to a preacher.”

“What is the difference between you and me? You are appearing before crowds night after night with fiction, and the crowds come wherever you go. I am preaching the essential and unchangeable truth, and I am not getting any crowd at all.”

Walter Knight told of an old Scottish woman who went from home to home across the countryside selling thread, buttons, and shoestrings. When she came to an unmarked crossroad, she would toss a stick into the air and go in the direction the stick pointed when it landed.

One day, however, she was seen tossing the stick up several times. “Why do you toss the stick more than once?” someone asked.

Two men were out hunting in the northern U.S. Suddenly one yelled and the other looked up to see a grizzly charging them. The first started to frantically put on his tennis shoes and his friend anxiously asked, “What are you doing? Don’t you know you can’t outrun a grizzly bear?”

“I don’t have to outrun a grizzly. I just have to outrun you!”

Aren’t you glad we don’t have a heavenly Father with a friendship like that!

Source: Unknown

Submitted by the homiletics class of West coast Baptist College

A British publication once offered a prize for the best definition of a friend. Among the thousands of answers received were the following:
“One who multiplies joys, divides grief, and whose honesty is inviolable.”
“One who understands our silence.”
“A volume of sympathy bound in cloth.”
“A watch that beats true for all time and never runs down.”
The winning definition read: “A friend is the one who comes in when the whole world has gone out.”

You know it will be a bad day when: