Sermon Illustrations(Pr R) (A Compilation)

《Sermon Illustrations(Pr~R)》(A Compilation)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

P

Practice
Praise
Prayer
Prayer Meetings
Prayerlessness
Preachers
Preaching
Precaution
Precociousness
Precocity
Predestination
Prejudice
Premature
Preparation
Preparedness
Prescriptions
Presence of Christ
Presence of Mind
Presentation
Pride
Pride of Rank
Priesthood
Principal
Principles
Printers
Prison Reform
Prisons
Privilege
Problems
Procrastination
Prodigal Son
Prodigals
Profanity
Profiteers
Progress
Prohibition
Prolific
Promise
Promoting
Promotion
Promptness
Pronunciation
Proof
Property
Prophecy
Proportion
Proposals
Propriety
Prosperity
Protestant Episcopal Church
Protestants
Providence
Provincialism
Provision
Prudence
Psalms
Psychology
Pta
Public Relations
Public Service
Public Speakers
Publicity
Punctuality
Punishment
Puns
Pupil
Pure Food
Purity
Purpose
Putting on Christ
Puzzle
Pyramids
Python

Q

Quality
Quarrels
Quarrelsome
Questions
Quietness
Quotations

R

Race Prejudices
Race Pride
Race Suicide
Race
Races
Rahab
Railroads
Rainbow
Rank
Rapid Transit
Reading the Bible
Reading
Ready
Real Estate Agents
Realism
Reality
Reason
Rebekah
Recall
Recognition
Recommendations
Reconciliation
Redeemer
Redemption
Reform
Reformation
Reformers
Refuge
Refusal
Regeneration
Regrets
Rehearsals
Relatives
Reliability
Religion
Remedies
Remembrance
Reminders
Remorse
Repartee
Repentance
Repetition
Report Card
Reproach
Republican Party
Reputation
Research
Resemblances
Reserves of God
Resignation
Resourcefulness
Respectability
Responsibility
Rest
Rest Cure
Restitution
Restoration
Results
Resurrection
Retaliation
Retirement
Retribution
Retrospect
Revelation
Revenge
Reverence
Revival
Revolutions
Reward of Merit
Reward of Virtue
Rewards
Rheumatism
Riches
Right
Righteousness
Rites
River of Life
Roads
Roasts
Robbers
Robes
Rock of Ages
Rockets
Rod
Romans
Roosevelt, Theodore
Rooster
Royalty
Rules
Ruling Passion

Practice Sermon Illustrations

`Christianity refuses to be proved first and practiced afterwards: its practice and its proof go hand in hand,' wrote I. R. Illingworth.

The sermons of a certain preacher were magnificent, but his life was so inconsistent with his profession that, when he was in the pulpit, his congregation wished he would never leave it; and, when he was out of the pulpit, they wished he would never enter it again.

(1 Cor. 9. 27; Col. 2. 6)

Praise Sermon Illustrations

I can live for two months on a good compliment.—Mark Twain

Sigmund Freud once refused to attend a festival in his honor, remarking, "When someone abuses me I can defend myself; against praise I am defenseless."

Every person needs recognition. It is expressed cogently by the lad who says, "Mother, let's play darts. I'll throw the darts, and you say 'Wonderful!"

It is always a token of revival, it is said, when there is a revival of psalmody. When Luther's preaching began to tell upon men, you could hear ploughmen at the plough singing Luther's psalms. Whitefield and Wesley had never done the great work they did if it had not been for Charles Wesley's poetry, and for the singing of such men as Toplady, Scott, Newton, and many others of the same class. When your heart is full of Christ, you want to sing.—C. H. Spurgeon

(Eph. 5. 18-20; Col. 3. 16)

I'll praise my Maker with my breath,
And when my voice is lost in death,
Praise shall employ my nobler powers.—Selected

"Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us,"
The praise or honor, power or glory be!
Our naked spirits bow in shame and dust,
And empty all our nothingness to Thee.

"Not unto us!" Oh Lord of lords, supreme,
Whate'er we work, Thou workest; Thine the praise.
O wake us, cleanse us, light us with Thy beam,
And work in us, through us, to endless days.—Geo. Lansing Taylor

Three clergymen conversing, one said, "Give me praise for my preaching, because I like it." The second said, "Give me praise that I may give it to my Master." The third said, "Give my Master all the praise and let me not have any."—Selected

WIFE (complainingly)—"You never praise me up to any one."

HUB—"I don't, eh! You should hear me describe you at the intelligence office when I'm trying to hire a cook."

"What sort of a man is he?"

"Well, he's just what I've been looking for—a generous soul, with a limousine body."—Life.

One negro workman was overheard talking to another:

"I'se yoh frien'. I jest tole the fohman, when he say dat nigger Sam ain't fit to feed to de dawgs, why, I done spoke right up, an' tole him yoh shohly is!"

Prayer Sermon Illustrations

One of the most beautiful things that one can ever read on the subject of prayer is a verse found in a Norwegian novel, The Wind from the Mountains, by Trygve Gulbranssen. Adelaide hands to old Dag, who amid his sorrows and difficulties is struggling toward the light, the bishop's Bible, with these lines on the flyleaf:

Our human thoughts and works are not so mighty
That they can cut a path to God, unbless'd,
And so from Him the gift of prayer is sent us
To hallow both our labor and our quest.
Over life, and death, and starlit spaces
The highroad runs, that at His word was laid,
And reaches Him across the desert places;
By prayer it is our pilgrimage is made.

How true that is! Over life and death and starlit spaces runs for us the highroad of prayer, and by prayer our pilgrimage is made.

What a friend we have in prayer! What a protector! And how little use we make of it! When the Adantic cable was laid in 1850, there were great celebrations and rejoicings on both sides of the Atlantic. But what is the Atlantic cable, with the messages of war and peace, of nations in commotion and sore travail, which flash across it, compared with the heavenly cable of prayer, whereby the tempted and tried man communicates with the God of heaven, and receives messages and messengers of encouragement from heaven just as Jacob did at Bethel when he saw a ladder set up on earth, the top of which reached to heaven, and the angels of God ascending and descending.

When Grant was fighting his last campaign with cancer at Mount McGregor, General O. O. Howard, who had honestly won the title "The Christian Soldier," came to call on him. He spoke for a time to Grant about some of the battles and campaigns of the war in which both men had played so illustrious a part. Grant listened for a time and then, interrupting him, said, "Howard, tell me what you know about prayer." Face to face with death and the unknown, the question of prayer was of greater interest to the dying soldier than the reminiscences of his battles.

In the diary of his prison experience at Fort Warren, in Boston Harbor, Alexander Stephens thus describes the close of his prison day: "He undresses and stretches himself on his bunk. Here with soul devout he endeavors through prayer to put himself in communion with God. To the Eternal, Prisoner, in weakness and full consciousness of his own frailty, commits himself, saying from the heart, 'Thy will, and not mine, be done.' With thoughts embracing the well-being of absent dear ones, and all the world of mankind besides, whether friend or foe, he sinks into that sweet and long sleep from which he arose this morning."

A medical missionary captured by bandits in China, informed that he was to be shot at a spot ten minutes' distance away, tells how a terrible fear and helplessness came over him at the thought of such a death so far away from his native country, from his friends and his family. But he had strength enough to pray. This was his prayer: "My Lord God, have mercy on me, and give me strength for this trial. Take away all fear, and if I have to die, let me die like a man."

Instantly, he said, his terrible fear began to disappear. By the time he had reached the gorge where he was to be shot he felt perfectly calm and unafraid. At the last moment, however, the bandits relented and his life was spared. In the days which followed, full of danger and suffering, the memory of this experience was cherished more and more. "My own will had failed in the most critical moment of my life. But the knowledge that I could depend on a power greater than my own, one that had not failed me in that crisis, sustained me in a wonderful way to the very end of my captivity. What ingratitude it would be in me not to proclaim this power."

Harold Dixon, one of the three men on a raft who drifted for thirty-four days a thousand miles in their rubber raft, eight feet by four, with no food and no water, speaking of the prayer meetings which they held every night, said: "There was a comfort in passing our burden to someone bigger than we in this empty vastness. Further, the common devotion drew us together, since it seemed we no longer depended entirely upon each other, but could appeal simultaneously to a Fourth that we three held equally in reverence."

That reference to a "Fourth" with them in that raft makes one think of those three Hebrew lads in the fiery furnace who prayed to God and put their trust in God, and how, when Nebuchadnezzar came to look into the fiery furnace to see what had happened to them, he saw that they were unharmed by the flames, and lo, in the midst of them, he saw the form of a Fourth, like unto the Son of Man! That is one of the great blessings of prayer. It puts you into fellowship with the form of a Fourth—with God, with Jesus Christ, the Saviour of men.

There was once a godless seaman who was in a boat fishing with his companions when a storm came up which threatened to sink the ship. His companions begged him to offer a prayer; but he demurred, saying it was years since he had prayed or entered a church. But finally, upon their insistence, he made this prayer: "O Lord, I have not asked you for anything for fifteen yeairs, and if you deliver us out of this storm and bring us safe to land again, I promise that I will not bother you again in another fifteen years!"

There is no doubt that many of those who pray earnestly in time of great distress, afterward, when the storm is over and the danger is past, forget God. But that in no way invalidates the fact that in their distress and danger they realized that there was a higher power than themselves and turned to that power in earnest supplication.

Madame Chiang Kaishek, who is a product of Christian missions and whose father and mother were devout Methodists, relates how her mother would spend hours in prayer in a room on the third floor of their home. At the time of the Manchurian invasion Madame Chiang said one day to her mother: "Mother, you are so powerful in prayer, why don't you pray that God will annihilate Japan by an earthquake or something?"

Her mother looked gravely at her and said: "When you pray or expect me to pray, don't insult God's intelligence by asking Him to do something which would be unworthy of you, a mortal."

"After that," said Madame Chiang, "I can pray for the Japanese people."

Few persons, perhaps, have read the sequel to Robinson Crusoe's story of his captivity on the lonely island—Serious Reflections—in which Crusoe tells how he revisited the island and endeavored to convert to Christianity the mixed colony of English and natives. Most notorious among these islanders was the wicked and profligate seaman Will Atkins. After his conscience had been reached and it was suggested to Atkins that he and his companions teach their wives religion, he responded, "Lord, sir, how should we teach them religion? Should we talk to them of God and Jesus Christ, and heaven and hell, it would make them laugh at us." In his ever charming style Defoe describes Atkins sitting by the side of his tawny wife under the shade of a bush and trying to tell her about God, occasionally going off a little distance to fall on his knees to pray, until at length they both knelt down together, while the friend who was watching with Crusoe cried out, "St. Paul! St. Paul! behold he prayeth!"

In Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" we have the poetic conception of how sin hinders prayer. After the Ancient Mariner had killed the sacred albatross, in his distress he tried to pray. But his lips could not pronounce the words:

I looked to Heaven, and tried to pray
But or ever a prayer had gusht,
A wicked whisper came, and made
My heart as dry as dust.

It was only after his repentance, and when the spell of judgment had been lifted, that he found himself able to pray, and set out on his pilgrimage from land to land, to teach by his own example love and reverence to all things that God made and loves. The great poem comes to a conclusion with the Ancient Mariner telling his delight in going to the church with the goodly company to pray.

When Senator Penrose of Pennsylvania, stricken with his last sickness, was being wheeled about in a chair, his once gigantic frame shrunken and haggard, Penrose said to his faithful Negro valet, "William, I want you to tell me the truth, not what the doctors tell me, but the truth. Do you think I'm getting better?"

With tears in his eyes, the Negro answered, "Senator, I will tell you the truth. You are not far from the end. Amen."

With that Penrose lifted a once mighty hand and said, "Then, William, when you go to church tomorrow, put up a prayer for me."

In Dick's Philosophy of a Future State, the book which converted David Livingstone, there is preserved a beautiful prayer made by a Mrs. Sheppard, a lady of Somersetshire, for the conversion of Lord Byron. In the prayer she referred to him as one as much distinguished for his neglect of God as for the transcendent talents God had bestowed upon him. She prayed that he might be awakened to a sense of his danger and led to seek peace and forgiveness in Christ.

After the woman's death her husband forwarded the prayer to Byron. It took him in one of his best moods; and he responded, "I can assure you that not all the fame which ever cheated humanity into higher notions of its own importance would ever weigh in my mind against the pure and pious interest which a virtuous being may be pleased to take in my behalf. In this point of view, I would not exchange the prayer of the deceased in my behalf for the united glory of Homer, Caesar, and Napoleon."

The head of an insane asylum for the inebriate in New York testified that those who were sent there by their relatives or neighbors or by the state simply to get rid of them and to restrict their liberties never recovered. The ones who recovered were those who had some loved one, father or mother, or wife or child, or sister, praying for them. Suffering love has the power to restore. So the suffering love of God in Christ can restore the sinner.

What could be finer than that final touch which Thackeray gives to the beautiful character of Amelia in Vanity Fair: "No more fighting was heard at Brussels. The sound of battle rolled miles away. Darkness came down on the field and city, and Amelia was praying for George, who was lying on his face dead, with a bullet through his heart." Sorrow, anguish, battles, wounds, darkness, and death; but shining in that darkness the calm star of a faithful woman's intercession!