3 Sermon Illustrations on Bible Customs To Day

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“Take up thy bed and walk,” seemed to the writer in his boyhood days as a most extraordinary expression. He pictured a four-posted bed being tugged out of a bedroom by one poor man only just recovered of his sickness; but when he came to Korea, he understood it all. The bed was just a little mattress spread out on the floor of the living-room, and to roll it up and put it away was the common act of every morning when the sleeper awoke. Morning light and consciousness had come into the life of the poor invalid, so he would roll up his sleeping-mat and walk off to where it was put for the day. So, in many of the common acts of life in Korea we were in touch with the days of our Lord on earth.

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The expression, “Girt about the breasts with a golden girdle,” is never quite clear to a young Bible reader at home, and China and Japan cast no special light upon it; but in Korea there was the long white robe down to the feet, and round the breast the embroidered girdle. It remained until after the missionary arrived, and then in the changes of the new century the girdle was swept away. The white robes, too, find their corresponding part in Scripture, and the expression, “So as no fuller on earth can whiten them,” often came to mind in the old days, when out of the little squalid huts came forth coats that shone like polished marble.--The above four illustrations from JAMES S. GALE, “Korea in Transition.”