158 Sermon Illustrations on Conviction of Sin

Alexander McLaren says:

I once heard that if you take a bit of phosphorus and put it upon a slip of wood and ignite the phosphorus, bright as the blaze is, there drops from it a white ash that coats the wood, and makes it almost impossible to kindle the wood. And so, when the flaming conviction laid upon your heart has burnt itself out, it has coated the heart, and it will be very difficult to kindle the light there again.

Many men could be brought to abandon their evil habits if they could have them as plainly pictured as the man did in the following incident:

A rich profligate kept two monkeys for his amusement. Once he peeped into his dining hall where he and his friends had been enjoying themselves in wine, and found his pets mimicking the recent party. They mounted the table, helped themselves to the wine, and gestured and jabbered as they had seen their master and his guests doing. Soon they got merry and jumped all about the room. Then they got to fighting on the floor and tearing each other’s hair. The master stood in amazement. “What,” he said, “is this a picture of me? Do even the brutes rebuke me?” Ever afterward he was a sober man.

When Deacon Hotchkiss bought Brother Bemis’ yearling heifer he demanded a guarantee of the animal’s condition, and he asked Brother Bemis to swear to that guarantee before the justice of peace. Brother Bemis was hurt by this unusual precaution on the part of a lifelong friend and neighbor. “Why, Brother Hotchkiss,” he remonstrated, “you ain’t no need to be so pesky s’picious with me. I ain’t never cheated you, hev I? You wa’nt like this never before.” “I wa’nt--I wa’nt,” assented Brother Hotchkiss cordially, “but I hearn you t’other night when you wuz on the anxious seat at revival meetin’ and I sez to myself, sez I, ‘if Brother Bemis is half the sinner he makes himself out to be, it behooves me to be everlastin’ keerful with him next caow trade.’” Which goes to show that a man is more likely to be taken at his own estimate of himself when he puts that estimate low than when he puts it high; and that it is not overwise in a man to make estimate of himself in time of excitement and a place of publicity. (Text.)--_Puck._

The influence on John Wesley’s theology of an escape as a child from a burning dwelling is thus described by Rev. W. H. Fitchett:

His theology translated itself into the terms of that night scene. The burning house was the symbol of a perishing world. Each human soul, in Wesley’s thought, was represented by that fire-girt child, with the flames of sin, and of that divine and eternal anger which unrepenting sin kindles, closing round it. He who had been plucked from the burning house at midnight must pluck men from the flames of a more dreadful fire. That remembered peril colored Wesley’s imagination to his dying day.--“Wesley and His Century.”