10 Sermon Illustrations on Power Of God

"A giant striking with a straw cannot put forth his strength with it. So in blessing, no creature nor ordinance can convey all the goodness of God to us." The best preacher is no better than a straw, in and of himself. God shows his omnipotence by accomplishing anything with such poor tools as we are. Were he not Almighty the infirmities of his servants would cause him to fail in every design in which he employs them. As it is, the fact of our unfitness should greatly enhance our sense of his glory. This feebleness on the part of the fittest instrument makes it imperative that the Lord's own Spirit should work in men's hearts over and above his working through the means. New hearts cannot be created by mere human voices: these are more qualified to call beasts to their fodder than dead souls out of their spiritual graves. The Holy Ghost must himself breathe life and infuse strength into men; for his ministers are little better than the staff of Elijah, which was laid upon the dead child, but neither hearing nor answering resulted from it. The figure of a giant using a straw as a cudgel is not, however, perfect unless we picture him as able to strengthen the straw, till he strikes with it as with a hammer and dashes rocks in pieces; for even thus the Lord doth by his feeble servants. Hath he not said, "Fear not, thou worm Jacob, and ye men of Israel; I will help thee, saith the Lord, and thy Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel. Behold, I will make thee a new sharp threshing instrument having teeth: thou shalt thresh the mountains, and beat them small, and shalt make the hills as chaff. Thou shalt fan them, and the wind shall carry them away, and the whirlwind shall scatter them: and thou shalt rejoice in the Lord, and shalt glory in the Holy One of Israel"? O thou Almighty One, continue to display thine omnipotence by using me, even me, the least and feeblest of all thine instruments.

GENIUS, Power of Vulcan is the fabled artificer among the gods of Greece: "He built of brass the houses of the gods. He made for them the golden shoes with which they trod the air or the water, or moved from place to place with the speed of the wind. He shod with brass the celestial steeds which whirled the chariots of the gods through the air, or along the surface of the sea. He was able to give his workmanship self-motion. He even endowed with intelligence the golden handmaidens whom he made to wait on himself."

Boast not of the roaring river, Of the rocks its surges shiver, Nor of torrents over precipices hurled, For a simple little tear-drop, That you can not even hear drop, Is the greatest water-power in all the world.

--Chicago _Tribune_.

The author and preacher Tony Campolo delivers a stirring sermon adapted from an elderly black pastor at his church in Philadelphia. “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s Comin’” is the title of the sermon, and once you know the title you know the whole sermon. In a cadence that increases in tempo and in volume, Campolo contrasts how the world looked on Friday -- when the forces of evil won over the forces of good, when every friend and disciple fled in fear, when the Son of God died on a cross -- with how it looked on Easter Sunday. The disciples who lived through both days, Friday and Sunday, learned that when God seems most absent he may be closest of all; when God looks most powerless he may be most powerful; when God looks most dead he may be coming back to life. They learned never to count God out.

Campolo’s sermon skips one day, though. The other two days, Good Friday and Easter Sunday, are perhaps the most significant days on the entire church calendar, and yet, in a real sense, we live our lives on Saturday, the day in between. Can we trust that God can make something holy and beautiful and good out of a world that includes Bosnia and Rwanda and inner-city ghettoes in the richest nation on earth? Human history grinds on, between the time of promise and fulfillment. It’s Saturday on planet Earth; will Sunday ever come?

Perhaps that is why the authors of the Gospels devoted so much more space to Jesus’ last week than to the several weeks when he was making resurrection appearances. They knew that the history to follow would often resemble Saturday, the in-between day, more than Sunday, the day of rejoicing. It is a good thing to remember that in the cosmic drama, we live out our days on Saturday, the day with no name.

Prof. G. Currie Martin draws this suggestive picture:

In the gallery at The Hague there hangs a wonderful picture by Rembrandt. When the visitor first looks at it the horror that it inspires seems too great to be borne, for there, in the very forefront of the canvas, so that the spectator imagines he could touch it, is the grim and ghastly form of a corpse lying livid and rigid upon the dissecting-table. To add still further to the sense of shrinking it evokes, the scalpel of the surgeon has been thrust into the flesh, and he is laying bare the muscles of the arm. But if the visitor has only patience and courage for a moment to overcome the first sense of repulsion, he will find that he goes away from an examination of the picture thinking no longer of death and its terror, but of life and its power. For the skill of the artist is shown in so presenting the great and eternal contrast between death and life that the latter triumphs. Above the figure of the corpse are grouped the faces of the great scientists and physicians who, as they listen to the words of the lecturer, are drinking in the new-found knowledge that is to make them the conquerors of disease, and those portraits are so wonderfully painted that the spectator finds himself ever afterward thinking of the power of life that they manifest and of the greatness of human knowledge that has wrested the secrets from death itself which make life more powerful and safe. (Text.)