5 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."

In a letter addressed to the British and Foreign Bible Society, by W. Bannister, Esq., of Madras, in 1832, the following facts are related:—

The men of the —th regiment were regarded as amongst the most depraved in the country. Five or six years ago, they were stationed at Maulmein, on the other side of the Bay of Bengal. They had there no divine ordinances, and the Sabbath was scarcely known amongst them. One of the men, in a drunken fit, on one occasion, without any particular provocation, shot a sergeant of his corps, and was subsequently condemned for the crime. Before his execution, a missionary obtained access to him, and, through the blessing of God, was made instrumental in his conversion. He pleaded so affectionately and so earnestly with the prisoner, that the sentinel on guard was led to hearken to what was going forward inside the cell; and was so much affected by what he heard, that he requested, as a favor, to be admitted, whenever the missionary visited the condemned man. This soldier not only attended himself, but he told his comrades of the manner in which the missionary conversed with the criminal in such affecting terms, that many others were led to attend; and after seeing their comrade die in peace through Christ, notwithstanding the offence he had committed, they requested the missionary to come to their barracks and talk to them in the same way. This he, of course, very gladly did; and, ere long, baptized about one hundred of them, as he believed, in the faith of Christ. Many of these men remained faithful to the solemn profession they had made, and became diligent students of the Bible.