9 Sermon Illustrations on Power

A man who is furnished with arguments from the mint will convince his antagonist much sooner than one who draws them from reason and philosophy. Gold is a wonderful clearer of the understanding; it dissipates every doubt and scruple in an instant; accommodates itself to the meanest capacities; silences the loud and clamorous, and brings over the most obstinate and inflexible. Philip of Macedon was a man of most invincible reason this way. He refuted by it all the wisdom of Athens, confounded their statesmen, struck their orators dumb, and, at length, argued them out of their liberties. A division.

Cyrus, the Persian king, was accustomed to say, that did men but know the cares he had to sustain, he thought no man would wish to wear his crown.

The conquests of Alexander the Great could not satisfy him; for when he had conquered the whole of one known world, he sat down and wept because he knew of no other world to conquer.

Says a recent journal:

Many years ago, in the lecture-room of President Woolsey, of Yale University, a young man who did not know his lesson ventured to make a mock recitation and to give an impertinent answer. The president was a man of fiery temper, tho it had been curbed and subdued by the discipline of years. On this occasion his face turned white; he bowed his head upon the desk before him. There was a half-minute’s silence of death; he raised his head, called upon another man, and the recitation went on. He knew that if he spoke to the offender he would speak too much, so he said nothing.

The students of that class knew well what a lava-flood was penned up there. Self-repression did not seem to them a sign of weakness--it was the greatest evidence of power.

Shall we call it a sign of weakness in God that he bears with the sins of men? When God humbles himself to behold and to forbear, shall we not see in this voluntary self-limitation one of the proofs of his greatness? (Text.)

Men and churches often wait for outside help to draw them along. They need the lesson taught in this anecdote:

When an engineer in Bolivia brought over the Cordilleras the first locomotive ever seen in these latitudes, the native Indians came up from the Amazon basin to see this sight, and sat on their haunches discussing what this strange monster could be. They said: “It is made to go; let’s make it go”; and so they lassoed the buffers, and about thirty of them began to pull, and drew the locomotive a few yards. They exclaimed, “Ay-ay-ay-ay Tatai Tatito.” “The great and little father hath enabled us to do something wonderful!”

The next day the engineer got up steam and hitched a couple of cattle trucks to the locomotive and, when the Indians came again, put them into the trucks and locked them in. Then he stood on the fire-plate of the locomotive and opened the regulator, and let the steam into the cylinder, and it began to move the piston, and the piston the crank, and the crank the wheel, and the wheel the locomotive; and the locomotive carried the Indians along ten miles an hour! What did they not say to their “great and little father!” But they learned this great lesson--that locomotives are not made to be moved along by outside human power, but by means of a power within, and so to carry human beings along.