9 Sermon Illustrations on Strength in Weakness

Edinburgh Castle was captured only once in the whole history of Scotland. Its defenders thought that the steepness of the rock on one side made it inaccessible and impregnable, so they put no sentries there. In the grey mist of the early morning a little part of the enemy crept up the precipitous slopes and surprised the garrison into surrender. It was captured at its strongest point. Paul said, "When I am weak, then am I strong" (2 Corinthians 12:10). Yet the reverse is often true also. "When I am strong, then am I weak."

"It is related of Laurence Saunders the martyr, that one day in the country, meeting his friend Dr. Pendleton, an earnest preacher in King Edward's reign, they debated upon what they had best do in the dangerous time that Mary's accession had brought upon them. Saunders confessed that his spirit was ready, but he felt the flesh was at present too weak for much suffering. But Pendleton admonished him, and appeared all courage and forwardness to face every peril. They both came, under the control of circumstances, to London, and there, when danger arose, Pendleton shrunk from the cross, and Saunders resolutely took it up." The reader has probably met with this story before, but it will not harm him to learn its lesson again. We are certainly stronger when we feel our weakness than when we glory in our strength. Our pastoral observation over a very large church has led us to expect to see terrible failures among those who carry their heads high among their brethren. Poor timid souls who are afraid to put one foot before another, for fear they should go an inch astray, go on from year to year in lovely, bashful holiness, and at the same time the very professors who condemned them, and distressed them by their confident pretensions, fall like Lucifer, never to hope again.

The fault which has happened to others may be yet seen in me, unless the Lord shall guard me from it. It is no time for boasting while we are still in the enemy's country.

Intrepidity is an extraordinary strength of mind, which raises it above the troubles and disorders, and the emotions, which the sight of great perils is calculated to excite. It is by this that heroes maintain themselves in a tranquil state of mind, and preserve the free use of their reason under the most surprising and terrible circumstances.

— La Rochefoucauld

See VITAL FAITHS.

FURY INCREASING STRENGTH

The almost superhuman pluck of certain prize-fighting animals--bulldogs and badgers, for instance--may in reality be founded on a temporary insensibility to pain, and the evident advantages of that negative endowment suggest its development by the agency of natural selection. Individuals gifted with that faculty of emotional anesthesia were less likely to succumb to the terrors of a life-and-death struggle, and therefore more apt to prevail in that struggle for existence which in a state of nature is implied by the frequent necessity of contesting the physical superiority of sexual rivals or alien antagonists. The invigorating tendency of certain passions may have been developed in a similar manner. The formidable and, indeed, quite abnormal strength of infuriated man is so well known that even an athlete will hesitate to try conclusions with an adversary under the influence of raging passions, and in such moments fury-inspired vigor has often accomplished feats which afterward surprized even the hero of the exploit. “The saints do help a man in a desperate plight,” said an old Creole planter, who had rescued his family from the attack of a brutal negro. The same strength-sustaining influence of fury may explain the almost miraculous victories of small bodies of desperate men over large armies of better-armed foes, as in the three murderous battles which the rustic avengers of John Huss gained against the ironclad legions of his enemies, or in that still less expected defeat of an entire Russian army by a few hundred followers of the hero-prophet Shamyl. Religious frenzy has often produced a similar effect, and on any other theory only a miracle could explain the almost constant victories of the Saracens, who, in spite of determined resistance of millions of better disciplined and physically superior opponents, succeeded in less than a century in extending their empire from the Ganges to the Bay of Biscay.--FELIX OSWALD, _The Open Court_.

When the little girl told her music-teacher that it hurt her fingers to practise on the piano, the teacher answered: “I know it hurts them, but it strengthens them, too.” Then the child packed the philosophy of the ages into her reply: “Teacher, it seems that everything which strengthens hurts.”

— F. F. SHANNON