God needs to speak louder!

My five-year-old daughter, Barbara, had disobeyed me and had been sent to her room. After a few minutes, I went in to talk with her about what she had done. Teary-eyed, she asked, "Why do we do wrong things, Mommy?"

"Sometimes the devil tells us to do something wrong," I replied, "and we listen to him. We need to listen to God instead."

To which she sobbed, "But God doesn't talk loud enough!"

Citation: Jo M. Guerrero, Christian Reader (September/October 1996)

Illustrations for Every Topic and Occasion - – Perfect Illustrations: For Every Topic and Occasion.

Everything I touch hurts!

A man went to see his doctor in an acute state of anxiety. "Doctor," he said, "you have to help me. I'm dying. Everywhere I touch it hurts. I touch my head and it hurts. I touch my leg and it hurts. I touch my stomach and it hurts. I touch my chest and it hurts. You have to help me, Doc, everything hurts."

The doctor gave him a complete examination. "Mr. Smith," he said, "I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is you are not dying. The bad news is you have a broken finger."

Citation: David Holdaway; Stonehaven, Kincardinshire, Scotland

Illustrations for Every Topic and Occasion - . – More Perfect Illustrations: For Every Topic and Occasion.

One Solitary Life

He was born in an obscure village
The child of a peasant woman
He grew up in another obscure village
Where he worked in a carpenter shop
Until he was thirty

He never wrote a book
He never held an office
He never went to college
He never visited a big city
He never travelled more than two hundred miles
From the place where he was born
He did none of the things
Usually associated with greatness
He had no credentials but himself

He was only thirty three

His friends ran away
One of them denied him
He was turned over to his enemies
And went through the mockery of a trial
He was nailed to a cross between two thieves
While dying, his executioners gambled for his clothing
The only property he had on earth

When he was dead
He was laid in a borrowed grave
Through the pity of a friend

Nineteen centuries have come and gone
And today Jesus is the central figure of the human race
And the leader of mankind's progress
All the armies that have ever marched
All the navies that have ever sailed
All the parliaments that have ever sat
All the kings that ever reigned put together
Have not affected the life of mankind on earth
As powerfully as that one solitary life

That man and the birds in the snow

Now the man to whom I'm going to introduce you was not a scrooge, he was a kind, decent, mostly good man. Generous to his family, upright in his dealings with other men. But he just didn't believe all that incarnation stuff which the churches proclaim at Christmas Time. It just didn't make sense and he was too honest to pretend otherwise. He just couldn't swallow the Jesus Story, about God coming to Earth as a man. "I'm truly sorry to distress you," he told his wife, "but I'm not going with you to church this Christmas Eve." He said he'd feel like a hypocrite. That he'd much rather just stay at home, but that he would wait up for them. And so he stayed and they went to the midnight service.

Shortly after the family drove away in the car, snow began to fall. He went to the window to watch the flurries getting heavier and heavier and then went back to his fireside chair and began to read his newspaper. Minutes later he was startled by a thudding sound. Then another, and then another. Sort of a thump or a thud. At first he thought someone must be throwing snowballs against his living room window. But when he went to the front door to investigate he found a flock of birds huddled miserably in the snow. They'd been caught in the storm and, in a desperate search for shelter, had tried to fly through his large landscape window.

Well, he couldn't let the poor creatures lie there and freeze, so he remembered the barn where his children stabled their pony. That would provide a warm shelter, if he could direct the birds to it. Quickly he put on a coat, galoshes, tramped through the deepening snow to the barn. He opened the doors wide and turned on a light, but the birds did not come in. He figured food would entice them in. So he hurried back to the house, fetched bread crumbs, sprinkled them on the snow, making a trail to the yellow-lighted wide open doorway of the stable. But to his dismay, the birds ignored the bread crumbs, and continued to flap around helplessly in the snow. He tried catching them. He tried shooing them into the barn by walking around them waving his arms. Instead, they scattered in every direction, except into the warm, lighted barn.

And then, he realized, that they were afraid of him. To them, he reasoned, I am a strange and terrifying creature. If only I could think of some way to let them know that they can trust me. That I am not trying to hurt them, but to help them. But how? Because any move he made tended to frighten them, confuse them. They just would not follow. They would not be led or shooed because they feared him. "If only I could be a bird," he thought to himself, "and mingle with them and speak their language. Then I could tell them not to be afraid. Then I could show them the way to safety ... to the safe warm barn. But I would have to be one of them so they could see, and hear and understand."

At that moment the church bells began to ring. The sound reached his ears above the sounds of the wind. And he stood there listening to the bells - Adeste Fidelis - listening to the bells pealing the glad tidings of Christmas. And he sank to his knees in the snow.

-- Author Unknown --
(Shared by Paul Harvey on his radio show)

Is following Jesus easy or hard?

Following Jesus seemed easy enough at first, but that was because they had not followed him very far. It soon became apparent that being a disciple of Christ involved far more than a joyful acceptance of the Messianic promise: it meant the surrender of one's whole life to the Master in absolute submission to his sovereignty. There could be no compromise. "No servant can serve two masters," Jesus said, "for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon" (Luke 16:13). There had to be a complete forsaking of sin. The old thought patterns, habits, and pleasures of the world had to be conformed to the new disciplines of the kingdom of God (Matt. 5:1-7:29; Luke 6:20-49). Perfection of love was now the only standard of conduct (Matt. 5:48), and this love was to manifest itself in obedience to Christ (John 14:21, 23) expressed in devotion to those whom he died to save (Matt. 25:31-36). There was a cross in it—the willing denial of self for others (Mark 8:34-38; 10:32-45; Matt. 16:24-26; 20:17-28; Luke 9:23-25; John 12:25-26; 13:1-20).The Master Plan of Evangelism.

Fishing for men

Jens Oveson was fishing for salmon in central Norway's Gaula River when he was swept away by a strong current. Kjell Wilhelmsen, 55, spotted the man's struggle. Wilhelmsen had fished the river for 25 years and knew where the current would carry Oveson. Wilhelmsen ran across a bridge, waiting for Oveson as the current carried him downriver.

Wilhelmsen later told a newspaper, "He seemed paralyzed. Only his face and the tips of his boots were above water. I decided to start casting."

His homemade lure hooked Oveson's rubber waders on the first cast of about ten yards. But Oveson weighed nearly 250 pounds. Wilhelmsen used every trick he knew to reel in the big man without breaking his light line. He landed the half-conscious Dane and hauled him onto the shore. Oveson survived the ordeal.

Citation: "Fisherman Hooks Drowning Dane to Save His Life," The Wenatchee World (7-20-01); submitted by Jay Caron; Wenatchee, Washington

Illustrations for Every Topic and Occasion - . – More Perfect Illustrations: For Every Topic and Occasion.

The high cost of laziness.

"If a man will not work, he shall not eat." That may sound hard, but the wisdom of that Scripture is seen in the story of one New York man.

According to the Associated Press, this thirty-six-year-old resident of New York was quoted as saying, "I like to live decent. I like to be clean." Nothing wrong with that; the only problem was he didn't like to work. So he found other ways to satisfy his cultured tastes.

He would walk into a fine restaurant, order top cuisine and choice liquor, and then when the check arrived, shrug his shoulders and wait for the police. The sometimes homeless man actually wanted to end up in the slammer, where he would get three meals a day and a clean bed. He has pled guilty to stealing a restaurant meal thirty-one times. In 1994 he served ninety days at the Rikers Island jail for filching a meal from a cafe in Rockefeller Center.

New York taxpayers have paid more than a quarter of a million dollars over five years to feed, clothe, and house one lazy man.

750 Engaging Illustrations.

Happiness -- John Piper.

Well, that was one.Now here I am a teenager, knowing, perhaps not as clearly from Scripture, but from my own soul,that I had another passion. I wanted to be happy. I couldn't get rid of it. As much as I heard certain spokesmen in my church talk about the denial of my own desires in order to do God's desires, that paradigmnever ended it. I wanted to be happy.

Call it what you will: joy, satisfaction, contentment. It doesn't matter, they are all in the Bible. The Bible is indiscriminate in its pleasure language. If you have nice little categories for "joy is what Christians have" and "happiness is what the world has," you can scrap those when you go to the Bible, becausethe Bible is indiscriminate in its uses of the language of happiness and joy and contentment and satisfaction. It is lavish in all of them, and none of them is chosen above the other.

So, I was torn in those days. I cast about as I finished Wheaton College and went out to Fuller Seminary, looking desperately for some unifying thing. "Let Your Passion Be Single" is my topic tonight. And that's been the passion of my life for all these years. I must have a single passion. I can't have a divided heart.

"Unite my heart O God to fear thy name" is the great goal of our lives. (Psalm 86:11) To have a united, not a divided heart. I couldn't deny the one from Scripture. I couldn't deny the other from experience. I also couldn't deny it from reading. I was looking around to see whether I was the only one in the world who felt this way.

All Men Seek Happiness

In reading Pascal, I read,

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.¹

Well, that seems to be what I think, too. To find it in the Pensées gave me encouragement that this other passion to be happy was universal, undeniable and just as unavoidable as hunger in the stomach. How does it fit with this tremendously central, biblical passion for the glory of God?

Well I got help. First, from C.S. Lewis and then from Jonathan Edwards, and then the Bible broke open to me. So I want to tell you how Lewis helped me, then how Edwards helped me, and then spend some time showing that the Bible undergirds these things profoundly.

C.S. Lewis: Praise Is Joy's Consummation

Lewis had an awful time accepting God's centrality in the Bible. He called the demands for praise in the Psalms, when he was still an atheist, the soundings of an old woman seeking compliments for herself. That's the way God sounded to him when the Psalms said, "Praise the Lord." But this is God's word, and it says over and over again, "Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!" So, you have God up there saying, "Praise me! Praise me! Praise me!" which sounded very vain to Lewis.

Then in this life-changing page in Reflections on the Psalms, I read this:

But the most obvious fact about praise—whether of God or anything—strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise...

The world rings with praise—lovers praising their mistresses, readers their favorite poet, walkers praising the countryside, players praising their favorite game...My whole, more general, difficulty about the praise of God depended on my absurdly denying to us, as regards the supremely Valuable, what we delight to do, what indeed we can't help doing, about everything else we value.I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation.²

That was almost the solution. Very close. That set my feet to dancing. That praise giving glory to God was described by Lewis as not something different from joy but joy in consummation—O, that's so close to having them be one passion.

Whose cell phone is this?

MATERIALISM

IMPOSTOR HUSBAND SPENDS THOUSANDS

Proverbs 11:24-25; Ecclesiastes 5:8-15; Ephesians 5:25

Deception; Family; Generosity; Golden Rule; Marriage; Materialism; Money; Responsibility

Several men in the locker room of a private exercise club were talking when a cell phone lying on the bench rang. One man picked it up without hesitation, and the following conversation ensued:

"Hello?"

"Honey, It's me."

"Sugar!"

"I'm at the mall two blocks from the club. I saw a beautiful mink coat. It is absolutely gorgeous! Can I buy it? It's only $1,500."

"Well, okay, if you like it that much."

"Thanks! Oh, and I also stopped by the Mercedes dealership and saw the new models. I saw one I really liked. I spoke with the salesman, and he gave me a great price."

"How much?"

"Only $60,000!"

"Okay, but for that price I want it with all the options."

"Great! Before we hang up, there's something else. It might seem like a lot, but, well, I stopped by to see the real estate agent this morning, and I saw the house we had looked at last year. It's on sale! Remember? The beachfront property with the pool and the English garden?"

"How much are they asking?"

"Only $450,000, a magnificent price, and we have that much in the bank to cover it."

"Well then, go ahead and buy it, but put in a bid for only $420,000, okay?"

"Okay, sweetie. Thanks! I'll see you later! I love you!" "I love you, too."

The man hung up, closed the phone's flap, and raised it aloft, asking, "Does anyone know who this cell phone belongs to?"

Citation: John Fehlen; Stanwood, Washington

Illustrations for Every Topic and Occasion - . – More Perfect Illustrations: For Every Topic and Occasion.