Sermon Illustration

During the French war, a train carrying dispatches to the headquarters was compelled to go over sixty miles of very rough road, and reach its destination within an hour. The engineer was the bearer of the dispatches, and his wife and child were in the coach. Every moment threatened to pitch the train over the embankment or over a bridge, and, as it rolled from side to side, leaping at times almost in the air, rushing past stations, the few people inside held their breath and often cried out with terror as they sped along. There was one on that train who knew nothing of their fears and that was the child of the engineer. Happy as a bird, she laughed aloud when asked if she were not afraid, and looked up and answered, "Why, my father is at the engine." A little later, the engineer came into the car to cheer up his wife and, as he wiped the great drops of sweat from his face, the child leaped into his arms and laid her head upon his bosom, as happy and peaceful as when at home. ...

When David Livingstone appeared at the University of Glasgow to receive the honorary doctor of law degree, he was received with silent respect. He was gaunt and weary from 16 years of exposure to Africa’s hardships. One arm hung useless at his side because of an attack by a lion. Livingstone asked, “Shall I tell you what supported me through all those years of exile among a people whose language I could not understand and whose attitude toward me was always uncertain and often hostile? It was this: ‘Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world’” (Matt. 28:20).

During an earthquake that occurred many years ago, the inhabitants of a small village were generally very much alarmed, and at the same time surprised, at the calmness and apparent joy of an old lady, whom they all knew. At length one of them, addressing the old lady, said, “Mother, aren’t you afraid?” “No,” she replied, “I rejoice to know that I have a God that can shake the world.”

To illustrate the lack of Christian assurance, the Rev. J. C. Ryle takes two English emigrants and supposes them set down side by side in the colony of New Zealand or Australia. He says: “Give each of them a piece of land to clear and cultivate. Let the portions allotted to them be the same both in quantity and quality. Secure that land to them by every needful legal instrument; let it be conveyed as freehold to them and theirs forever; let the conveyance be publicly registered, and the property made sure to them by every deed and security that man’s ingenuity can devise. “Suppose then that one of them shall set to work to bring his land into cultivation, and labor at it day after day without intermission or cessation. Suppose in the meantime that the other be continually leaving his work, and going repeatedly to the public registry, to ask whether the land is really his own, whether there is not some mistake—whether, after all, there is not some flaw in the legal instrument which ...

Assurance is rather the fruit of faith than faith itself; it is in faith, as the flower is in the root. Faith in time, after much communion with God, acquaintance with the Lord, and experience of His dealings with the soul, may flourish into assurance; but as the root truly lives before the flower appears, and continues when the flower has shed its beautiful leaves and is gone again, so does true justifying faith live before assurance comes and after it disappears. Assurance is, as it were, the cream of faith. Now there is milk before cream; this cream does not appear until after the milk has stood for some time; and there remains milk after the cream is skimmed off. How many of the precious saints of God might one shut out from being believers if their faith did not reach to that which amounts to assurance!