Sermon Illustration

The losing of one’s life is an irreparable loss. Whatever we may seem to get in exchange, we really get nothing. For if we gain the whole world, we can keep it but for a little while, and it will have no power to deliver us from death or give us the blessing of eternal life. The world cannot give peace of conscience or comfort in sorrow. It cannot purchase heaven. All we can do with the world is to keep it until death comes. We cannot carry even the smallest portion of it with us into the other world. “How much did he leave?” asked a neighbor, referring to a millionaire who had just died. “Every cent,” was the reply. So it is easy to see that there is no profit, but rather a fearful and eternal loss in gaining even all the world at the price of one’s soul. —J. R. Miller

The Roman Cicero, who lived before Christ, was a very respected orator and politician. Without the insight of Christ’s revelation, he said something very important concerning life and death: “I am sure that my friends who died before me did not cease to live. In reality, only their present state can be called life. I believe this because I am duty bound to do so by my logic and because of my respect for the greatest philosopher of the past. I consider this world as a place which was never meant to be our abode forever. I never considered my departure from this world as being chased out of my permanent residence, but rather as a checking out from a temporary abode such as a hotel or an inn.”

Paul tells of Christians who “through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage” ( Heb. 2:15 ). There are some men and women who haunt their lives and make them cheerless for fear they will not be able to meet the king of terrors when he comes. Dear friends, learn from your Savior that no duty reveals itself till we approach it. The duty of death, when you approach it, will light itself up, you may be sure, and seem very easy to your soul. Till then do not trouble yourself about it. To live, and not to die, is your work now. When your time comes, the Christ who conquered death will prove Himself its Lord, and pave the narrow river to a sea of glass for you to cross. The work of life is living, and not, as we are so often told, preparing to die, except by living well. —Phillips Brooks

In the winter and early spring there seems to be no life in the garden and field and forest. Everything looks dead—twice dead. But it is not so really. Under the surface, roots are full of ferment, seeds are swelling, and within the bark of the trees is as much movement as in a city’s noisy streets. Every fiber is tingling with vital force, and the sap is coursing along the minute channels, and all that is needed is the breath of the south wind, the warmth of the smiling sun, and the branches will burst into buds, and the earth will break out with laughing flowers. So in souls that seem dead, twice dead, the Spirit of God is often at work, and one earnest heaven-sent message calls out the buds of penitence and faith, and it is seen as a very garden of the Lord. Spiritual winter may hold a springtide of blessing and resurrection glory in its chill grasp, but He who commands both can easily transform the one into the other.

The only child of a poor woman, a little boy of three years old, one day fell into a fire by accident, during his mother’s absence from the cottage, and was so badly burned that he died after a few hours’ suffering. The clergyman of the parish did not hear of the accident until the child was gone; but as soon as he knew of it, he went down to see the mother, who was known to be dotingly fond of the child, in order that he might comfort and console her. To his great surprise, he found her very calm, and patient, and resigned. After a little conversation, she told him how that God had sent her wonderful comfort.

A preacher once said that we must recover from some of our blind prejudices concerning death, and must come to understand that it is not an enemy, but a messenger of God, and such a messenger can never be other than kindly. To Christ it must have been an infinite relief, and to us who follow in his footsteps it is the inn in which we sleep on the last night before we reach home. In the morning when we wake from slumber, we find ourselves on the brighter shore in the presence of the loved who have gone before. Such faith makes us peaceful, contented, and happy, glad to live as long as we may, and glad to go when the Father summons us.

The following picture of spiritual death is told by Henry Ward Beecher: “A man is taken out of the water into which he has fallen. It is feared that he is past recovery. He is brought in. He no longer hears, nor speaks, nor sees, nor breathes, nor moves, nor shows any evidence of feeling. And you say, “He is dead.” Why is he said to be dead? Because he lacks sensibility.

A sad thing happened in Henderson, Kentucky, when two little girls who were playing hide-and-seek with three other children went into the cellar to find a hiding place. Seeing a large, old-fashioned trunk in one corner, they raised the lid and jumped inside. The top fell and closed with a tight spring lock, and before they were found they had been smothered to death. Sad as it is, this heartbreaking incident is only a fitting type of the smothering to death of spiritual life by men and women all about us. The heart that does not worship God, but twines its affections about things of the world, will soon smother to death its noblest life.

“And they stoned Stephen, calling upon God, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”  ( Acts 7:59 ). In a Chinese town an angry mob was stoning a Chinese Christian to death. “Are you sorry,” asked the missionary, “that you must die like this?” “Oh, no,” he replied. “How glad! Only sorry that I have done so little for Jesus, my Lord.”

“Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest”  ( Matt. 11:28 ) The story is told of a little Welsh girl who lay dying of a dread disease. The doctor had told the mother she could not live throughout the night. Whereupon the mother sought to console the little girl with thoughts of heaven.

On the 10th of June, 1770, the town of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was utterly devastated by an earthquake. From one of the destroyed servant’s housing buildings the slaves had fled, except a black woman, the nurse of her master’s infant child. She would not desert her charge, though the walls were even then giving way. Rushing to the child’s bedside, she stretched forth her arms to protect the babe. The building rocked to its foundation; the roof fell in. Did it crush the hapless pair? The heavy fragments fell indeed upon the woman, but the infant escaped unharmed, for its noble protectoress extended her bended form across the body, and at the sacrifice of her own life, preserved her charge from destruction.

“One should think,” said a friend to the celebrated Dr. Samuel Johnson, “that sickness and the view of death would make men more religious.” “Sir,” replied Johnson, “they do not know how to go about it. A man who has never had religion before no more grows religious when he is sick than a man who has never learned figures can count when he had need of calculation.”

According to the Associated Press and the Chicago Tribune, in the span of one-year tragedy struck twice in one family. In 1994 Ali Pierce, the fourteen-year-old daughter of John and Anna Pierce of Massachusetts, was diagnosed with liver cancer. She fought the disease bravely for two years, but in November 1996 she passed away. Her parents of course were grief-stricken. To deal with his loss, the father sought a constructive way to help others. He started running and set the goal of entering the 1998 Boston Marathon. He intended to take pledges for his run in support of the cancer center where his daughter had died. On October 11, 1997, Pierce entered a half marathon of thirteen miles in Hollis, New Hampshire. It was the longest race he had ever run. He was fifty-one years old, and so before the race he had a medical exam and was given a clean bill of health. He almost finished the race. Just ten feet short of the finish line, wearing a baseball cap that said, "In Memory of Ali...

The Pillsbury Dough Boy. Cute. Cuddly. And wanted for attempted murder. Well, not exactly ... A woman in Arkansas was sitting in her car in a parking lot last year when she heard a loud bang and then felt a sharp pain in the back of her head. She was holding her hands behind her head when someone walked by and asked, "Are you OK?" The woman answered, "I've been shot in the head, and I'm holding my brains in." Well, it wasn't her brains. It was dough. A Pillsbury biscuit canister had exploded in the back seat, apparently from the heat, making a loud explosion and shooting the dough into the back of the woman's head.

When divers combed the wreckage of the Kursk (the destroyed Russian nuclear submarine on which 118 sailors perished), they found a letter written by Lt. Dmitri Kolesnikov. The handwritten note was addressed to his wife, Olga. It was penned after the explosion that sealed the sub's doom on August 12, 2000, in the Barents Sea and confirmed speculation that all the crew had not died instantly. A few hours after the submarine plunged to the bottom of the sea, Kolesnikov wrote, "All the crew from the sixth, seventh, and eighth compartments went over to the ninth. There are 23 people here. . . . None of us can get to the surface." The note included a deeply personal expression of affection to his beloved Olga, who admitted that her husband had a premonition of death when he bade her goodbye before sailing out to the Barents Sea. Eerily, the last lines of the letter indicated that death was closing in. The auxiliary power had failed. Kolesnikov wrote unevenly in the pitch dark...