Sermon Illustration

The duty of every man is to ask himself two questions: “What is my place?” and, “Am I in it?”. There are people who from lack of thought or because of unsettling circumstances, drift about uncertainly, anchoring nowhere, bearing no cargoes, and guarding nothing. It is pathetic to meet individuals of middle age who never yet have found their niche. But, once in a situation of opportunity, there comes the urgent demand, Am I measuring up to it? No one is negligible; and even one cog, if broken, will mar the running of the social machine. Nothing is unimportant in the economy of God. The Lord has a place for us, and, if we have the high aim of a holy enterprise, it will prove to be no narrow one. Let us get the right spirit, and we shall have all the “sphere” we want.

There are a great many helps to courage in numbers and display. The music of marching feet, the brilliancy of uniform and flag, and, above all, the military band with its martial tunes which make the air vibrate with martial feeling. A woman in an American town hurried to the window not long ago at the sound of the band, to see the soldiers marching. “If I were a man,” she exclaimed, “I should be a soldier myself! I know I could shoot if they kept the band playing all the time.” How many who can fight the battle of life while the band plays faint by the wayside when they must go out in cold blood and sternly struggle with the hard duties of quiet days! But the noblest heroes among men and women are those who in silence and in quiet, in unreported battles do their duty for Christ’s sake and for the love of their fellow men. The newspapers may not herald their bravery, but God recognizes it, and they shall have something better than the medal of the Legion of Honor in God’s ...

Feeble are we? Yes, without God we are nothing. But by faith, every man may be what God requires him to be. This is the only Christian idea of duty. Measure obligation by inherent ability? No, my brethren, Christian obligation has a very different measure. It is measured by the power that God will give us, measured by the gifts and possible increments of faith. And what a reckoning it will be for many of us, when Christ summons us to answer before Him under the law, not for what we are, but for what we might have been.

The most beautiful sight this earth affords is a man or woman so filled with love that duty is only a name, and its performance the natural outflow and expression of the love which has become the central principle of their life.