18 Sermon Illustrations on Assurance in Christ

In the second century, a Christian was brought before a pagan ruler and told to renounce his faith. "If you don't do it, I will banish you," threatened the king. The man smiled and answered, "You can't banish me from Christ, for He says, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you.' " To this the king angrily retorted, "Then I will confiscate your property and take all your possessions." Again the man smiled and said, "My treasures are all laid up on high; you cannot get them." The king became furious and shouted, "I will kill you!" "Why," the man answered, "I have been dead forty years; I have been dead with Christ, dead to the world, and my life is hid with Christ in God, and you cannot touch it." In desperation the king turned to his advisers and asked, "What can you do with a fanatic like that?" The Pilot's Smile In Robert Louis Stevenson's story of a storm, he describes a ship caught off a rocky coast, threatening death to all on board. When terror among the passengers was at its worst, one man more daring than the rest, making the perilous passage to the pilot-house, saw the pilot lashed to his post with his hands on the wheel, turning the ship little by little into the open sea. When the pilot beheld the ghastly white, terror-stricken face of the man, he smiled, and the man rushed to the deck below shouting, "I have seen the face of the pilot and he smiled. All is well." The sight of that smiling face averted panic and converted despair into hope.

I envy not quality of the mind or intellect in others; nor genius, power, wit, or fancy: but if I could choose what would be most delightful, and, I believe, most useful to me, I should prefer a firm religious belief to every other blessing; for it makes life a discipline of goodness; creates new hopes when all hopes vanish; and throws over the decay, the destruction of existence, the most gorgeous of all lights; awakens life even in death, and from corruption and decay calls up beauty and divinity; makes an instrument of torture and of shame the ladder of ascent to paradise; and, far above all combinations of earthly hopes, calls up the most delightful visions and plains and amaranths, the gardens of the blest, the security of everlasting joys, where the sensualist and the sceptic view only gloom, decay, annihilation, and despair. Sir Humphrey Davy.

As with a thing that is bought there is sometimes given earnest-money, as well for the beginning of payment as for assurance that the bargain shall be held firm; so the Holy Ghost is the earnest-money, assuring us, by this beginning of spiritual blessings, that God holds us for his possession, and will at length gather us to the full enjoyment of the inheritance of heaven.

— Cawdray

To a really wise man, the well weighed approbation of a single judicious character gives more heartfelt satisfaction than all the noisy applauses of ten thousand ignorant though enthusiastic admirers. Parmenides, upon reading a philosophical discourse before a public assembly at Athens, and observing that, except Plato, the whole company had left him, continued, notwithstanding, to read on, and said that Plato alone was audience sufficient for him.

# ATONEMENT.

vanced years. Of late, in the course of a severe and dangerous illness, I have been repeatedly brought to the gates of death. My time in this world cannot now be long, but with truth I can declare that, in the midst of all my past afflictions, my heart was supported and comforted by a firm reliance upon the merits and atonement of my Savior; and now, in the prospect of entering upon an eternal world, this is the only foundation of my confidence and hope."

"It is just a year this day," says Mrs. Judson, "since I entertained hope in Christ. About this time in the evening, when reflecting on the words of the lepers, 'If we enter into the city, then the famine is in the city, and we shall die there; and if we sit still here, we die also;' and felt that if I returned to the world, I should surely perish; if I staid where I then was, I should perish; and I could but perish, if I threw myself on the mercy of Christ. Then came light, and relief, and comfort, such as I never knew before."

The Rev. John Rees, of Crown-Street, Soho, London, was visited on his death-bed by the Rev. John Leifchild, who very seriously asked him to describe the state of his mind. This appeal to the honor of his religion roused him; it freshened his dying lamp, and raising himself up in his bed he looked his friend in the face, and with great deliberation, energy, and dignity, uttered the following words:—"Christ in his person, Christ in the love of his heart, and Christ in the power of his arm is the Rock on which I rest; and now (reclining his head gently on the pillow) death, strike!"

"I have not time to add more," says Cowper the poet, in a letter, "except just to add, that if I am ever enabled to look forward to death with comfort, which I thank God is sometimes the case with me, I do not take my view of it from the top of my own works and deservings, though God is witness that the labor of my life is to keep a conscience void of offence toward him. Death is always formidable to me except when see him disarmed of his sting by having sheathed it in the body of Jesus Christ."

—Brown, on being asked if he were not afraid to enter a world of spirits, answered, “No; a persuasion that Christ is mine makes me think that when I appear in that world all the spirits will use me well on Christ’s account.” Warren, being asked in his last hours how he was, answered, “I am just going into Eternity; but I bless God I am neither ashamed to live nor afraid to die.”

Many things depend upon temperature--the psychological climate of the soul. Sometimes in mountain regions you will see clouds gathering around the mountain peak, and staying there in spite of a strong wind blowing. You wonder how that is. It is cold up there, and the warm air, vapor-laden, climbing up the side of the mountain, reaching that cool region, makes clouds as fast as the winds can blow them away. Which thing is an allegory. There are psychological climates which make clouds, and there are other psychological climates which make clearness; and cloud and clearness do not depend upon purely intellectual and syllogistic operations, but upon something deeper by far--the attitude of the will toward God and righteousness. That is the significant thing. And there we come upon a doctrine which we have only recently begun to emphasize speculatively, a doctrine of pragmatism, a doctrine which Christianity has always held, that “if any man wills to do the will of God, he shall know.” And I fancy he will never know in any other way. It is the will. One must “will to do the will” of God; then he shall know. Of course, it does not mean that he shall know all about the metaphysics of the Athanasian Creed, or the “Thirty-nine Articles.” But it means that he who thus wills to do the will of God shall come out into practical assurance, on the right track. It means that he is not alone, but the Father is with him.--Prof. BORDEN P. BOWNE, _Zion’s Herald_.