11 Sermon Illustrations on Spiritual Death

It is a dreadful thing to be choked. Those who have either by accident or design suffered partial strangulation tell us that it is one of the most dreadful experiences. It must, to the all-seeing eye of God, be a dreadful thing to behold so many of His children gasping for a breath of life, being choked by the evil weeds, thorns, and tares indigenous to the flesh or diligently planted there by the enemy of souls while they sleep. It is a sad thing to see the corners of a corn-field left unreaped during the harvest (because the grain growing there among the thorns is not worth reaping), afterward reaped down and bound in bundles and burned, the thorns and choked product of a good seed together. It is a sadder thing to behold the lives of not a few Christians all overgrown and choked with thorns and weeds just ripening for the fire of destruction, because they are shriveled and choked and not fit to be gathered into our Lord’s garner. (Text.)--_The Independent._

* * * * *

A marvelous thing for these times is reported from Weathersfield, Conn. A convict who has served a sentence of fifty years in the State prison receives his liberty at this Christmas season (1909). In 1859, when he was twenty-one, he murdered his wife, who was only a young girl of eighteen. He is seventy-one now. Every one of the great occurrences in American life which make our modern civilization what it is belongs to that half-century for which this man has been behind prison bars. Into what a changed world he will come. What can he do? His friends are dead. His generation has passed. His own State does not know him. One would suppose he would almost want to commit some crime that would take him back to his home of fifty years. What can he do? Society punished him, now what will society do for him? There is no asylum for him. He knows nothing of the business methods of the day. He is a living dead man. Would it not have been more merciful for society by capital punishment to have made him a dead man fifty years ago?

Says a writer in the _North China Herald_:

One of the facts that ineffaceably cut into my memory during my first winter in New-chwang was the finding on one morning about New Year’s time thirty-five masses of ice, each mass having been a living man at 10 o’clock the preceding night. The thermometer was a good bit below zero. The men had just left the opium dens, where they had been enjoying themselves. The keen air sent them to sleep, and they never wakened.

The freezing was only the external manifestation of a spiritual benumbing that long before existed within. (Text.)

In some parts of Africa the natives are attacked with “sleeping-sickness.” The first symptom is drowsiness, and the following days and weeks drift past in sleep. The sleep grows deeper and heavier until the sufferer has passed out into the unknown, to the sleep that knows no waking.

Sleeping-sickness, in a moral sense, is a common disease in the world. It is often as fatal to activity and character as the dread plague of Africa is to the body. The temperature of the heart falls, the soul sleep deepens, God is forgotten, Christ forsaken. (Text.)

See DEGRADATION; EARLY PROMISE; SELFISHNESS.

DEGENERACY THROUGH DISUSE

It is a recognized fact that the disuse of faculties inevitably leads to deterioration.

There is a curious little plant called the sundew which grows in marshes. A small fly alights on one of the leaves attracted by the crimson hairs, and by the sticky liquid called the “dew.” When the fly struggles to get free the hairs slowly curve round him and trap him, at the same time pouring out more of the dew. Presently the poor insect dies in that trap. Why does the plant do this? Simply because it wants to eat the fly. The dew is acid and dissolves the insect’s body, so that the plant can absorb the nitrogen which it contains. The sundew once lived in harmless plant fashion, for it belongs to the saxifrage family, of which the other members are quite respectable and hard-working plants, getting their living by honest root-work in extracting their nitrogen out of the ground. When we examine the sundew we find it has scarcely anything worthy the name of a root. Long ago it seemed to dislike the wear and tear of thrusting rootlets into the ground and seeking for food, so it settled into a bog, where it could get water at least without any trouble. There, as the roots had next to nothing to do, they slowly dwindled away, as all things will dwindle which are not used, whether they be plant-roots, or the limbs of animals, or the minds of men.--“A Mountain Path.”