107 Sermon Illustrations on Vision

At the tender age of three, actor Peter Falk had his right eye surgically removed (and replaced with a glass one) when a malignancy was found. His glass eye did not prevent him from participating in team sports like baseball and basketball at school. In fact, despite his disability he excelled at both games and the eye became the source of much amusement. During one Little League game, Falk was called out by the umpire at third base. Falk, sure that he had been safe, angrily pulled his glass eye out of its socket and handed it to the umpire. “Here,” he declared. “I think you might need this!”

His daughter Catherine Falk is a private detective in real life.

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http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000393/bio

Alexander Popov, senior pastor of Baptists in the Russian region of Udmurtia, isn’t in a hurry.

But he doesn’t waste time, either.

By his count, Popov has looked death squarely in the face at least 20 times. So he’s more aware than most that he lives on God’s time schedule, not his own. He makes the most of his time in reaching the Udmurt (OOD-mert) people.

In his younger years, the former geologist survived an airplane crash landing and a mine explosion. Twice he was saved from drowning; three times he escaped job-site electrocution. Once he was attacked by a bear in the woods. He nearly froze to death in the wilderness on another occasion. He drank some toxic homemade liquor that killed others, but he lived.

“Why am I still alive?” Popov started to ask himself.

An ethnic Russian, he was raised in a Baptist home in Udmurtia during the hard years of Communism. He read the Bible (smuggled from abroad) many times. “I knew every chapter, but I was an unbeliever,” he says. He was a scientist, an intellectual, a businessman. Yet for some reason he kept the Bible with him everywhere he traveled.

God answered his question with a dream: “He showed me myself, dead in a coffin. The grave didn’t have a bottom. That terrified me. God spoke to my heart and said, ‘This is your last chance.’”

Popov repented and experienced God’s grace and mercy through Christ. A breath of religious freedom was returning to the dying Soviet Union at the time, and Popov heard God’s call to bring the Word he now embraced to Udmurtia. Bible school and seminary followed.

He fulfills his call today by starting churches, mentoring younger Baptist leaders and having a passionate commitment to Bible distribution. Before Bibles were available in Udmurtia, he frequently made an 18-hour train trip to Moscow to buy them and bring them back.

His evangelistic work and Bible distribution efforts extend beyond Udmurtia as well. He takes several trips a year to Mongolia (six days by train) to spread the Word.

“I heard from some missionaries that there were 100 people in Mongolia to one Bible,” he says. “That gave me a desire to help. Bibles cost $5 apiece there, a huge sum for Mongolians. I started collecting money to buy Bibles for Mongolia. Russia went through a time when we didn’t have Bibles for believers.”

In Udmurtia, meanwhile, he has plenty of plans and dreams: befriending Orthodox priests who need encouragement (and Bibles), starting creative community evangelism projects that connect believers to searching people at all levels of society, multiplying churches, unifying Christians in a vision for outreach.

Above all, “He’s a man of prayer,” says Southern Baptist missionary Tim Wicker, a close friend. “When you’re in the office with him, you pray. When you get in the car, you pray. When you get there, you pray.”

When it comes to the Word, Wicker says, “Alexander doesn’t just talk about it, he lives it -– and God blesses it.”

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen a strange phenomenon: fear of good news.

When the surge in Iraq actually worked, not many antiwar activists exulted in the fact that violence had actually diminished. When Barack Obama was elected President, many black activists still kept grumbling about an incurably racist America. When the stock market climbed recently, prophets of the “coming economic collapse” still had nothing good to say.

In each case, of course, good news exposed some fallacy around which these groups had framed their lives. That’s also and especially true when it comes to extraordinary events — like encountering God in his glory. It’s not always good news.

The Genesis story tells us that God was walking in the Garden apparently the day after Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit. He was looking to get close to the guilty couple. But when they discovered that God was in the neighborhood, they hid themselves.

In the New Testament we read that Peter, after hauling in a great catch at the command of Jesus, found himself confronted with the glory of miracle and the power of God. He tells Jesus, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man!”

On Easter, we are be reminded of another such moment: When the women realize that Jesus has been raised, they run in fear.

There is something about the great news of encountering the very glory of God that scares the spirituality out of us. There are many reasons for that, but one is this: Divine light exposes something in us that we do not like to look at.

Paint a room in normal lighting, and when you step back, it all looks pretty good. You pat yourself on the back, and start cleaning up. But shine one of those 500-watt high-intensity lamps on the walls, move the lamp up and down, and get a sideways look at it. That high-intensity light exposes all the places where the old paint still bleeds through.

To experience Christ in his resurrection glory can be something like that. The one whom the Nicene Creed calls “Light from Light” has a way of exposing all the old paint that still bleeds through our lives. So some days, the last thing I want is to meet the resurrected, glorious Christ. He just exposes too many flaws.

These days, we spend a lot of ink and electrons wondering why God does not manifest himself like he did in biblical times. We write eloquent books and preach powerful sermons on the absence of God in modern life, feeling sorry for ourselves, living as we do in an alienated age. But I wonder if God is trying to plug the lamp of his glory into our lives, but we just keep hitting the breaker switch in the basement, making sure no electricity whatsoever gets to that outlet.

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On the other hand, the very light that exposes also heals. “And we all, with unveiled face,” wrote Saint Paul, “beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18, ESV).

The parents of Catherine of Genoa (d. 1510) forced her at age 16 to marry a young nobleman who proved to be an ill-suited match. He not only neglected the things of God, he also squandered their funds so that the couple was ruined.

To take her mind off her unhappy circumstances, Catherine drifted into small diversions. If she attended church, it was more out of habit and duty. Still, she prayed desperately for relief. Her sister, a nun, urged her to go to confession at her convent. Catherine agreed, although she didn’t really want to do so. Her sister said, “At least go to obtain the blessing of our confessor,” who had a reputation as a holy man.

So, on one March day in 1473, a miserable, 26-year-old Catherine knelt in the confessional. Something remarkable happened: a ray of light burst in from who knows where. A medieval biography (Life and Doctrine of Saint Catherine of Genoa) describes what happened to Catherine, whom is called “the Soul” here:

Touched by this ray, the Soul saw and felt a certain flame of

love proceeding from that divine source, which, for the moment,

left her like one bereft of sense, without understanding, without

speech, without feeling. In that pure and simple love, as God

manifested it to her, she remained at that moment wholly

absorbed, and never more did this sight depart from her memory;

always she beheld that pure, divine love turned toward her.

All well and good, except that ray of light and drink of pure, divine love revealed something ugly in her. But she did not flinch:

She was then shown how she had lived without the knowledge of

this great love, and how great were the faults in which she saw

herself, and what she could do to correspond to this pure love;

and so humbled was she in her own eyes that she would have

publicly proclaimed her sins through the whole city, and could do

nothing but incessantly repeat these words: “O Lord! no more

world, no more sin,” with a cry of inward anguish which came from

the depths of her heart.

Instead of running from the extraordinary encounter — “No more light, no more glory!” — Catherine submitted to the painful light of purification. She had a saint’s instinct to know that all love comes wrapped in pain, and all pain, when accepted in faith, delivers the gift of love. One cannot have the love of God without pain any more than one can have the sun’s light without the sun’s heat.

Catherine realized that not only the Cross but also the Resurrection comes with two beams.

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Mark Galli is senior managing editor of Christianity Today. He is author of A GREAT AND TERRIBLE LOVE: A SPIRITUAL JOURNEY INTO THE ATTRIBUTES OF GOD (Baker) explores a variety of spiritual themes on his blog.

Copyright © 2009 Christianity Today.

In 1983 a young woman in Pakistan named Naseem Fatima claimed to be in direct visionary contact with the twelfth Imam (Shia Muslims believed their twelfth leader had disappeared centuries ago and would return as the world’s Messiah). A number of Shias were inspired by her, especially when she prophesied they would be able to visit the holy city of Karbala without worldly means.

Shia are known for their passionate faith, and for their poverty, so some of them took her literally. In February, thirty-eight Shia pilgrims walked to the shore of the Arabian Sea near the large city of Karachi. The women and children in the group, about half the number, were placed in six large trunks. Their leader, Sayyad Hussain Shah, pointed his religious banner at the waves and then marched into the sea. He believed that a path would open in the sea and lead them to Basra, from where the party would proceed to the holy city of Karbala in Iraq.

A few hours later, eighteen of the pilgrims had drowned and the survivors were plucked out of the water in varying stages of exhaustion and consciousness. Some of those who survived claimed, despite all the evidence to the contrary, to have witnessed the miracle of a parting sea. The Karachi police proceeded to arrest them on the grounds that they had attempted to leave Pakistan illegally without visas.

The nation of Pakistan was astonished at the incident. Rich Shias, impressed by the devotion of the survivors, paid for their journey by air for a week to and from Karbala. In Iraq, influential Shias, equally impressed, presented them with gifts, including rare copies of the Holy Quran. Shia Muslims saw the episode as confirmation of their faith; only the Shiahs were capable of such extreme devotion, of such a sacrifice. Naseem’s promise that they would visit Karbala without worldly means had seemingly been fulfilled.

Mainstream Sunni Muslims dismissed it as yet another example of Shiah aberration from the orthodox faith. More secular citizens saw it as flat-out evidence of insanity.

It makes you wonder what was going through Moses’ head when he and the Israelites were cornered at the Red Sea.….

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Adapted from “The Rhetoric of English India,” by Sara Suleri Goodyear; “Death in Islam: The Hawkes Bay Case,” by Akbar S. Ahmed; and “The Disappeared: How the fatwa changed a writer’s life,” by Salman Rushdie in The New Yorker magazine, September 17, 2012, page 52.