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10,054 illustrations — Lessons from history, biography, and world events
Two essential requirements emerge for realizing this ideal.
Yet the psalmist's reply contains crushing power: "Our God is in heaven; all that he pleased he has done." Consider the contrast Martin Geier illuminated with surgical precision.
How could the man who saw the descending dove and heard the voice proclaim 'This is My beloved Son' ever waver?
His counsel to leave the apostles unmolested was not born from sympathy with Christian truth, but from a shrewd political calculus: the Pharisees and Sadducees were locked in bitter theological combat over the resurrection, and these Galileans preaching *anastasis* (resurrection)...
Many people attribute their deliverance to fortune or their own skill, yielding only scattered praise to God.
The historical fulfillment is breathtaking: for three days the Cross was the occasion of their panic and despair, the apparent ruin of all their hopes.
The work of Christ in us and for us does not exempt us from work.
When Jesus enters the locked room where the disciples huddled 'for fear of the Jews,' He greets them: 'Peace be unto you!' This first peace addresses their terror—the dread that what they witnessed was mere phantom, a ghostly visitation.
At the base of those ancient fortifications lie five or six courses of massive, squared blocks, 'the wonders of the world yet; well jointed, well laid, well cemented.' These represent gold, silver, and precious stones—the solid verities of Christ proclaimed...
First, it expresses supreme contempt—the mighty Conqueror reduced His defeated enemies to mere grapes beneath His feet, utterly insignificant before His power.
His words, 'Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world!' are prophecy's swan-song, its final *Eureka!* uttered as it dies.
It refuses both the cynic's delight in exposing hidden corruption and the melancholic's despair at universal failure.
Yet Maclaren observes that "as they abode together and worked at their trade, there would be many earnest talks about the Christ, and these ended in both husband and wife becoming disciples." The mundane labor of their craft became the...
Critics who say 'Give me his ethics, keep his dogmas' commit a fatal severance that destroys both.
The juxtaposition reveals the animating principle of New Testament morality itself: devotion to God is the indispensable basis of all practical helpfulness to man, and conversely, practical helpfulness to man is the expression and manifestation of devotion to God.
He uses a striking geographical image: 'The springs lie close together up in the hills, the rivers may be parted by half a continent.' What begins as unity at the source becomes division at the mouth.
Exell's Victorian homiletic unpacks this indictment with surgical precision.
The branches do not draw strength from soil or seasonal rains; they depend utterly upon the living sap flowing from the vine's root system.
First comes the temporal: "the former rain and the latter rain" (Joel 2:23), granaries filled with wheat, vats overflowing with wine and oil.
The gifts are not separate from grace; they are its direct offspring, its cognates.
These heresy-hunters positioned themselves apart from the crowd at Peter's house, sitting near enough to observe yet far enough to signal their superiority over the provincial peasants.
The Greek word *skolops* suggests not a splinter but one of those hideous stakes used in ancient impalement—Paul describes himself as "quivering upon that tremendous torture." This is no minor inconvenience but a piercing affliction from God's own hand.
Maclaren observes that 'one coat of paint is not enough, it soon rubs off'—a homely image that captures how readily doctrinal knowledge slides from memory without constant reinforcement.
The prohibition is not against reasonable foresight, but against anxious foreboding, that wretched state in which a man is 'rent asunder' by care.
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