Loading...
10,045 illustrations — Lessons from history, biography, and world events
Exell's Victorian commentary on Proverbs 25:15 illuminates what seemed paradoxical to ancient minds: that meekness, courteousness, and kindness possess greater persuasive force than harshness, bitterness, or clamour.
SermonWise.ai generates complete sermon outlines for any passage across 17 theological traditions.
Consider two grave consequences: First, pride subjects a man to the imputation of folly.
Of all species of deception, self-deception proves most detrimental; it is like having a traitor within the fortress who betrays his country to the enemy.
The flattery here is not gentle commendation but *kelalah* (curse)—a loud, vaunting display that intrudes itself on all occasions with busy, demonstrative energy.
His affliction becomes a wall that separates the sufferer from all comfort.
The ruined city in Solomon's metaphor depicts precisely this condition.
The prophet identifies hands and knees as the body's most visible registers of fear and despair.
The term signifies the outward expression of exultation, especially in speech and declaration.
Joseph Exell's 1887 exposition reveals three vital truths about the present moment.
To gird oneself is to prepare for action, yet Maclaren expands this to something far richer: the faculty of bright imaginations about one's future course.
Everything depends upon the prevailing sentiment of the hour.
Acts 12:12 reveals that some believers retained their property, maintaining households with children and servants as before.
Exell observed a profound perversity in human judgment.
The cultivated tree is the joint product of human care and earth's fertility.
But the New Testament animates itself by love's voice: 'Though I have all boldness in Christ to enjoin thee ...
The vast region of human sorrow appears to most a dark and dreary desert.
The latter we enjoy now through faith and hope; but the former is present with us, the certain consequence and necessary attendant upon a mind truly virtuous and religious.
While all persons possess some sense of duty rooted deeply in the human heart, the constant strife between inclination and principle generates contradiction in conduct.
Love proves far more effective than logic in attaining the best ends.
Propriety demands three conditions: first, that things be done in their proper time; second, that they be kept to their proper use; third, that they be put in their proper place.
Consider the work of mortification—to pluck out our eyes, to chop off our hands, to cut off our feet.
Thus life appears utterly different to the young than to the aged—one face glory, the other sober melancholy.
Exell's Victorian scholarship illuminates this reciprocal dynamic across four dimensions.
Love is not something we indulge when we feel generous toward the worthy and attractive.