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22 illustrations for sermon preparation
The tabernacle in which our soul dwells is a most frail and complicated machine.
Exell's *Biblical Illustrator* offers three principles for this conquest.
Our Lord Himself uttered these same words when His soul was overwhelmed with grief in the prospect of His agonies, bloody sweat, and sacrificial death (John 12:27).
The prophet identifies hands and knees as the body's most visible registers of fear and despair.
First, some say, "I lack the dramatic conversion others profess." Yet Elohim has brought many sons to glory through utterly different paths.
The prophet envisions a transformation so complete that the wilderness itself becomes verdant, streams break forth in the desert, and the lame leap like deer.
The possessions of the world often lighten life's sorrows and increase its enjoyments; the Word of Yahweh itself recognizes prosperity as a subject for gratitude.
De Witt Talmage, D.D., identified this threefold promise—banished crutch, loosed tongue, and waters in the wilderness—as Yahweh's comprehensive restoration.
For forty years, the prophet Isaiah had testified to a truer understanding of Elohim, warning that these supports were *rotten* and would fail at the crucial hour.
The prophet had learned to recognize God's messengers in natural phenomena—as he wrote, the winds themselves are messengers of Elohim (Psalm 104:4).
To ransom (*lutroo*) means to redeem or free from captivity by paying an equivalent—to rescue from danger and death, to deliver from an enemy's possession through warfare or purchase by gold.
The mirage—from the Latin *mirari* (to wonder at)—deceives the thirsty traveler with an optical illusion: shimmering water that recedes as one approaches.
We find in Scripture the recorded history and experience of God's people, permitting us to compare our own experience with theirs.
As the proverb reminds us, "The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind to powder." Sennacherib's parricides fled to Ararat in Central Armenia, where Armenian historians trace the Sassimian and Arzrunian tribes from them.
"Where are the gods of these places?" (Isaiah 36:19).
Had the Assyrian king conquered Jerusalem, Jewish nationhood would have perished—absorbed into heathenism like the ten northern tribes before them.
When Rabshakeh addressed Hezekiah's officials in this diplomatic tongue, his words carried the smooth insinuation of a seasoned negotiator.
Shepherds move constantly in pursuit of fresh pasture for their flocks, making the shepherd's tent the perfect emblem of life's transience and uncertainty.
King Hezekiah's near-death experience reveals what many never discover: the difference between mere existence and genuine life.
We entrust our fellows with sums large and small, yet human confidence repeatedly fails.
First, the lost traveler in an endless desert—surrounded by bleaching bones of former victims, the monotonous swells of sand-heaps stretching to the horizon, no landmarks, no guides.
This is the exact location where King Ahaz had rejected Jehovah's help centuries before, preferring Assyrian alliance instead (Isaiah 7:3).
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