Sermon Illustrations on Providence
Background
How Did I Get Here?
In John Perkins’ memoir, Dream with Me, the civil rights leader describes how a life lived with God can change very suddenly, and what was seemingly impossible can become possible:
How in the world did I get here? The only answer I know to give is that these things can happen when you walk with God. It’s easy to look at a person—to see where he started and how far he has come—and think you know how the story will end. But I’ve learned what Saul learned on the road to Damascus: when God’s involved, everything can change in an instant.
You may think you know where you’re headed, but often God has a different plan—something “exceedingly abundantly above all that [you] ask or think” (Eph. 3:20 NKJV). Sometimes a light drizzle becomes a deluge. Other times you open your eyes to find yourself by still waters. Sometimes you hear thunder clapping along with the rain. Other times the clouds disappear so you can see a billion stars in the sky.
Living out our Belief in the Sovereignty of God
Because the results of God’s sovereignty are delayed, waiting remains an act of faith. We believe results will occur one day. By waiting on God, we affirm our belief in his providence. We trust his timetable. We hope in heaven. Waiting on God is inseparably bound to our belief in the sovereignty of God to bring about the good he promises.
…Waiting is often the application of many other, more abstract, biblical qualities of character. Hope, for instance, requires waiting. Faith is all about waiting. Patience and waiting are yoked together. Trust requires delayed gratification. In fact, run down your mental list of the fruit of the Spirit and see if waiting doesn’t play into every single one of them (see Gal. 5:22–23).
Wayne Stiles, Waiting on God, Baker Publishing Group, 2015, pp. 16-17.
Unlikely Providence
“When the plane leveled off at 14,500 feet, Joan Murray took a deep breath and jumped out the door. The bank executive from Charlotte, North Carolina, was enjoying her free fall through the air until she pulled the ripcord for her parachute and nothing happened. Just about then she had an extreme rush of adrenaline.
“But she didn’t panic – she knew she had a back up parachute. She was falling 120 miles per hour when she released the reserve chute. It opened just fine, but she lost her bearings and in her struggle to right herself she deflated the chute. While the chute briefly slowed her descent, she continued to fall at 80 miles per hour.
“She struck the earth with a violent blow shattered her right side and jarred the fillings from her teeth. She was barely conscious and her heart was failing. Just when it seemed things could not get much worse, she realized she had fallen into a mound of fire ants that didn’t appreciate her disturbing their solitude. All told they stung her about 200 times before the paramedics arrived.” [People’s Stories of Survival, 15]
It reminds you of the old “Hee-Haw” song, “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”
But things are not always as they seem. The doctors that treated Joan believe that the ants actually saved her life. They theorized that the stings of the ants shocked her heart enough to keep it beating!
Stories
Charlie Stoltzfus
One of my favorite stories about intercessory prayer comes from Tony Campolo. A prayer meeting was held for him just before he spoke at a Pentecostal college chapel service. Eight men took Tony to a back room of the chapel, had him kneel, laid their hands on his head, and began to pray. That’s a good thing, Tony wrote, except that they prayed a long time, and the longer they prayed, the more tired they got, and the more tired they got, the more they leaned on his head. “I want to tell you that when eight guys are leaning on your head, it doesn’t feel so good.”
To make matters worse, one of the men was not even praying for Tony. He went on and on praying for somebody named Charlie Stoltzfus: “Dear Lord, you know Charlie Stoltzfus. He lives in that silver trailer down the road a mile. You know the trailer Lord, just down the road on the right-hand side.” (Tony said he wanted to inform the pray-er that it was not necessary to furnish God with directional material.) “Lord, Charlie told me this morning he’s going to leave his wife and three kids. Step in and do something, God. Bring that family back together.”
Tony writes that he finally got the Pentecostal preachers off his head, delivered his message, and got in his car to drive home. As he drove onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike, he noticed a hitchhiker. I’ll let him tell it from here:
We drove a few minutes and I said: “Hi, my name’s Tony Campolo. What’s yours?” He said, “My name is Charlie Stoltzfus.” I couldn’t believe it!
I got off the turnpike at the next exit and headed back. He got a bit uneasy with that and after a few minutes he said, “Hey mister, where are you taking me?” I said, “I’m taking you home.” He narrowed his eyes and asked, “Why?”
I said, “Because you just left your wife and three kids, right?” That blew him away. “Yeah! Yeah, that’s right.” With shock written all over his face, he plastered himself against the car door and never took his eyes off me.
Then I really did him in as I drove right to his silver trailer. When I pulled up, his eyes seemed to bulge as he asked, “How did you know that I lived here?” I said, “God told me.” (I believe God did tell me) …
When he opened the trailer door his wife exclaimed, “You’re back! You’re back!” He whispered in her ear and the more he talked, the bigger her eyes got.
Then I said with real authority, “The two of you sit down. I’m going to talk and you two are going to listen!” Man, did they listen! … That afternoon I led those two young people to Jesus Christ.
Trusting In God’s Word & Providence
In 1933, as Hitler’s Nazi party rose to power in Germany, the Jewish artist Marc Chagall painted Solitude. In the foreground, a seated man sits wrapped in a tallit, or prayer shawl. His right hand supports his head in an attitude of contemplation, and his left arm embraces a large Torah scroll. At his side, a heifer seems to be playing a violin. In the background the city of Vitebsk—where Chagall was born and raised—is shrouded in darkness and watched over by an angel.
At the time he painted this, Chagall was working “obsessively” on a commission to illustrate the Old Testament while also keenly aware of the looming clouds of Nazi anti-Semitism. Indeed, one of the Nazis’ first examples of “degenerate” Jewish art was a painting by Chagall. In the midst of these unsettling political developments, Chagall drew on the Jewish tradition of deep, loving attention to the Scripture.
The violin-playing cow is an image of the imaginative, artistic meditation on the divine Word being practiced by the man cradling the Torah scroll. Why a cow? Because the Hebrew word hagah, like the Latinate English word ruminate, means both “to meditate” and also “to chew the cud.” David Jeffrey links Chagall’s painting to this trope, explaining that “by analogy with the peaceable heifer, a spiritually flourishing person is said to be one who meditates on the Word of God, day and night.”
One of the iconic Old Testament passages that relies on this wordplay is Psalm 1, where the blessed man “delight[s] in the law of the LORD, / and on his law he meditates day and night” (Ps 1:2). The result of this meditation is not just some kind of personal enrichment: the psalmist compares the person who ruminates on God’s Word to a tree “planted by streams of water / that yields its fruit in its season, / and its leaf does not wither” (Ps 1:3).
The result of scriptural rumination is fruit that blesses one’s place and community. The rooted life of the blessed man contrasts with “the wicked [who] . . . / are like the chaff that the wind drives away” (Ps 1:4). These chafflike fools are blown about by the latest fads and trends; in this way, they are like those with macadamized minds. A Christian image for healthy attention, then, might be this rooted tree—or a violin-playing heifer.
In Chagall’s painting, the meditative figure is not ignoring the events of his time and place in order to lose himself in solipsistic, irrelevant flights of fancy. Rather, he is feeding on the eternal truths most needed in this turbulent historical moment. As one of Chagall’s biographers notes, this painting is part of Chagall’s own response “to the omens heralding the destruction of the world that had nourished him.”
Crucially, in the background of the painting an angel—suggesting divine providence—is watching over human affairs even when they seem imponderably dark to human eyes. Chagall’s composition suggests that trust in Providence and an imaginative attention to the Word of God provide the proper perspective from which to view the events of our day. Chagall’s seated figure gestures toward a kind of contemplative politics, to use a phrase that may seem paradoxical.
Taken from Reading the Times by Jeffrey Bilbro. Copyright (c) 2021 by Jeffrey Lyle Bilbro. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com
Unlikely Providence
“When the plane leveled off at 14,500 feet, Joan Murray took a deep breath and jumped out the door. The bank executive from Charlotte, North Carolina, was enjoying her free fall through the air until she pulled the ripcord for her parachute and nothing happened. Just about then she had an extreme rush of adrenaline.
“But she didn’t panic – she knew she had a back up parachute. She was falling 120 miles per hour when she released the reserve chute. It opened just fine, but she lost her bearings and in her struggle to right herself she deflated the chute. While the chute briefly slowed her descent, she continued to fall at 80 miles per hour.
“She struck the earth with a violent blow shattered her right side and jarred the fillings from her teeth. She was barely conscious and her heart was failing. Just when it seemed things could not get much worse, she realized she had fallen into a mound of fire ants that didn’t appreciate her disturbing their solitude. All told they stung her about 200 times before the paramedics arrived.” [People’s Stories of Survival, 15]
It reminds you of the old “Hee-Haw” song, “If it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all.”
But things are not always as they seem. The doctors that treated Joan believe that the ants actually saved her life. They theorized that the stings of the ants shocked her heart enough to keep it beating!
Analogies
Fate Is Blind, Providence Has Eyes
Charles Spurgeon, the most popular preacher of nineteenth-century London, battled depression throughout his life. He said, “If God is in control, if his name is hallowed, then that means he is in control of my depression. Fate is blind; providence has eyes.”
Taken from Still Life by Gillian Marchenko Copyright (c) 2016, p.102 by Gillian Marchenko. Published by InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL. www.ivpress.com
Ignorance and Fear
Charles Spurgeon related a trip through the Lake District, when a dense fog descended on him and his fellow travelers, “we felt ourselves to be transported into a world of mystery where everything was swollen to a size and appearance more vast, more terrible, than is usual on this sober planet.” Little mountain ponds could have been great lakes. Descending into a valley, the rocks on either side of the trail looked like incredible cliffs and the path downward like an abyss. But in the morning, when the fog was gone, they could see that the path was safe and the rocks were only moderately sized. The road had been a steep but safe descent – nothing to fear.
In our ordinary lives, our ignorance makes our obstacles terrifying, but in the light of God’s truth and provision, they are nothing to be afraid of.
Adapted from Charles Spurgeon, Feathers for Arrows (1870)
Living out our Belief in the Sovereignty of God
Because the results of God’s sovereignty are delayed, waiting remains an act of faith. We believe results will occur one day. By waiting on God, we affirm our belief in his providence. We trust his timetable. We hope in heaven. Waiting on God is inseparably bound to our belief in the sovereignty of God to bring about the good he promises.
…Waiting is often the application of many other, more abstract, biblical qualities of character. Hope, for instance, requires waiting. Faith is all about waiting. Patience and waiting are yoked together. Trust requires delayed gratification. In fact, run down your mental list of the fruit of the Spirit and see if waiting doesn’t play into every single one of them (see Gal. 5:22–23).
Wayne Stiles, Waiting on God, Baker Publishing Group, 2015, pp. 16-17.
Which Way does the Mississippi Flow?
“Ask any school boy, ‘Which way does the Mississippi River flow?” He will say, ‘From north to south.’ If you have flown over the Mississippi there are times and places where the Mississippi River will flow north. There are times and places where the Mississippi River will flow due west, but it ultimately and finally flows south. So the elective purpose of God in Christ Jesus is frustrated, turned, twisted, but it is God’s purpose of the ages that the reign and kingdom shall belong to Him.
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