Logos.com
|
Bible
|
Blog
|
Forums
|
Sermons
|
WBSA

Rusty Russell

689 sermons

March 2010

This sermon has not been rated.

Link to this page▼

Find Sermons

Illustration

You Wear His Coat Well

Phil 3:17

Apologist and author Ravi Zacharias recounts a story found in Marie Chapian's book Of Whom the World Was Not Worthy (Bethany House, 1980). The book follows the Yugoslavian Christian church's suffering under a corrupt church heirarchy:

One day an evangelist by the name of Jakov arrived in a certain village. He commiserated with an elderly man named Cimmerman on the tragedies he had experienced and talked to him of the love of Christ. Cimmerman abruptly interrupted Jakov and told him that he wished to have nothing to do with Christianity. He reminded Jakov of the dreadful history of the church in his town, a history replete with plundering, exploiting, and indeed with killing innocent people.

"My own nephew was killed by them," he said and angrily rebuffed any effort on Jakov's part to talk about Christ. "They wear those elaborate coats and crosses," he said, "signifying a heavenly commission, but their evil designs and lives I cannot ignore."

Jakov, looking for an occasion to get Cimmerman to change his line of thinking, said, "Cimmerman, can I ask you a question? Suppose I were to steal your coat, put it on, and break into a bank. Suppose further that the police sighted me running in the distance but could not catch up with me. One clue, however, put them onto your track: they recognize your coat. What would you say to them if they came to your house and accused you of breaking into the bank?"

"I would deny it, " said Cimmerman.

"'Ah, but we saw your coat,' they would say," retorted Jakov. This analogy quite annoyed Cimmerman, who ordered Jakov to leave his home.

Jakov continued to return to the village periodically just to befriend Cimmerman, encourage him, and share the love of Christ with him. Finally one day Cimmerman asked, "How does one become a Christian?" Jakov taught him the simple steps of repentance for sin and of trust in the work of Jesus Christ and gently pointed him to the Shepherd of his soul. Cimmerman bent his knee on the soil with his head bowed and surrendered his life to Christ. As he rose to his feet, wiping his tears, he embraced Jakov and said, "Thank you for being in my life." And then he pointed to the heavens and whispered, "You wear His coat very well."

Sermon Details

Sermon Illustration

Welcome to Sermons.Logos.com!

Find sermons by typing words or passages into the Find box, e.g.:

faith
Eph 2:8-9
raising teenagers
topic:joy
humility type:illustration

Help on searching...
Contribute a sermon to share with others (requires free registration).

Please sign in or create a new account using the form on the right.

Sermons.Logos.com is a service provided by Logos Bible Software. Please send site feedback to sermons@logos.com.

Enter your search terms in the box above.

Please sign in to contribute.

Searching for Sermons & Illustrations

Basic Use

To perform a simple search for sermons and illustrations, type your search terms into the search box on the left and press enter. The sidebar will switch over to the search results tab and automatically load the first submission. To view more search results, simply scroll down. Additional results will automatically load into the bottom of the sidebar as you scroll.

hope
faith like a mustard seed

You can modify your search to only return results containing two or more of your terms by using the AND keyword. The OR keyword can be used to specify that you want results that may only match one of your terms. Use quotation marks to search for an exact phrase.

love AND patience
joy OR happiness
"walk with God"
joy AND "hard times"
(servant OR slave) AND (Jesus OR Christ)

Advanced Searches

Sermons.Logos.com also supports more advanced search syntax. Sermons are broken down into several sections, or fields:

author | The name of the contributor
title | The title of the submission
passage | Passages related to the submission
topic | Topics addressed by the submission, e.g.: forgiveness, marriage
tag | Tags attached to the submission, e.g.: men's retreat, Easter Sunday
type | 'sermon' or 'illustration'
language | The language the submission was written in, e.g.: en, es, ko
content | The full text of the submission

By default a search will look for matches in any field. You can also specify which field you want to search by inserting the name of the field directly before your search term.

title:faith
tag:"Father's day" AND type:illustration
topic:"John the Baptist"

Bible references are treated as special search terms. Sermons.Logos.com understands verse ranges, and will match submissions that contain any references within the range you specify, not just the exact reference. If you search for John 3:15-17, you will also get results with John 3:16. A Bible reference is specified by using angle brackets, such as <Eph 2:8>. If you forget to use the angle brackets in a simple query, don't worry, it will still be recognized as a Bible reference.

Genesis 1:1
<Eph 2:1-9>
passage:<Proverbs 3:5-6>

Name:
Email address
Password:
Confirm

Name:
Email address
Password:
Confirm

Sign in with your Logos.com account

Sign in with your Logos.com account