Sermon Illustrations
Inspired by His Presence
President Theodore Roosevelt, a charismatic figure who made quite an impression on people. One journalist, William Allen White, wrote of his first meeting with Roosevelt in 1897:
He sounded in my heart the first trumpet call of the new time that was to be.… I had never known such a man as he, and never shall again. He overcame me. And in the hour or two we spent that day at lunch, he poured into my heart such vision, such ideals, such hopes, such a new attitude toward life and patriotism and the meaning of things, as I had never dreamed men had.… After that, I was his man.
If a mere mortal can have such an affect on another, how much more our Lord? If we will spend time with him in prayer and in Scripture, we too will find our hearts filled with vision, with hopes, with a new attitude toward life and the meaning of things, and afterwards we too will say with thankfulness, "I am his."
Source:
Thomas Bailey and David Kennedy, The American Pageant, ninth edition (D.C. Heath, 1991) p. 676