Sermon Illustrations
Our Inheritance, Kept in a Safe Place
Clark Cothern, in a sermon titled “Joyfully Rescued,” talks about the inheritance promised by God to his children:
Mom kept saying, “After I’m gone, keep your eyes out for the gold.” My sister and I chalked this admonition up to a little memory loss. But, just in case, we kept our eyes open. As we sorted through Mom’s things shortly after she went to heaven. We looked under drawers, behind cabinets; anywhere we thought she might have hidden some gold, but we didn’t really expect to find any.
Then I went to Mom’s bank to get the life insurance policy from her safety deposit box. In a tiny privacy room, all by myself, I opened the long narrow metal box. Under the life insurance policy was a brown paper lunch bag. There was a rubber band wrapped around it which crumbled into tiny pieces because it was so old. I opened the crinkly paper sack. There were two, 3-inch long rolls of gold coins. I laughed out loud.
As you can imagine the contents of that lunch bag were extremely valuable. My sister and I used that money to help us prepare Mom’s house for market. That gold was still just as shiny as the day Mom had purchased it over 40 years earlier. And it was a lot more valuable than the day it had been purchased. It had been kept safe for my sister and me, as part of our inheritance. We hadn’t done anything to earn it and yet it now belonged to us.
Peter tells us in 1 Peter 1:4 that our spiritual inheritance, worth far more than gold, will one day be ours. Our inheritance will never decay or fade. It is growing more valuable the older we get. Jesus Christ did all the work for it and then banked it in heaven where he is keeping it safe.
Source: Clark Cothern, “Joyfully Rescued,” Sermon Podcast (September, 2019)