Synonyms: replica, copy, representation, mock-up, dummy, imitation, double, duplicate, lookalike, reproduction, prototype, stereotype, archetype, type, version, style, ideal, paragon, perfect example, specimen, perfect specimen, fashion model, supermodel, mannequin, sitter, poser, subject, artist's model, photographic model, design, mark, configuration, variety, kind, sort, original, original design, exclusive, toy, miniature, facsimile, prototypical, prototypal, archetypal, illustrative, perfect, exemplary, classic, flawless, faultless, consummate, impeccable
Antonyms: deficient, imperfect
Showing 1526 to 1550 of 5000 results
Sermon
Leonard Mann
... part of the message tonight. The Christian gospel is not only demandingly ethical, it is also graciously ethical. We discover God’s gracious offer of personal transformation in and through Jesus Christ. The Athenians wanted to hear a new thing. Paul both declared it and illustrated it in his own being: "If any man is in Christ he is a new creation." That is the new thing. That is the thing which is really new about the doctrine he was proclaiming. "Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become ...
Sermon
Allan J. Weenink
... The goal must be firmly fixed, the desire must excite and stimulate, the plan and purpose must have meaning. Running with patience means keeping a long range strategy in order to prevent burning out on the course. The classic story of the tortoise and the hare illustrates the point. The tortoise won the race because he ran it with patience. The hare did not take the race seriously, was not conditioned for it, was careless and casual about its importance, and had no deep desire to do his best. To his chagrin ...
Sermon
Harold Warlick
... would tell us that she felt God had told her to cut off her offending hand and she had obeyed. Now we categorize these last two cases as "sick." We do not consider the businessmen in the first case to be "sick." Yet all three cases graphically illustrate what happens when religion gets "sick." Actually, the attitudes of the men in the first example are the most dangerous of all. You see it is one thing to allow our religion to become harmful to ourselves. It is quite another thing to possess a religion ...
Sermon
Harold Warlick
... to make them feel that they were worth his time and his care. Jesus knew that you do not affirm anyone or anything by merely giving some money. No, the higher form of love is to give people and things your time and care. What remains tragic about the illustration of my mother and me handing out the Christmas baskets is the fact that we never again went back to that little wooden shack. Oh, several times when I was driving around town I would drive past it and wonder if the little old woman still lived there ...
Sermon
Harold Warlick
... I want us to examine our own personalities in the light of scriptural declarations. Are you graceful? Are you obnoxious? Are you sensitive to the needs of others? Or are you self-centered and narrow? In the 4th chapter of First Samuel, there is a graphic illustration of the insensitive person. At the time of this chapter, the most important element in Israelite religion was the ark of God. The ark was symbolic of God’s presence among his people. For forty years the nation of Israel had been judged by a ...
Sermon
Barbara Brokhoff
... to put it in! Let me ask "If a letter should come to your postman, addressed simply: God’s Man (or Woman), the name of your town, state, and zip code, would it occur to your postman to put the letter in your box?" This illustration is another way of asking: Do your priorities say "Shibboleth" or "Siboleth?" OUR UNCONSCIOUS REACTIONS GIVE US AWAY The late E. Stanley Jones says that there is "such a thing as having such a sound experience of conversion to Jesus Christ that even your unconscious reactions ...
Sermon
Barbara Brokhoff
... something solid. What are the anchors for your life when the crisis comes? Do you have any absolutes that hold when the storms begin to blow every direction? Every Christian needs to sit down and sort out what he actually believes for sure relative to his faith. Let me illustrate. I don’t have too many absolutes, things for which I’d stake my life - and yours might not have to be the same as mine - but I could not attempt to live a life of faith without something to hold on to as an anchor. Let me name ...
1533. Cross-Bearing
Matthew 16:21-28
Sermon
Jerry L. Schmalemberger
... its own sake. Life is no brief candle for me. It is the sort of splendid torch which I got hold of for a Moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before turning it over to future generations."* (*A Treasury of Sermon Illustrations, by Charles L. Wallis, Abindgon Press.) Our lives become soft and flabby, when they could be an adventure. We become earth-bound when we could be reaching for the stars. Let’s be challenged and invited today by this Scripture: "Then Jesus said to his disciples ...
Sermon
Jerry L. Schmalemberger
... , and that’s the question he posed to the religious leaders of his day. The crowd answered Jesus by saying the son who said, "No," and then changed his mind and did the work was better than the other son. Jesus said, "That’s right," and he illustrated that by saying that the tax collectors and the harlots of the day would go into the kingdom of God before the Jewish religious leaders to whom he was speaking. This parable was told for a special reason. Jesus was saying that the Jewish leaders were like ...
Sermon
Louis H. Valbracht
... of this but without apprehending it. Having intervened in many countries in the supposed interest of its nationals, having extended generous aid, political and financial, the United States is the most vilified nation on the globe, simply because it proffered aid." He illustrates this by developments in Indonesia and Latin American and in Europe. Why, then, does the Foreign Aid Program continue and even expand again? The major part of the answer is the bureaucracy which has been built up under it. There are ...
Sermon
Louis H. Valbracht
... is saying, literally, is that each of us has the obligation of justifying the fact that he’s going on living. He holds up the very real possibility that we may be dead, even though we are going through the physical motions of life. Perhaps we may illustrate what we mean by an incident in the life of a professor who was walking on the grounds of a great European university, and one of the students was walking with him. The student had been attracted there by the reputation of the university, by the sense ...
1537. Paul Today
Acts 17:16-34
Sermon Aid
T. A. Kantonen
... enjoying the satisfaction of knowing, "I did it my way." I still remember vividly the advice given by the school superintendent at my graduation from high school. "Blaze your own trail," he said, "clear your own plantation," and he used the illustration of Ty Cobb ferociously stealing bases without waiting for someone else to advance him. Self-reliance, we were told, is the key to success. American religious thought has been cast in this mold from the beginning. Its original determinants were the legalism ...
1538. Numbered Hairs
Matthew 10:1-42
Sermon
Herchel H. Sheets
... word for word, but also followed the Congressman around for ten minutes trying to give him additional information for which he had not asked. He said that experience caused him to suspend the test for about two weeks. But the other extreme was illustrated by the response of a taxi driver who said that he did not know the Bill of Rights was lost.3 There are so many opportunities for ignorance, and as the knowledge and population explosions continue, those opportunities increase. There is a multitude ...
1539. Minute Accounting
Matthew 12:22-37
Sermon
Herchel H. Sheets
... that is pure and clean, and may be as words set on our lips by God himself. Then we shall not have to fear the evidence they give in at the judgment, for they will be words of righteous and redeeming influence. 1. W. E. Sangster. The Craft Of Sermon Illustration, p. 42. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press (copyright 1950 by W. L. Jenkins). 2. Quoted by William Barclay in The Gospel Of Matthew, Vol. II, p. 52. Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1957, 1958. 3. William Shakespeare. Hamlet, Act III, Scene 3.
Sermon
Herchel H. Sheets
... attention to that speck. Total blindness is not indicated here. One sees well enough the speck in the other person’s eye. But because of cultivated farsightedness, one fails to see an even larger foreign object in one’s own eye. When Jesus used this humorous illustration of a person looking around a log to see a speck, it was not, of course, specks and logs and eyes which concerned him. He was thinking of studied indifference to faults in one’s own life and of concentration on the faults in others ...
1541. Ghosts - 1951
Ephesians 6:10-20
Sermon
Kent Moorehead
... , and religion for the most part are engaged in riveting the chains of ghosts upon us. Only here and there do a few perceive that true education, genuine culture and the religion of Jesus should rescue us from this dumb dominion and give us life. To illustrate, suppose we begin with so trivial a thing as dress. In tracing the marks of the ghost grip, and avoiding the bromidic criticism of women’s clothing, let us consider man’s attire, commonly supposed to be so rational. Why does the being called a ...
Sermon
Kent Moorehead
It is perfectly possible to tell a lie without saying anything untrue. As a matter of fact, the most effective liars are those who never deliberately say anything that is not so; they simply tell a piece of the truth and refuse to tell all of it. Let me illustrate the lying power of partial truth. I know a man who, with two other men, deliberately planned to get a fourth man in a particular situation where he would be utterly at the mercy of the three men. It would then be possible for them to kill their ...
Sermon
Leonard Mann
... can trust him. Remember Abraham? He was called to go into a land that God would show him. Abraham did not know where he was going; but he knew with whom, and this was enough. I suppose there are two ways of walking into tomorrow. Let me illustrate. I saw two blind men, each walking along the main street of town. One groped his way, arms outstretched in wild motions of search, his feet shuffling tentatively as though they mistrusted one another. The other man strode, a spring in his step, white cane tapping ...
Sermon
Leonard Mann
... bear met him; or went into the house and leaned his hand against the wall, and a serpent bit him." Wilder was right; we do indeed walk on a thin edge of danger. This fact is most apparent to most of us; sooner or later we can assemble many personal illustrations of the truth of it. Job, in the midst of his grave afflictions, went so far as to say at one point: "Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward" (Job 5:7). I know it seems sometimes that almost nothing works out right, that we are hounded ...
Sermon
Leonard Mann
... anywhere as it does from the bottom. I’m saying: Act on the good things you wish for. John Wesley gave us some good advice on Christian living when he said: If you do not have faith, act as though you do until it comes, and it will. Let me illustrate. Here is a church with half its pews empty on Sunday morning, and all the people say they wish the attendance were better and they wonder why it isn’t. Well, if everybody who has sometimes said, "I wish we had better attendance," and "Why don’t we?" would ...
Sermon
Jon L. Joyce
These two virtues, faith and obedience, are very closely related. Each one is incomplete without the other. In Abraham’s life and work, he illustrates these virtues admirably. When God called him to leave his home where he had lived for 70 years and go out to another land, the land of Canaan, many miles away, "by faith he obeyed." (Genesis 11:9) And when God told Abraham to offer up his dearly beloved Son, ...
1547. We are Not Simply "Now" People
Deuteronomy 26:1-15
Illustration
Jon L. Joyce
... down through the Old and New Testaments and the history of the Church is a part of our "now" story. That whole history looks down upon us, as it were, and we are called to remember it and to be alert to the past from which we were hewn. An illustration that points to this idea involves Napoleon. He is reputed to have been one of the world’s champion leaders of men. He could, it is said, inspire people as few men have been able to do. By this gift, Napoleon rose from a general in the French Republican Army ...
1548. Seek God's Will
Matthew 17:1-13
Sermon
Jon L. Joyce
... God’s will for our lives? A good answer has been given - do what is in harmony with the word of God, the Spirit of God, and the providence of God. The providence of God is revealed usually by closed and open doors. One of Paul’s experiences illustrates this. When the door closed for any further preaching in Asia Minor, then the door opened in Macedonia, when he had the vision and the voice saying, "Come over into Macedonia and help us." He entered that door and later went on to Rome, but not until he ...
Sermon
Jon L. Joyce
... or tends to the physical needs of the poor and oppressed, simply to get them off our middle class, gleaming hands, we are substituting for the real thing - proclamation of a relationship with Christ (Vertical) and with ourselves (Horizontal). Further illustrations of succumbing to cheap substitutions in ministry abound in every parish: sending the church flowers, every once in a while, to the parish’s elderly shut-ins, but not visiting them and developing relationship with them; insisting that there be ...
Sermon
Bill Bouknight
... . Isn't that what restoration is supposed to look like in the Christian church? I have a friend named Blanche who grew up during the days of Great Depression. She has written a delightful book about her experiences. Let me use one of Blanche's stories to illustrate ration. When she was nine years old, it was her job to take a turn washing and drying the dishes. On one particular Saturday noon she was laboring at this task when she got a bright idea. Instead of putting the dishes away and later having to ...
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