Sermon Illustrations

My maternal grandfather who was a devout Hindu by birth did his schooling at a Missionary school in the state of Haryana in the North of New Delhi, India. He had learned about Christ and been invited to accept Him as His personal Savior but shrugged the opportunity. After qualifying as a pathological technician he started to work at a hospital. Being a bachelor, he lived across the rail tracks opposite to the hospital and walked daily to work. In the 1940s on one of those early morning walks to the hospital he encountered a goods train standing on the tracks waiting for the green signal. As he was getting late to work, he took the risk to cross it by going under the area where the carriages joined one another. As he was about to cross to the other side the train started to move. If he ever embarked on returning or crossing to the other side, he would be sliced in half by the wheels of the train carriages. In a spur of the moment he decided to lie down between the tracks. As he lay in fear and trembling between the rail tracks while the train ran over him, he sensed an overwhelming presence of God and made a decision that if he came out alive from this event, he would surrender his life to God and be devoted to Christ alone. After the train had passed away, numerous onlookers surrounded him to see this awesome incident of a dead man come alive. He had already surrendered his life to Christ and pursued to walk the Christian life. He died in the early 1990s as the Director for Sunday school at a Methodist church in Delhi.