Sermon Illustrations

"LAMB OVER ME"

In his book “Eternity in their Hearts”, Don Richardson a Missionary writes of cultural compasses in other cultures and their language that point to one and only one person, Jesus, preparing the way for the Gospel to be heard.

He tells the story of Robert Morrison who landed in China in 1807 and began to translate the Scriptures into the Chinese language with the help of a Chinese man with a limited English vocabulary. Chinese uses more than 200 pictures to combine in different ways to make Chinese words. When they got to the word righteous, he asked how to translate it and when his Chinese helper wrote the word in Chinese, Robert Morrison saw him use two symbols. On top was a picture of a lamb and on the bottom was the symbol for I, first person singular. So when the Chinese were writing the word righteous, they were writing the symbols which mean the lamb over me. Jesus, the Lamb of God, spoke through the Chinese language and that became the cornerstone for Robert Morrison introducing them to Jesus, the lamb under whom you and I are found to be righteous.

This led him to study the language even more intently to discover other signs within their language and he found more than 120 other spiritually significant messages of the Gospel within the Chinese language. So Robert Morrison discovered these symbols within their own Chinese language and used them to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ.

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