Stages in the Development of Expository Messages

  1. Selecting the Passage
  2. Studying the Passage
  3. Discovering the Exegetical Idea
  4. Analyzing the Exegetical Idea
  5. Formulating the Homiletical Idea
  6. Determining the Sermon’s Purpose
  7. Deciding How to Accomplish This Purpose
  8. Outlining the Sermon
  9. Filling in the Sermon Outline, p. 97

New Concepts

Repetition

Restatement

Explanation

Definition

Factual information

Quotations

Narration

Illustrations

7
 Making Dry Bones Live

Outlines serve as skeletons of thought, and in most sermons, as in most bodies, the skeleton will not be completely hidden. We ought not put the outline on vulgar display, however, as if the skeleton were “Exhibit C, Victim of Starvation.” The most effective means of hiding the bare bones of a sermon is not by disposing of the skeleton but by covering it with flesh. Supporting material is to the outline what skin is to bones or walls are to the frame of a house.

Stage 9 Fill in the outline with supporting materials that explain, prove, apply, or amplify the points.

An audience does not respond to abstract ideas, nor have many people ever been moved to faith by reading an outline of Romans. If an outline remains undeveloped, therefore, an audience can miss its meaning and remain unconvinced. As the sermon unfolds, listeners raise several questions: “I wonder what he means by that?” “What evidence does she have for that statement?” “Sounds interesting, but how would this work out in my life?” “I didn’t catch that. Would you say that again?” To amplify, explain, prove, or apply your ideas and make them understandable and appealing, you use a variety of supporting materials.

Restatement

We have already talked about restatement during our discussion of transitions. Restatement, saying the same thing in different words, is used in other places in your sermon. Restatement serves at least two purposes. First, it helps you make a concept clear. Listeners, unlike readers, must get what you say when you say it. A reader who is confused by what she is reading can flip back a few pages and pick up the author’s flow of thought. But listeners have no such option. If at first they don’t understand you, then unless you say it again in other words, the listeners are lost.

Restatement differs from repetition. Repetition says the same thing in the same words; restatement says the same thing in different words. Repetition may profitably be used throughout the sermon like a refrain to reinforce a major idea, but the skillful preacher learns to restate a point several times in different ways. Restatement resembles the blinking cursor on the computer. It shows listeners where they are. Restatement is like marching in place. It does not have forward movement, but it is part of the parade. It is saying the same thing in different words.

Clovis G. Chappell employs restatement in his introduction to a sermon on the woman taken in adultery (John 8:1–11). “The scholars are uncertain as to where in the sacred record this story belongs. Some think that it does not belong at all. From certain of the ancient manuscripts it is omitted. However, speaking not as a scholar but merely as a Bible reader, I am sure that it does really belong. Here I feel is a true story. If it is not true, it is one from which the truth itself might learn. Not only is this story true, but in my judgment it is factual. It is the record of an event that actually took place. It would have taken a superb genius indeed to have invented a story so true to life. Certainly it is consistent with what we know about the scribes and the Pharisees; it is yet more consistent with what we know about Jesus himself.”1

All that Clovis Chappell is saying in this paragraph of thought is “I think this story really happened.”

Peter Marshall emphasizes a point through restatement in his sermon “The Art of Moving Mountains”:

I am sure that each of you has read this statement many times:

Prayer Changes Things

You have seen it painted on posters which adorn the walls of our Sunday school rooms.

You have seen it stamped on little metal plates,

read it in the Bible,

heard it from the pulpit, oh, so many times.

But do you believe it?

Do you actually, honestly, believe that prayer changes things?

Have you ever had prayer change anything for you?

Your attitudes

your circumstances

your obstacles

your fears?2

Restatement, then, makes your concepts clear. Listeners may not get the meaning of your point when you say it for the first time, but when you restate it in different words, that can cause them to say, “Oh, I see what you mean.”

Restatement serves a second purpose: it also impresses an idea on the listeners’ mind. If you say something once, it can be ignored, but if you repeat it several times, it will influence a hearer’s thoughts and feelings. Advertisers invest millions of dollars to restate their ideas on radio, on television, and in magazines. You need to develop that skill as well.

Definition and Explanation

A definition establishes limits. It sets down what must be included and excluded by a term or statement. When we think of definitions, we usually think of dictionaries where we find terse, quick explanations of a word.

Explanation, like definition, also sets boundaries, but it may do so by amplifying on how ideas relate to one another or what an idea implies. Notice how Earl F. Palmer explains what is meant by the Greek word eros:

Eros is love that is earned, love that is won from us. It is not the instinctive love that we have for our parents or our children, our family or our social or racial structure. It is not the kind of love we have for something like wisdom or mankind. It is love earned from us because of the compelling excellence of the person or thing or reality. It is the love of beauty, the love of power, the love of strength.3

Definitions and explanations work in a variety of ways. We usually define a term or idea by placing it in a broad class of things of which it is a part. At the same time, however, we must show how it differs from other things in that class. Classification, therefore, explains both similarities and differences. Palmer says, “Eros is love [the broad class of which it is a part] that is earned, love that is won from us [how it differs from other kinds of love].”

Sometimes we define and explain through synonyms. A synonym works, however, only if it touches listeners’ previous experience and makes them understand and feel the meaning intended. Presumably everyone knows what cults are; but perhaps they don’t know in the particular way we want, so we may say, “The cults are the unpaid bills of the church.”4

Comparison and contrast also help us develop and explain ideas. Palmer used both in his explanation of eros.

Illustrations, too, help us to explain. Ray C. Stedman did this when he asked in a sermon, “What do we mean when we say a thing is holy? Look at your Bible and it says, ‘Holy Bible.’ What makes it holy? The land of Israel is called, ‘The Holy Land’ and the city of Jerusalem is called, ‘The Holy City.’ Why?” Then he answers, “There is a quality about all three which they share in common. They all belong to God. The Bible is God’s book; Israel is God’s land; Jerusalem is God’s city—they are God’s property! That is why they are holy; they belong to God.”

Explanation proves to be more difficult if you do not know your audience. The more familiar you are with a subject, the less aware you may be of a congregation’s ignorance of it. Most people in the pews live in a different intellectual world from yours. Indeed, they support you financially so that you can study what they cannot. You must not assume that your listeners immediately understand what you are talking about. You owe them a clear explanation of exactly what you mean. It is obvious that we should not use jargon or language that is unnecessarily abstract. If you must use theological language, you should define every important term in language the audience understands. Certainly it is better to define too many terms than too few. In explaining the relationships and implications of ideas, you should know the explanation yourself so clearly that no vagueness exists in your mind. Then you should work through the steps in the explanation so that they come in a logical or psychological order. A mist in the pulpit can easily become a fog in the pew.

Factual Information

Facts consist of observations, examples, statistics, and other data that may be verified apart from the speaker. You make a factual statement when you declare, “Greek is a rich and varied language having several words for love. But only two of these words, philia and eros, exerted much influence in Greek literature or thought in the first century.” If your listeners cared to do so, they could verify the accuracy of that statement by checking the words the Greeks used for love. In the expository sermon observations about the content of a passage are factual because hearers can see for themselves what the Bible says.

Much that parades as fact is opinion in disguise. “As a matter of fact,” a preacher says, “the greatest threat to the morality of America is the television set.” Of course that is not a matter of fact at all, only a matter of opinion. That opinion may or may not be valid, depending on the facts. Facts, of course, are stupid things until they are brought into relationship with one another and conclusions are drawn from them. Opinions, on the other hand, are just as stupid unless they are built on facts. The expositor, like any ethical speaker, needs to know the facts and be sure of their validity. Facts not only help the listener understand, but when used correctly, they secure respect for the speaker.

Statistics are a special form of facts that enable us to survey a large amount of territory very quickly. They are particularly appealing to citizens in a numbers-conscious society. Indeed, the American appetite for statistics seems insatiable, and statisticians crank out an unending supply, ranging from the number of hours an average family watches TV to the percentage of unhappy marriages in our culture. This allegiance to numbers has created its own pitfalls for the innocent—and opportunities for the dishonest. An air of certainty hangs over the decimal point or the fractionalized percentage, even where measurement is unknowable or absurd. A classic illustration is a report made years ago that one third of all women students at Johns Hopkins University had married faculty members. The percentage was accurate. Johns Hopkins had only three women students at the time, and one of them married a faculty member. The statistics were accurate, but the statement is misleading. Preachers eager to win their point may be particularly susceptible to the unsupported statistic. One evangelist reported, “I read not long ago that 50 percent of heavy-metal groups practice devil worship and witchcraft, and I believe the figure is rising each day.” Who counted? Who was counted? When? Where?

When statistics do enter a sermon, they should be as simple as possible without sacrificing accuracy. Round numbers are usually sufficient. While an accountant might be impressed with the information that in 1950 the population of Chicago was 3,620,962, most of us will find the figure “a little over three and a half million” easier to grasp. As we work with statistics, data can be made meaningful and vivid by comparing them to things within the experience of the audience. In describing the temple of Diana in Ephesus, we might say, “It was 180 feet wide, over 375 feet long, with columns that towered 60 feet in height,” and then add, “That temple was wider and longer than a football field including the end zones, and the columns were taller than a five-story building.” A speaker made understandable the small size of an electron by first giving the decimal fraction, which was incomprehensible, and then adding: “If an electron were increased in size till it became as large as an apple, and a human being grew larger in the same proportion, that person could hold the entire solar system in the palm of his hand and would have to use a magnifying glass in order to see it.” Wow!

Quotations

We introduce quotations to support or expand a point for two reasons: impressiveness and authority. When we discover that someone else has stated the idea more effectively than we can, we use the other person’s words. James S. Stewart introduces a sermon on Isaiah 5:30 with a snatch of a phrase from Robert Browning: “Of all the doubts which, as Browning puts it, can ‘rap and knock and enter in our soul,’ by far the most devastating is doubt of the ultimate purpose of God.” Stewart develops his introduction with a series of other quotes, all selected because of the power of their wording. He says:

That is precisely the doubt which is lying like an appalling weight on multitudes of lives to-day. They would think twice before subscribing to Tennyson’s faith:

Yet I doubt not thro’ the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widen’d with the process of the suns.

“Where is any evidence of such a purpose?” they want to ask.

. . . So they are back where Ecclesiastes was. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” What is the use, cried Thomas Hardy, of all your prayers, you praying people, when you have nothing better to pray to than

The dreaming, dark, dumb Thing

That turns the handle of this idle Show?

“A bad joke”—that was Voltaire’s final verdict on life. “Ring down the curtain,” said the dying actor, “the farce is done.”5

There are many ways to talk about the place pain plays in our lives. A preacher sums up one perspective by quoting words more impressive than his own: “Pain plants the flag of reality in the fortress of a rebel heart.”

Anchoring a point with some wording that digs into the mind is probably the major reason preachers turn to quotations in sermons. When we give credit for that kind of quote, we do so primarily for ethical reasons.

We also include quotations to gain authority. In this case, when we give credit for what we quote, we do so because the person who said it is in a better position to speak than we are. Ernest T. Campbell does this in speaking of times when the seeming futility of what we do causes us to draw back from involvement in social action. Campbell reports:

I was struck the other day by Leonard Woolf’s view of his life’s work. “I see clearly,” he said, “that I have achieved practically nothing. The world today and the history of the human anthill during the past 5–7 years would be exactly the same as it is if I had played ping pong instead of sitting on committees and writing books and memoranda. I have therefore to make a rather ignominious confession that I must have in a long life ground through between 150,000 and 200,000 hours of perfectly useless work.”6

We also quote others because they are in a better position to know the facts or interpret them or because the audience would be more likely to accept their evaluation. Who says something makes a difference. Quoting a fundamentalist preacher on the importance of proclaiming God’s judgment resembles quoting a Muslim on the virtues of the Qur’an. He is expected to take up that cause. It is much more arresting to quote John Steinbeck on the subject. In his Travels with Charley, he describes a Sunday visit to a New England church. The minister delivered a no-nonsense fire-and-brimstone sermon. The noted author reflects favorably on the experience:

For some years now, God has been a pal to us, practicing togetherness, and that causes the same emptiness a father does playing softball with his son. But this Vermont God cared enough about me to go to a lot of trouble kicking the Hell out of me. He put my sins in a new perspective. Whereas they had been small and mean and nasty and best forgotten, this minister gave them some size and bloom and dignity. I hadn’t been thinking very well of myself for some years, but if my sins had this dimension, there was some pride left. I wasn’t a naughty child but a first-rate sinner, and I was going to catch it.7

At other times an expert is better qualified to speak with authority on a subject. D. M. Baillie calls in a historian, T. R. Glover, to demonstrate that early Christians possessed an intellectual quality in their faith:

Dr. T. R. Glover, who was such an authority on that period [the early centuries A.D.], tells us that one reason why Christianity conquered the world was because it did better thinking than the rest of the world. It not only knew better how to live and how to die: it also knew better how to think. It “out-thought” the world. Here is a deeply interesting passage: “The Christian read the best books, assimilated them, and lived the freest intellectual life the world had. Jesus had set him free to be true to fact. There is no place for an ignorant Christian. From the very start every Christian had to know and to understand, and he had to read the Gospels, he had to be able to give a reason for his faith. They read about Jesus, and they knew him, and they knew where they stood. . . . Who did the thinking in that ancient world? Again and again it was the Christian. He outthought the world.”8

Authorities must carry credentials. Several questions should be asked about experts to establish competence:

  1. Does experience or training qualify them to speak with authority on this subject?
  2. Is the testimony based on firsthand knowledge?
  3. Is the authority prejudiced? Prejudiced authorities do not inspire trust because they tend to look with favor on evidence supporting their opinions and to overlook the rest. Prejudiced authorities speaking against their bias can, of course, make an excellent witness. An agnostic or atheist speaking on behalf of Christianity would be strong support because he is expected to speak against it.
  4. How does the audience regard the testimony? Do your listeners know the witness? Do they respect her? When an obscure individual is used as an authority, we should tell the audience what qualifies that person to speak to the issue.9

Quotes should be used sparingly. Sermons ought not sound like term papers. As a general rule quotes should be brief. Long quotations often become unclear and hinder communication. Sometimes a longer quote may be paraphrased and then a few important sentences from the quotation read directly to the audience.

Introduce your quotations into the sermon with a touch of freshness. It requires little effort to draw in a quote with “Spurgeon said,” “Paul wrote,” or “the Bible says.” More thought is demanded but more accomplished if we set them up: “Written boldly into the Bible is this phrase . . .” “Paul felt keenly that . . .” “This is what Charles Dickens was trying to tell us when he observed . . .” “You can see the significance of those words embedded in verse 10 . . .”

Narration

When we gossip, we gossip not about ideas but about people. When popular newsmagazines such as Time handle complex subjects, such as the economy or political upheaval in China, they do so in part by featuring the people involved. Narration within a sermon describes the individuals and events embedded in biblical accounts. Every passage has its people—sometimes they stand out in the open laughing, cursing, plotting or praying, and at other times they play hide-and-seek and we must look for them. In every text, though, there is always somebody writing and somebody reading. Pull aside a doctrine and you’ll find personalities. For example, grace does not exist in cold storage in heaven. There is only someone giving grace and another receiving it.

The men and women in Galatia never thought of themselves as “legalists.” They felt they were devoted to the Old Testament and probably could not figure out why Paul was so upset with them. The Holy Spirit knew the value of narration when he filled the Scriptures with it, and Jesus demonstrated the impact of narration in the parables he told.

You can use narration in a sermon to supply background by filling in the history, the setting, or the actions and spotlighting the personalities involved. John Hercus allows us to live with David as he wrote Psalm 24:

David sat up straight, stretched his arms and yawned. It had been a day of rehearsing, going over the whole processional routine with the musicians, the singers, and the ballet. The score and the choreography were well advanced, and David was more than satisfied. The psalm was good—short, clear, well-suited to the occasion. Hm-m-m-m-m . . . that was a choice phrase about “ascend the hill of the Lord . . . stand in His holy place.” Very good. It would make a fine background for work with the cymbals and trumpets and chorus. And the ballet would have splendid chances, under his leadership, to express their rising feeling of spiritual drama.

And those four conditions of entry into the holy place—they were just right. Terse, compact, neat. Clean hands, pure heart, no accent on trashy values (that’s really what he meant by “does not lift up his soul to what is false”) and no cheating or being deceitful. Yes, indeed, that checks a man out as fully and completely as you could wish.

Clean hands . . . like his own clean hands . . .

Suddenly a memory flashed into his mind. A memory of washing, washing, washing those “clean” hands of his, trying to scrub away a bloody thing that could not be undone. How did it happen? Oh yes . . . because of Michal.10

Narration takes on energy when your verbs and nouns paint pictures in your listeners’ minds. A different viewpoint often brings freshness to an oft-told account. How did the woman taken in adultery or the woman at the well think of Jesus when they first met him? In the epistles Paul pictures an objector jumping up to argue with him: “What advantage . . . is there in being a Jew?” (Rom. 3:1 NIV), someone asks. “Food for the stomach and the stomach for food” (1 Cor. 6:13 NIV), argues a hedonist of the time. What were they like? Can you describe how they might have carried on the discussion?

Use dialogue. The Gospel narratives and the parables are filled with it. Put words into people’s mouths. When only one person appears, use soliloquy or “self-talk.” That’s what Hercus did with David, and it’s what Jesus did with the shrewd branch manager (Luke 16:2–7) and the destitute boy in the far country (Luke 15:11–32). The lad asks himself, “How many hired servants of my father’s have bread enough and to spare, and I perish here with hunger!” (v. 17 ASV).

Narration means communicating with imagination, and imagination reflects the insights of faith. Imagination is half brother to interpretation because both relate to the text. In interpretation we determine what the passage means from what the passage says. In the same way, imagination goes one step beyond the biblical facts and yet stays tied to them.

Illustrations

S. I. Hayakawa’s advice for speakers wanting to develop clarity is to study a cookbook, because recipes explain general concepts by breaking them down to their specifics. A recipe for beef Wellington reads: “Place tenderloin on rack in open roasting pan. Do not add water. Do not cover. Roast in a 425 degree oven, 20 to 25 minutes.” Hayakawa’s counsel is particularly helpful for specialists, whose extensive knowledge of a subject can keep them from being effective communicators. Their education moves them away from particulars to the vague realms of abstraction.

Theologians, for example, may speak about hamartiology instead of sin because the abstract word serves as a better umbrella for the varied aspects of the topic. When theologians address an audience less familiar with their discipline, though, they must step down from their abstraction and talk about murder, lying, stealing, or adultery. If they cannot or will not do this, though they may get high marks as scholars, they fail as communicators. Søren Kierkegaard complained that when he asked the philosopher Georg Hegel for directions to a street address in Copenhagen, all he received was the map of Europe.

Skilled preachers deal in high and low levels of abstraction, climbing back and forth like laborers on a ladder. To have meaning particulars must be gathered up in generalizations, and abstractions must be taken down to particulars to be made understandable. “The interesting writer, the informative speaker, the accurate thinker, and the sane individual, operate on all levels of the abstraction ladder, moving quickly and gracefully in orderly fashion from higher to lower, from lower to higher—with minds as lithe and deft and beautiful as monkeys in a tree.”11

One means of bringing your sermons down to life lies in the use of illustrations. Well-chosen, skillfully used illustrations can do just about everything—restate, explain, validate, or apply ideas by relating them to tangible experiences. To fix a truth firmly in the hearer’s mind requires that we state it and state it again. While most restatement comes through the repetition of propositional statements, illustrations can present the truth still another time without wearying listeners. Understanding, too, may be gained through analogies and anecdotes. An illustration, like the picture on television, makes clear what the speaker explains.

fig108

Illustrations also make truth believable. Logically, of course, examples cannot stand as proof, but psychologically they work with argument to gain acceptance. If you wanted to argue that all truth is equally valid but not equally valuable, you might use an analogy to get your audience to accept what you are saying. A penny and a dollar bill are both genuine, you may point out, but they are not of equal worth. Therefore, we must distinguish between penny- and dollar-truth. The analogy wins as much agreement as the reasoned argument.

Illustrations also apply your ideas to people’s experience. Your listeners not only need to understand a biblical concept, but they also need to know what difference it makes. Examples display truth in action. William E. Sangster preached a sermon based on Genesis 41:51 that developed the idea, “We must remember to forget.” He concluded his sermon with an anecdote:

It was Christmas time in my home. One of my guests had come a couple of days early and saw me sending off the last of my Christmas cards. He was startled to see a certain name and address. “Surely, you are not sending a greeting card to him,” he said.

“Why not?” I asked.

“But you remember,” he began, “eighteen months ago . . .”

I remembered, then, the thing the man had publicly said about me, but I remembered also resolving at the time with God’s help, that I had remembered to forget. And God had “made” me forget!

I posted the card.

People today need applications that show them “how to do it,” and they need plenty of them. The seasoned faithful need help. What about those souls who may be the product of dysfunctional families or who have bypassed the church on their way to growing up and come into faith out of cold secularism? They often lack the skills needed for living a life of faith. They need us to draw them a picture. If a father is not “to provoke his children to anger,” how exactly does he do that or keep from doing it? It’s a dandy idea to trust God in a crisis, but what might that look like in practice? We are urged to “confess our sins,” but how do you go about it, and are you talking about every one of them? The Scriptures teach us that if a brother or a sister “repents,” we are to forgive them. In a Bill Watterson comic strip, the cartoon character Calvin says to his tiger sidekick, Hobbes, “I feel bad that I called Suzie names and hurt her feelings. I’m sorry I did it.” “Maybe you should apologize to her,” Hobbes suggests. Calvin ponders this advice and then replies, “I keep hoping there’s a less obvious solution.” Calvin needs Hobbes to help him do what was right. So do those who come to listen to us.

Lynn Anderson, in his helpful book If I Really Believe, Why Do I Have These Doubts?, uses an illustration to apply the concept that the living Word of God is self-validating:

Jesus said, “It is more blessed to give than receive.” “Well,” you say, “that is a nice theory—but is it really true?” There is really only one way to find out: Give! Give generously and consistently, and before long you will begin to experience the blessings of being a great giver. And when that happens, you can say, “Hey, I know that that is true!”

Sharon found out firsthand that the lifestyle of faith fits. A few years ago Sharon’s faith was on hold. She felt she should contribute more to God’s work, but she didn’t really feel like it. Besides she really didn’t think she had anything important to give—or that anyone would want her “gift.” Sharon did want more faith, however. So she committed to teach a fourth-grade Sunday school class.

But there’s a little more to this story. Sharon has multiple sclerosis and lives in a wheelchair. Just getting around is a chore in itself. She knew the hassle of transporting her teaching materials to and from her house, car, and classroom could overwhelm her, but Sharon wanted to do what faith would do.

That was several years ago! Today Sharon is a valued member of a strong teaching team. Her kids adore her—and they have learned a lot about handicaps too. . . . Sharon has found that doing what faith would do “fits.” New feelings of self-worth and trust in God’s care have blessed her with a vastly improved quality of life.12

It takes effort to think of ways a great truth may be applied to life. Sometimes you have an illustration from your life and ministry. At other times you can imagine a situation that someone in your audience might go through where a biblical insight might be used. Be as specific as possible. Fill in the details so that people respond, “Oh, I see what you mean!” Sermons cannot always be a “how to” manual, of course, but sermons seldom fail because they are specific. Too many of us preach sermons that are all cork and no pop.

Illustrations serve you and your congregation in other ways. They aid memory, stir emotion, create need, hold attention, and establish rapport between speaker and hearer.13

The foundational principle for the use of illustrations is that illustrations should illustrate.

To illustrate is a transitive verb. It takes an object. An illustration should illustrate something. Therefore, there is no such thing as “a good illustration,” but only a good illustration of a particular truth. According to its etymology, to illustrate means “to throw light on a subject.” Illustrations resemble a row of footlights that illuminate the actors and actresses on the stage. If a footlight shines into the eyes of the audience members, it blinds them to what they ought to see.14 A story told for its own sake may entertain or amuse an audience, but it gets in the way of your sermon. An anecdote works in the service of truth only when it centers attention on the idea and not on itself.

Illustrations should also be understandable. Through examples we clarify the unknown with the known. If you need to explain an illustration to make it clear, you should not use it. To explain an illustration that, in turn, explains a concept is to use the unfamiliar to illustrate the unfamiliar. Examples taken from the Bible sometimes violate this rule because we illustrate the unknown with the unknown. In a day of biblical illiterates, biblical stories may be as remote to modern listeners as ancient Chinese history. If we use them as illustrations of other biblical passages, we may indulge in an exercise of futility. If you tell stories from the Bible, then you must take time and care to relate them so that an audience can enter into them and feel their force. You are usually better off illustrating a biblical truth from modern life. Because you want to illuminate the unknown by the use of the known, your most effective illustrations will touch as close to the lives of your listeners as possible. Human interest stories have great power because they deal with subjects out of our common experiences, such as children, animals, and comic strip characters.

Some illustrations are more effective than others. Effective communication is more like a handshake than an email message. It is something we experience as well as hear. The best illustrations not only appeal to people’s minds but also touch their emotions. The strongest examples flow out of our lives into the listeners’ lives.

Think of two large overlapping circles. The circles represent your life and the life of your listener (see figure 3). Within each large circle there is another circle. This smaller circle represents everything you have personally experienced—the dog you grew up with, the friends you had, the games you played, the high school you attended, your first date. The outer circle, on the other hand, represents the things you have read about, seen in a movie, watched on television, heard about in school. Some of these, such as a vivid movie, feel very close to the inner circle. Other things, such as an event in the eighteenth century, lie much further away. Your listener, too, has an inner circle and an outer circle, representing actual experiences and vicarious experiences.

The most powerful illustrations are those where your personal experience overlaps your listener’s personal experience. Examples drawn from these circles we call human interest stories. These illustrations make us laugh, weep, or wince because we have been there, done that, and have the T-shirt to prove it.

The second-best illustrations are those where your learned experience overlaps your listener’s lived experience. When possible we want to talk into our audience’s lived experiences. Pastors of rural churches who grew up in the city must learn as much as possible about farmers and farming if they expect to illustrate their sermons effectively for their congregations.

fig112

The third-best illustrations come out of the speaker’s direct experience and overlap the listener’s vicarious experience. A minister who grew up on a farm and is speaking to an urban congregation can tell a story about delivering a calf so vividly that even a city audience can identify with it.

The fourth and least effective illustrations speak from the speaker’s learned experience into the audience’s learned experience. Illustrations from the Puritans, the life of Woodrow Wilson, or Alexander the Great fall into this category. The audience may understand the illustration, but listeners will not experience it.

The fifth level of illustration is stories that do nothing in the hearer. They fall completely outside the listener’s awareness. The preacher illustrates an abstract truth with some incident completely unknown to the audience. It may be possible with time and effort to bring the incident into the congregation’s outer circle. But why bother? The aim of an illustration is to explain the unknown with the known, the distant with the familiar. These stories do not communicate. The basic principle of illustration has been completely ignored. Usually biblical incidents used to illustrate other passages fall into this category. Modern congregations do not know their Bibles, and even when they do, the stories sound like part of the long ago and far away, distant from life as they live it.

Jay Adams adds an additional warning about biblical illustrations: they are often not biblical. “Always use the Bible authoritatively; never illustratively. Scripture was not given to illustrate points; it was written to make points. If you don’t pay attention to this warning, the first thing you know, you will find yourself making points you want to make and using (misusing) the Bible to illustrate and back up your ideas.”15

Illustrations should also be convincing. As much as lies in you, be sure of your facts. Although a factually inaccurate story might illustrate your idea, if you use it with an audience aware of the error, you will undermine your credibility. What is more, illustrations ought not offend the good sense of an audience. Truth may be stranger than fiction, but improbable anecdotes leave your audience to suspect that you are strange. If you must use an incident that seems far-fetched, acknowledge that and then give your authority for it. Let someone else shoulder the blame.

Ministers seem to beget children who talk in illustrations. When you tell too many such stories about your bright and witty children, skeptical congregations cannot help but wonder whether you’re always telling them the truth. Something else: because personal illustrations can have great force, you can succumb to the temptation of relating stories as though they happened to you, when in reality they did not. The gospel sits in judgment on the methods used to proclaim it, and ultimately God’s truth cannot be benefited by our falsehoods. If a congregation suspects that we will lie to make a point, it has good reason to believe that we will also lie to make a convert.

Your illustrations should be appropriate to the theme of your sermon and to your audience. Great truth can be trivialized by your illustrations. A student preacher, eager to emphasize the omnipresence of God, declared, “God is even in that trash can.” What his illustration had in accuracy, it lacked in appropriateness. Some illustrations, acceptable to one audience, might not be appropriate for another. For example, this story, while reflecting on the morality of our age, would have to be weighed for its appropriateness for different groups:

A man sat in a restaurant, chatting with an attractive young woman. In the course of the conversation, he pointed to a well-dressed young man seated at a corner table.

“See that fellow over there? If he offered you $500 to go to bed with him tonight, would you do it?”

“$500?” the young woman responded. “Well, for $500 I guess I would.”

A few minutes later, the man pointed to another fellow seated in another part of the room.

“See that guy over there? Suppose he offered you $20 to spend the night with him. Would you do it?”

“$20?” she sniffed. “Of course not! What do you think I am?”

The man replied, “I’ve already found that out. I’m just trying to establish your price.”

That illustration might be acceptable on a college campus or in a talk to businesspeople, but you would have to consider carefully whether it would be appropriate for a Sunday morning congregation.

Tell your illustration with energy and enthusiasm. A sculptor was once asked how he carved a statue of a lion when he didn’t have a model. He explained, “I simply carved away anything that didn’t look like a lion.” That is good advice for preachers, too. A skillful storyteller cuts away surplus details that don’t contribute to the mood or punch line of the story. When you use an illustration that contains narrative, use dialogue and direct quotation. Don’t simply retell the story. Relive it. Get into it. If you see the action in the story, so will your audience. Tell your stories as vividly as possible so that your listeners enter into the illustration, understand it, and feel it. When that happens, not only is your point being made—it is being felt.

Where do you find them? Good illustrations can be found everywhere. Start with your personal experience. Every life is a circus. Some people can find more illustrations in a stroll around the neighborhood than others can find in a trip around the world. The difference lies not in what we experience but in what we see in our experience. You must observe in order to see. The world can be God’s picture book if in ordinary events you see analogies, applications, or spiritual truth.

Personal illustrations add warmth and vitality to a sermon, but to use them effectively, keep three general rules in mind.

Not only can illustrations be gathered from your personal experience, but they also can come out of your reading. Few of us have memories lined with Velcro. We can’t afford to read without a pen in hand to record materials that can someday illuminate our sermons. All kinds of reading qualify—comic strips, nursery rhymes, magazines, novels, theologies, history—all provide material for sermons. Read sermons by gifted preachers. Such sermons provide illustrations in context, and that makes them superior to collections of stories that are divorced from what they illustrate.

Of course, many illustrations will occur to you as you work on your sermon. Write down clearly the point you want to make, and then think of the parts of that point that require illumination. You must know exactly what you want to illustrate if you expect your mind and memory to supply what you need. Your ability to fashion appropriate analogies and apt applications will be sharpened through practice.

Undoubtedly, the place to which you will turn most often for supporting material is your illustration file. Of course, what you get out of your file for a given sermon depends entirely on what you have put into it. There are many systems on the market developed to enable ministers to save the results of their study and reading. You will probably want to keep two kinds of illustration files:

This is the twenty-first century. Another way to file supporting material is on your computer. There are several different software programs that can be adapted for a preacher’s use. Now that computers have become smaller and therefore portable, you can carry your system with you.

You need a filing system. Any system that allows you to store information is superior to no system at all. Your filing system also needs you. No system works unless you determine to work it. Agur, a writer of proverbs, commends the ant for its great wisdom: “The ants are not a strong people, yet they prepare their food in the summer” (Prov. 30:25 NASB). You will do well to learn that lesson from the ant.

DEFINITIONS

Definition—establishes what must be included and excluded by a term or statement.

Explanation—sets boundaries by amplifying the relation of one idea to another or what an idea implies.

Factual information—consists of observations, examples, statistics, and other data that may be verified apart from the preacher.

Illustrations—restate, explain, prove, or apply ideas by relating them to tangible experiences.

Narration—describes who did what to whom with what effect in the biblical accounts. It can be used to supply background in a sermon by discussing the history, setting, or personalities involved in a passage.

FOR FURTHER READING

There are scores of books on illustrations. Most books on homiletics treat these collections as though they were pornography. If you order one by mail, they imply, you should have it wrapped in plain brown paper. They rightly argue that the danger in these volumes lies in using them as “Saturday night specials.” Stories grabbed in desperation usually sound canned and contrived.

I believe, however, that books of illustrations do have a place in your library. To avoid abuse, here’s a suggestion: read through those books at your leisure and mark those that strike you as effective. Put them in your personal file. If you use them at a later time, they have a better chance of being as fresh as material you have gathered on your own. Here are a few collections you might want to look at.

Of course, the best illustrations are still those that you gather from your own living and reading.

  

Questions and activities for this chapter can be found in the student exercises section at the back of the book.

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1. Clovis G. Chappell, Questions Jesus Asked (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1948; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1974), 154.

2. Peter Marshall, John Doe, Disciple: Sermons for the Young in Spirit, ed. Catherine Marshall (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 144.

3. Earl F. Palmer, Love Has Its Reasons: An Inquiry into New Testament Love (Waco: Word, 1977), 38–39.

4. This often-quoted statement appears, for example, in Anthony A. Hoekema, The Four Major Cults (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1963), 1.

5. James S. Stewart, The Gates of New Life (New York: Scribner, 1940; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1972), 1–2.

6. Ernest T. Campbell, Locked in a Room with Open Doors (Waco: Word, 1974), 117.

7. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America (New York: Bantam, 1966), 78.

8. D. M. Baillie, To Whom Shall We Go? (New York: Scribner, 1955; repr., Grand Rapids: Baker, 1974), 62–63.

9. Alan H. Monroe, Principles and Types of Speech, 233.

10. John Hercus, David, 2nd ed. (Chicago: InterVarsity, 1968), 55–56.

11. S. I. Hayakawa, Language and Thought in Action, 190.

12. Lynn Anderson, If I Really Believe, Why Do I Have These Doubts? (West Monroe, LA: Howard, 2000), 166.

13. Ian Macpherson lists seventeen purposes served by illustrations in The Art of Illustrating Sermons, 13–33.

14. John Nicholls Booth, The Quest for Preaching Power, 146.

15. Jay Adams, Preaching with Purpose (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1981), 10.