Preaching - Lesson 16

Dr. Bryan Chapell
Preaching
PR600-16
How to Illustrate (Part 1/2)
Lesson Transcript

[00:00:00] This recording is provided courtesy of Covenant Theological Seminary. I want you to begin to think, move on to lecture 14 and think how these truths move themselves in two illustrations that we will do. Here's my goal. I was just in that lecture 13 trying to say why illustrations are important. In lecture 14, we're going to talk about art. How do you do them first? Generally, that's as long as we're going to go today. Generally, how do you do a little serrations Next time we're going to get very specific and actually quite technical. So if you haven't read the material for lecture 14, it will really help you to read ahead next time because it gets very technical. And yet once you got it, wow, Can you make illustrations sing and work in your sermons powerfully when you understand how they work? So first, let's just talk about generally how they work. How do we make illustrations function in our sermons? The first thing we do is we isolate an event and experience and associate it with the principle being related. We isolate an event and experience, and then we associate it with the principle being related. Now, there's lots of ways this can occur, but let me just kind of relate it this way. The more when you're writing a sermon, the more that you can sharpen the principle, the easier it will be to find illustrations dealing with it. If you say, well, you know, I want to talk about something about sin, you are not going to find an illustration. Your concept is too broad. It's when you really sharpen the hook. What exactly am I looking for that you will be able to catch in your own experience when you're reading those illustrations that are much more specific.

[00:01:47] Here's an example. Some years ago now, I was the academic dean here, and I became aware that that one of our very beloved professors was going to be leaving. And I knew it would be shattering to some students, to some faculty as a matter and and it wasn't something I could talk about, You know, things were unfolding, but I was aware it was going to be very hard on some people that this very beloved professor was leaving. And I was I was wanting to teach in my own preaching and preparing for that moment that I couldn't tell people about how, you know, in a time of ease, in a in a time where God is blessing you, you should be building strength for difficult times that aren't just letting down, that you're actually building strength in the easy times for the hard times that are sure to come. Well, I was thinking about that message and I was actually preaching in a church in South Carolina. And when I was there, I was asked to stand in the home of some people. And the man happened to be an engineer for NASA who is on loan to the Federal Aviation. What is it for FAA? What is that Federal Aviation Administration? And the reason that this Nasser engineer was on loan to the FAA is because the FAA was studying how to deal with a big problem at the time, which was wind shears at the ends of airports. You remember that how there was a period of time when planes would come into airports and as they were landing, they would go through a thunderstorm or something like that, and it would just knock them out of the air. And there were a number of of huge crises, tragedies that occurred as a result of wind shears.

[00:03:27] And so the FAA began to study how can we find wind shears before they occur, identify them at the ends of runways and therefore warn planes about them. And they were all prepared to spend elaborate millions of dollars to be able to develop systems to develop. When she was actually it never happened. The reason that equipment was never developed is because of the study of this particular engineer. And what he said was, as we began to study more and more the nature of wind shears, he said, The way you think of it, you think of a wind shear, kind of like a a plane, like a piece of paper that that's pushing things down at the ends of airports. It doesn't really work like that, he said. A wind shear, he said, is actually like wind coming out of a hose. The way water comes out of a garden hose, it's actually that way. And he says if water comes hard out of a garden hose and it hits the ground, what does it do? It splashes back up. So he said what we discovered was happening is as pilots were coming into the airport, what they would first hit is they would hit the splash up of wind. Now, think about that. They're trying to they're trying to land and the wind's pushing them up as they're coming in. So what do they do? They drop their power. They pushed down into the wind. But what are they about to hit? They are about to hit that big downdraft. So at the very time they're dropping power and pushing down is the time, they ought to be adding power and push as long as pilots were trained. If you're at the end of a runway and you had a big updraft and a thunderstorm, you power up and push through and begin to train pilots to do that and they saved them.

[00:05:05] Do you remember what I was looking for as an illustration? When you're in the easy times, when you're in the updraft, times don't power down. Use that as the time to power up for the difficult times that are surely coming in human life. It's because I knew precisely what I was looking for, that that illustration was so profound to my own experience, and I can relate it to what I was talking about. What I was doing was I was isolating an event, an experience, and associating with the principal to be related. The more you will refine the principle, the more easy it will be and powerful it would be to deal with the illustrations that deal with those principals, noting that that what you're trying to do is take an experience of some sort to relate to a principal. You begin to understand why human interest accounts are usually the best illustrations. What are human interest accounts? Ordinary or extraordinary people in ordinary or extraordinary situations with which ordinary people can identify. You tell me about something ordinary, extraordinary, that I can identify with. And that principle that you want to make clear is now going to connect to my life. And that's what we're trying to do. It's why old preachers tales are usually problematic. If all of your illustrations in a sermon are about steam engines as I go. Well, maybe Interesting. But it's going to remove from my life, right? You're not involving me, which is the very point of the illustration. Some of the way this is expressed is Louis Paul Lehmann, who did a lot of work in the last generation on the use of illustration, he says, is this way. An illustration is a piece of life, a setting so familiar to the hearer.

[00:06:58] So totally believable that a minimum of a description is him to see it and live it. If the illustration is well-proportioned, well-designed, well-chosen, the hearer recognizes. I have seen that. I have heard that I have handled it. What's being reflected here? Seen, heard, handled. Rarely heard that before. That's John again. If the illustration is well done, the hearer says, I have seen that. I have heard that I handle it. So even if we're telling an old timey illustration, what do we do with it? We contemporaries it. We find some way of connecting it to our experience today. Maybe the language we use or even saying at a museum, Did you see this? Somehow we're bringing that event in to present experience. So the listener says, This is what I understand. Using our own heart and mind and life as the way of doing it. And again, it'll throw you sometimes because you'll think, Oh, I've got this great illustration out of Dostoyevsky. All right. That's powerful in your English class. How are you going to have to tell it here in a sermon? D.W. Ford writes this, admittedly, to quote from Dante and Dumas and Dostoyevsky. And Dickens is impressive. But what a congregation will most readily hear is references by the people to but references by the preacher to objects, events and people's comments that he has seen and heard himself in the present locality of the people here. That in the present locality of the people. An illustration drawn from the derelict house in the next street. The aftermath of a recent storm, a local flower show, a current play at a theater is the kind that is most serviceable. Because what are you trying to do? Motivate, not just inform. Take that proposition to their lives.

[00:09:07] So if you're going to a more distant setting, like a NASA engineer on loan to the FAA, you try to tell it in such a way as Do you remember when all the accounts were of planes falling out of the air because of wind shears? I try to engage you in some way instead of remove you from the event. I try to pull you into the events. You know what? I remember reading that. I remember about that. Yeah. Why didn't they ever install those and that equipment at the ends of runways trying to engage the here's even it is something removed from them. So the event the proposition, the truth is associated with an event with which they can identify. Let's keep going. If we talk about them using your own mind, heart reading and experience, it's not wrong. Also to use illustrations of others as catalysts for your own. Once you begin preaching a lot, you begin to recognize not only the power of illustration, but it's hard to find as many as you wish you could. So let me do a couple of things. Is it wrong to use illustrations of other preachers that you hear? It's not wrong. As long as you do. What? Give the credit away. Do you have to say. Tim Keller in his sermon in Covenant Seminary's Chapel on November 3rd. Do we have to say that? What are minimum words that you can give the credit away and still keep your integrity intact? A preacher said, I've heard it, said Preachers say any time you give the credit away, it's not a research paper. The sermon, As long as you give the credit away, your integrity is intact and that's what you're going for. People get in trouble not because they don't cite the footnote, but because they take the credit.

[00:10:51] As long as you give the credit away, you do not need all that footnotes, citation material. In fact, if you think of now, most of you will probably, if you're going into preaching settings will go first into a sister associate pastor roles. But some of you will go into solo pastor roles in small churches. I want you to think about what that means, how many times you will be preaching per week, many of you Sunday morning, Sunday evening, some form of teaching in Sunday school, midweek service. The funeral, the wedding, the meeting at the VFW, whatever it is. You know, the average preacher in a small town, in a small church is going to be preaching five or six times a week. It is not wrong in my mind to go and use those books and illustrations to listen to other preachers and be gathering mining, collecting illustrations for your own purpose as long as you do two things. You modify the illustration for your purpose and give the credit away and want to say modify. We're going to talk a lot about that next time. How do I take other illustrations and modify them appropriately for my sermon? You ever hear an illustration? A sermon? You comment? Well, it doesn't sound like him. Wonder where he got that. And automatically the message is removed from you. How do we take illustrations and rightly incorporate them into our language and the way we talk? Well, that's just about using other illustrations as catalysts. You can you can use others illustrations as long as they are catalysts for your own. But here's what we're doing when we tell illustrations. Let's get into some of the how we do it, how we isolate and associate. First is recognizing the story nature of illustrations.

[00:12:39] A true illustration is not just an allusion to the account of David and Goliath. It is a retelling of the account of David and Goliath. A number of you, when you turn in your conclusions which you are required to be human interest accounts, you got kind of acknowledged, you know, you can't do this in one sentence. Because a human interest account is a story. It's not an allusion to a story. It is the story itself. And therefore, one must do this. You must introduce the situation, recognize the story, nature of illustrations. You introduce the situation. You present characters. You know somebody is involved doing something. Introduce the situation, introduce character or present characters. Identify a complication. Identify a complication. Something goes wrong. There's a sense of wonder. They need to find out something. There's a complication of some sort that's going on. Then there's resolution. Somehow that situation is resolved. And then there is a conclusion. What's the meaning of it? Now that I've been through the story, what's the meaning of it? So you can't do this. In one sentence, an allusion alludes to another story. A statistic is a reference to a fact that's been found, but none of those are true illustrations. Three illustrations are the retelling of the story. So if you recognize there is an illustration hierarchy that is of illustrative material, there are things like metaphors. Satan's ways are a web similes. Life is like a banana peel. Examples. I know of an abortion clinic that says it is pro-life. Analogy. Some of you think of God. As a grandmother who sits inside the house banging her cane on the window to get the squirrels to go away from the bird feeder. He's upset about it, but he can't do anything about it.

[00:14:46] That's just an analogy. It's not exactly an illustration. An allusion. An allusion is the preacher reminding people of a story but not retelling the story. An allusion is the preacher reminding people of a story but not telling the story. What is a true illustration? A true illustration is the retelling of a story distinguished by lived body detail presented in narrative. If I were in that situation, what would I feel? What I hear? What would I smell? What would I taste? What if I my body were in that situation? We describe the sensations. They may be physical, they may be emotional sensations. I describe the sensations of somebody being in that event. Obviously, you have much longer aspects like allegory, novella and novel that are parts of illustrative illustrative material, but an illustration typically is a paragraph or two paragraphs in a sermon that tells a story. By way. Two paragraphs is a very long one. Two paragraphs is very long. Now, are there some stories, sermons where the whole sermon is the telling of a story with a moral? We think that anybody ever do that in the Bible. Sure. So it's not wrong to do it. It's not what we're going to do this semester. Right? This semester, we'll find how to do this paragraph. Illustrations that come out of the explanation demonstrate what the truth is before we apply that truth. A key thing here Often this ends up on midterms and illusion. Reports on the speaker's memory of an experience and illustration. Recreate the recreates the experience. An illusion is something like not only the preacher referring to the story, but simply referring to an experience. I can remember when I was a kid, and I just loved it when I was able to hit a double almost more than a home run because I love watching the ball sail over the second baseman's head into the field.

[00:16:49] Now that's somewhere between probably illusion and illustration. It's not the full telling, but it's really my referring to something. And often you get stuck in there somewhere. And what I'm encouraging to think of is something that's about a paragraph long. Something's about a paragraph long that has a story nature. How do we do it? We use narrative components, that is, we've said already we we introduce the illustration just as stories or narratives have introductions, illustrations have introductions. First, I want to just talk about the conceptual introduction. How are illustrations introduced? Here's the conceptual introduction. An illustration is always introduced by the last thing you said prior to it. An illustration is always introduced by the last thing you said prior to it. Now, this is not the way you write English essays. This is a critical difference. English essays. You may be illustrating something you said two sentences ago or even two paragraphs ago. The ear does not function that way. In preaching, the thing that you are illustrating is the very last thing. I mean, I'm talking about the words right before not even a sentence ahead. The thing that you are illustrating is the very last thing you said prior to the illustration. Now think about that. If you are illustrating a couple of some points in the explanation. So you've got one sub point that you've been talking about for 3 minutes, you've got a second sub point, you've been talking for two or 3 minutes, and then you're going to do an illustration and it's about both sub points together. What do you know you're going to have to do before the illustration? You're going to have to restate. You are going to have to summarize both some points because this illustration will not appear to anybody's ear to be about what you said two or 3 minutes ago.

[00:18:53] You will have to summarize again, even if you had a statement of the sub point two or 3 minutes of explanation and then you think you are illustrating that statement will not work. You have to summarize the statement again before you go into the illustration to the ear. The illustration is always about the very last thing you said prior to it. So if you think you're illustrating something that's two or 3 minutes ago, that's not what the people think. They think you're illustrating the last thing you said. And if you're not, there's just confusion. So the ear is always thinking conceptually that what you're doing is illustrating the last thing said prior to the illustration. Now, the second way that we begin is with the Homily article introduction, not the conceptual introduction, but the Hummel article introduction. How do we actually start the illustration? The first thing that we do, you know, again, it's just public speaking. If some of you had this, others if you hadn't taken it well, never thought of it before. The first thing you do when you tell an illustration is do nothing. The first thing you do when you tell an illustration is you pause. You shift gears. You put in the clutch, as it were. So I've said something like, What I want you to recognize is the role that every child has in the Kingdom of God. Paws rising out of the swamps of central Georgia is. Okay. The pause is that we we do not tell. People were illustrating. Okay. I'll get to that in just a minute. We don't say. Let me illustrate, Chris, what speech Miller calls called linear consciousness. I just I just and by the way, we're in an artificial situation and I'm talking to you about an illustration.

[00:20:42] We don't do that. We don't talk about the components of a sermon. In a sermon. We don't say. And my proposition is, you know, we don't say. My first main point is we don't say. Let me illustrate. To do it is just to deaden the message instead of engaging people. So we don't talk about illustrating. We just illustrate and we do it after a pause. The conceptual statement that is the last thing we said prior to the illustration. A pause and then the illustration we slice out and we begin the illustration and experiential context. And then we said, we're describing an experience. So I bracket it. I say, Here's the experience. I'm going to talk about rising out of the swamps of what am I done? I put another place in people's minds. You can do it in different ways. I can first begin with a separation of time. I can begin illustration with a separation of time. Those of you with little kids at bedtime, when you're telling the story, one of the first words you say once, Once upon a time. Now, now, what did you just do? I separated the experience by another time. I put time brackets around. It ought to be a little more biblical. The time came when Kings went to war. And David, stay home. Just separation time begins. The narrative could be a separation in space that is describing into another place. Jesus began a parable this way. Two men went up to the temple to pray. Here, I begins. It takes people to the temple. Two men went up to the temple to pray. A sower went out to the field. Also seen here, the place being described. I bracketed an experience by taking people to different time or place or time and place that separation of situation.

[00:22:39] Think of your youth, how it happened a long, long time ago. In a galaxy. Far, far away. Now, what happened? There's a time and place separation occurring a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. So the Star Wars dramas begin. And yet we know what is happening is, in narrative terms, its separation of situation. That's how the experience begins. What we're trying to do when we talk about separation of time, place and situation is avoiding the uninvolved, avoid what does not involve people like the words. Let me illustrate. We just don't do that. We don't say. Let me illustrate. The words of long ago are Don't talk about illustrating. Just illustrate. Don't talk about illustrating. Just illustrate. That also means we nix all long citations. We get rid of all long citations. We don't talk about Charles Swindle in the book Improving Your Serve. No, My Press 1992. We don't do that. We say Swindle says. Or I heard a preacher say that we involve the uninvolved. We avoid the UN involving. And then what we do is we use concreteness and detail. I've separated the experience now. I began telling it with concreteness and detail that live body involvement. The reason we do this, the more specific your details, the more powerful the illustration, the more specific your details, the more powerful the illustration. How we do it is that all language is tiny. Corinne Bell. We try to fully describe the experience with concreteness and detail. We try to fully describe the experience. What we use are sensory words that name, colors, shapes, sounds, smells. We use sensory words. And we describe actions, feelings and dialog describe actions, feelings and dialog. Trying to involve people here. As I am doing that somehow I create crisis.

[00:25:00] Now, doesn't mean tragedy always doesn't mean that at all. But it's what speech matters to call. I upset the equilibrium. I've described the situation. Now there's some complication. It may just be, you know. And he is. I just grew wide in wonder. And you're thinking, why? What's he see? What's going on? There be something bad. It can be. You know, the jewel was so big, it just glistened in the sun. Well, it's the complication of there's a sense of wonder that's now entered. It could be something tragic and bad, but somehow we complicate the situation, then come to a conclusion. We resolve the issues so that I see what I was supposed to find. I see what I was supposed to find in the illustration situation has been described complicates in some way, but there's resolution that is actually a demonstration of the principle that the illustration was meant to illustrate. Now, no one is better at this than the Savior. And I want you to think of the way he could have talked about. A wayward son being welcomed by a father. Think what he could have said. God loves us the way a father welcomes back his son, even when he's gone astray. Would it be all true? Right. But what did he say? But when the prodigal son came to his senses, he went back to his father. And while he was still a long way off. His father saw him and ran to him and threw his arms around him and kissed him. The sunset. Father, I am here. The dialog. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. I have sinned against you and I have sinned against heaven. But the father said, Bring the robe and put it on him.

[00:27:00] Put a ring on his finger, sandals on his feet, kill the fattened calf and let's have a feed feast for this son of mine was lost. And now he's found. He was dead, and now he is alive again. And they began to celebrate. What Jesus is doing is illustrating by saying this is what it feels like to be welcomed back by your father when you have been in a faraway land. When we are illustrating, we're not just clarifying. We are saying, Here's what it feels like. Here's the experience. So that now, you know, not just in your head, you know, in here, too. And that's the goal. Next time will be very explicit about things we do technically to make this happen. See them.