I want you to begin to think, move on to lecture 14 and think how these truths move themselves in to 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, all right, how do you do them? First, generally, that's as long as we're going to go today. Generally, how do you do illustrations? 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've 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, 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 of 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. Here's an example. Some years ago now, I was the academic dean here and I became aware that one of our very beloved professors was going to be leaving, and I knew it would be shattering to some students, to some faculties a matter, 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 wanting to teach in my own preaching and preparing for us that moment that I couldn't tell people about how in a time of ease, in a time where God is blessing you, you should be building strength for difficult times, that you aren't just letting down, that you're actually building strength in the easy times for the hard times that are sure to come. While 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 stay 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, FAA, what is that, federal aviation administration? And the reason that this NASA 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 windshears at the ends of airports. Remember that, however, 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 huge crises, tragedies, that occurred as a result of windshears. And so the FAA began to study how can we find windshears before they occur, identify them with 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 windshears. 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 windshears, he said, the way you think of it, you think of a windshear kind of like a plane, like a piece of paper that's pushing things down at the ends of airports. He said, it doesn't really work like that. He said, a windshear, 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 discover was happening is this pilots were coming into the airport, what they would first hit is they would hit the splash up of wind. Now, think about it, they're trying to land, and the winds pushing them up as they're coming in. So what do they do? They drop their power. They push down into the wind. But what are they about to hit? They are about to hit that big down draft. So at the very time, they're dropping power and pushing down is the time they off to be adding power and push as long as pilots were trained. If you're at the end of a runway and you get a big updraft in the thunderstorm, you power up and push through. They begin to train pilots to do that and they save them. 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 a 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 could relate it to what I was talking about. What I was doing was I was isolating an event and experience and associating with the principle to be related. The more you will refine the principle, the more easy it will be and powerful it will be to deal with the illustrations that deal with those principles. Noting that, that what you're trying to do is take an experience of some sort to relate to a principle. 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 preacher's tales are usually problematic. If all of your illustrations in a sermon are about steam engines and you can 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 Lewis Paul Layman who did a lot of work in the last generation on the use of illustration. He says this way, an illustration is a piece of life, a setting so familiar to the hearer so totally believable that a minimum of description abes 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. Where have you 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 have handled it. So even if we're telling an old, tiny illustration, what do we do with it? We contemporize it. We find some way of connecting it to our experience today. Maybe the language we use are even saying, at a museum, did you see this? Somehow we're bringing that event into 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. Again, it will throw you sometimes because you'll think, oh, I've got this great illustration out of Dostoevsky. All right, that's powerful in your English class. How are you going to have to tell it here in a sermon? DW Ford writes this, admittedly, the quote from Dante and Dumas and Dostoevsky and Dickens is impressive. But what a congregation will most readily hear is references by the people to, but excuse me, 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. Hear 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 the theater, is the kind that is most serviceable because what are you trying to do? Motivate not just in form. Take that proposition to their lives. 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 windshears? I try to engage you in some way instead of remove you from the event. I try to pull you into the event saying, you know what? I remember reading that. I remember about that. Yeah, why didn't they ever install those that equipment at the ends of Runways? Try to engage the hearers even if 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 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 in 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, anytime you give the credit away, it's not a research paper this 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. As long as you give the credit away, you do not need all that footnote citation material. In fact, if you think of, most of you will probably, if you're going into preaching settings, we'll go first into a sister associate pastor roles. But some of you will go into solo pastor roles in small churches. And I want you to think about what that means. How many times will we 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 and 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 of 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. Now, when I 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? Give her here an illustration of sermon you kind of went, 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, it is recognizing the story nature of illustrations. A true illustration is not just an illusion 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 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 illusion 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's 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 would 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 this story, what's the meaning of it? So you can't do this in one sentence. An illusion alludes to another story. A statistic is a reference to a fact that's been found. But none of those are true illustrations. True illustrations are the retelling of a 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. An 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. That's just an analogy. It's not exactly an illustration. An illusion. An illusion is the preacher reminding people of a story but not retelling the story. An illusion 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 would I hear? What would I smell? What would I taste? If 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 material, but an illustration typically is a paragraph or two paragraphs in a sermon that tells a story. By the way, two paragraphs is a very long one. Two paragraphs is very long. Are there some story sermons where the whole sermon is the telling of a story with a moral? Let me think that anybody ever do that in the Bible? Sure. It's not wrong to do it. It's not what we're going to do this semester. This semester we'll find how to do these 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. An illusion reports on the speaker's memory of an experience. An illustration recreates the experience. An illusion is something like not only the preacher referring to a 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 basements head into the field. 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'll 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. Now how do we do it? We use narrative components. That is, we've said already we introduce the illustration. Justice 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 you, I mean I'm talking about the words right before it, 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 subpoints in the explanation. So you've got one subpoint that you've been talking for two or three minutes. You've got a second subpoint. You've been talking for two or three minutes and then you're going to do an illustration and it's about both subpoints 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 subpoints because this illustration will not appear to anybody's ear to be about what you said two or three minutes ago. You will have to summarize again even if you had a statement of the subpoint two or three minutes of explanation and then you think you were 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 three 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 prior to the illustration. Now the second way that we begin is with the homiletical introduction, not the conceptual introduction but the homiletical introduction. How do we actually start the illustration? The first thing that we do, again it's just public speaking, some of you had this. Others of you hadn't said, well never thought of that 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 years, 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. Pause, rising out of the swamps of central Georgia is. The pause is that we do not tell people we're illustrating. I'll get to that in just a minute. We don't say let me illustrate. Creates what speech community calls called linear consciousness. I just said by the way we're in an artificial situation and I'm talking to you about an illustration. 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 an experiential context. Remember 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 central. What have 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 illustrations with a separation of time. Those of you with little kids at bedtime when you're telling the story what are the first words you say once, once upon a time. Now what did you just do? I separated the experience by another time. I put time brackets around it or to be a little more biblical. The time came when kings went to war and David stayed home. Just separation and time begins the narrative. It could be separation and space that is describing another place. Jesus began a parable this way. Tune then went up to the temple to pray. Here I begin. He takes people to the temple. Tune men went up to the temple to pray. A sower went out to the field, a so seed. Here the place being described. I bracket an experience by taking people to a different time or place or time and place. That's separation of situation. Think of your youth how it happened. A long long time ago in a galaxy far far away. Now what happened? There's 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 it's 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 uninvolving. 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 mix all long citations. We get rid of all long citations. We don't talk about Charles Swindall in the book Improving Your Serve, Montgomery Press 1992. Don't do that. We say Swindall says, or heard a preacher say, we avoid the uninvolving. And then what we do is we use concreteness and detail. I've separated the experience. Now I begin telling it with concreteness and detail. That lived 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 old language of Steinich or Embell? 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 dialogue. Describe actions, feelings, and dialogue. Keep trying to involve people here. As I'm doing that, somehow I create crisis. Now it doesn't mean tragedy. Always it doesn't mean that at all. But it's what speech commuters call, I upset the equilibrium. I've described a situation. Now there's some complication. It may just be, you know, and his eye just grew wide and wonder. And you're thinking, why? What's he see? What's going on? Don't have to be something bad. It can be, you know, the jewel is 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. It would have been 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 son said, Father, I'm here, the dialogue. I'm no longer worthy to be called your son. I've sinned against you and I've sinned against heaven. But the father said, bring the robe and put it on him, put a ring on his finger, sandals on his feet, kill the fat and calf, and let's have a feast for this son of mine was lost. 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 we'll be very explicit about things we do technically to make this happen. See them.