My stories must illustrate. I must avoid trying to make myself look too good or too wise. The rule to follow: An illustration should illustrate the truth, not elevate the speaker.
—Haddon Robinson
Gone are the days when preaching meant an aloof, authoritarian lecture. An impersonal preacher, these days, is almost a contradiction in terms. People today have come to expect personal preaching—vulnerability and self-revelation.
When people comment on my sermons, they rarely mention the sermon’s logic, structure, or persuasiveness—even though I try to include each of those elements. More typical is the comment: “I appreciated the message, but what I appreciated most was your vulnerability. You really got through to me. You let us see you.”
Today’s audiences expect the preacher to be personal and winsome. This means not only speaking to the personal needs of people, but also using illustrations out of the preacher’s life experience. This is what many people listen for and a gauge by which they judge a sermon.
Bringing yourself into the pulpit requires some special skills, because it has potential dangers. Here are some of the pitfalls and how to avoid them.
The Peril of Personal Illustrations
I sat in one church not long ago, listening to a preacher make a point about Satan’s tactics: “Normally, you get up in the morning and get to work at 8 o’clock. But on Sunday, you have to get to church by 9:30. Even though you have an extra hour and a half, somehow everything goes wrong.” Then he personalized the point. “This morning my wife and I had a terrible argument, and frankly we haven’t gotten things settled. I hope we can deal with it this afternoon.”
His point about disruptions of schedule and Satan’s influence was suddenly lost. Everyone was jarred by the fact that the preacher and his wife were in the third round of a ten-round fight. Even an audience that wants personal preaching did not respond well to preaching that was that personal.
Had he said, “Last Sunday we had a fight, and it took us until Sunday afternoon to get it settled,” the congregation might have appreciated and benefited from the illustration. After the struggle came victory. But people don’t particularly want to be spectators to a fight you are losing.
While people don’t expect us to be perfect, some personal illustrations overpower the delicate relationship between preacher and listeners. As a general rule, if you haven’t worked a situation through to a biblical solution, it’s not ready to use as an illustration. Merely saying, “I’m going to work on this soon” doesn’t throw light on your point; it puts the spotlight on you and your problem.
Unsettling and distracting the audience with an unresolved situation stands as one peril of personal illustrations. But there are others.
Inappropriate Self-disclosure
There are various levels of self-disclosure. One of the basic factors in any relationship is knowing how much to reveal. When friends have established trust, their self-revelation can be deeper. But only a fool dives headfirst into a pool without checking the depth of the water. Perhaps your mate knows you so well that you can tell her virtually everything. But a congregation, by nature diverse and at varied levels of spiritual maturity, can’t handle that level of revelation.
Imagine a ten-point scale of self-disclosure. Most congregations could accept probably only levels one, two, or possibly three. That’s enough to indicate in a healthy way that you are honest and authentic, but you’ve got enough good taste, sense, and discretion not to give out all the details.
One pastor, preaching on the problem of lust, admitted, “I know the power of sexual temptation. There are times when I still lust after women. In fact, standing here this morning, looking out at this congregation, I’ve lusted after some of you.”
Although that was honest, it destroyed the effectiveness of his sermon. His first statement would have been enough—”I know the power of sexual desire.” By going further, by personalizing it to that very audience at that exact moment, he lost the congregation completely. Instead of contemplating God’s answer to the power of lust, everyone was glancing around trying to decide who he had been looking at. Is it her? Is it me? The effect of his point was destroyed by the listeners’ reactions.
As a rule, people can handle self-disclosure more easily if it’s an incident out of the past. He could have said, “I’m ashamed to say that there have been times in the past, even when I bowed before God in prayer, that immoral thoughts dominated my mind. There was nothing I could do but admit to God my struggle with lust.”
Presenting a personal unresolved conflict, of any kind, tends to focus people’s attention on you, the preacher, rather than on their own condition. It resembles telling a counselor your struggles, only to have her say, “You think you have problems? Wait till I tell you what happened to me this morning.… “You leave with questions about the counselor and no relief for your own struggle.
If ministers do that in the pulpit, a congregation loses the sense that God’s Word has been offered to them. The arrow gets turned around. The preacher has used the audience for his own therapy.
This is not to say that everything in a preacher’s life comes to a neat, sensible, and biblical conclusion. Life on earth does not always present successful, happy endings. The preacher’s task in relating a personal illustration is simply to illustrate a point. At the same time, he communicates, “I’ve been there. I really don’t live in an ivory tower. My children aren’t virgin born. Not everything I’ve attempted has led to spiritual success.”
Under the Influence of Emotion
Another peril of personal preaching is that your present emotional condition can affect your preaching.
Visiting one church and hearing the preacher, I sensed he was upset with the people. His tone of voice gave way to anger. All his illustrations were negative: Christians who don’t love, who don’t care, who constantly misrepresent others, who gossip.
Afterward I asked a friend, a leader in the church, “Is the pastor having trouble with the board?”
“Yes,” he said. “I think the board may ask him to leave.” The pastor had lugged his emotional baggage into the pulpit. In his illustrations, he generalized to all Christians what he had experienced with a few. He was wounded. He didn’t like the people in front of him. And it showed.
Anger isn’t the only feeling that affects preachers. What I feel most often is fatigue. And I know when I’m tired, I must be aware of three things:
1. My perception of audience feedback will be distorted. My antenna may pick up wrong signals. When I’m tired, I’m more likely to feel people are disinterested, hostile, or distracted. I’m reading my own emotions onto them. I’ve learned not to listen to that.
2. I will feel like apologizing. When I’m tired, I have the strongest urge to say, for example, “I was up late last night. My wife was ill, and I didn’t have a chance to prepare as I would like.” But as a preacher, if you’re tired, let people discover it. Don’t tell them. If your throat is scratchy, let them decide that. Don’t cue them.
Everything within you wants to apologize, to ask your congregation to be sympathetic with you. But a congregation that’s feeling sorry for you cannot be persuaded. They’ll be thinking more about the messenger than the message.
3. I will lack enthusiasm. Instead of entering the pulpit with vigor, I’ll tend to be more passive. As a result, my delivery flattens. Before I get into the pulpit, I must remind myself that these people came here to be helped. When I get into the pulpit, my job is to help them. The sermon must go on. That means when the service starts, the congregation expects the choir to sing, the organist to play, and the preacher to preach. People come to keep an appointment with God. They expect us to be our best. Sometimes our best is not all that we could be. But we give that to God, like loaves and fishes, and trust him to do the rest.
When you are emotionally upset, you may find, while preaching, the tendency to weep. A pastor under a heavy burden can let tears flow, and the congregation will respond well if they understand his emotion. But a preacher who weeps too often will sacrifice his effectiveness. While people need to know you have deep feelings, they also want to see self-control. If you let your emotions go too often, either in anger or in weeping, your ministry suffers.
A basic principle of public speaking is that an able speaker is an able person, in a good emotional state, with a good attitude toward himself and toward his audience. That’s also true for ministers.
The Power of Humor
A preacher who can laugh in the pulpit has a tremendous advantage, but humor can be dangerous.
One of the engaging things about Pastor Charles Swindoll is that in the midst of preaching, he can throw back his head and laugh. He brings himself—and his natural good humor—into the pulpit. Perhaps the comment I’ve heard most about Chuck’s style is his laughter. People see he’s enjoying the experience, and as a result, they enjoy it, too.
An added benefit of humor: while it’s hard to engage the emotions of a congregation, once you engage any emotion (humor, suspense, grief), it’s relatively easy to enlist the others. After laughing, it is easy for people to feel sorrow. If they’ve felt grief, it’s easier for them to laugh. In Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, he would increase the suspense by introducing laughter. After the release of laughter, Hitchcock could tighten the screw of suspense even tighter.
Humor, however, also gets us into trouble. Some humor puts people down. And even though the putdown is funny and the audience laughs, the preacher comes across, on a subconscious level, as somewhat unkind. And that works against a speaker.
Humor at your own expense, if not used too often, can be a way of getting people to respond. We like people who laugh at themselves, because they are saying, “What I’m talking about is very serious, but I don’t take myself too seriously.”
The Danger of Turning-point Stories
Another temptation resident in personal illustrations is returning too often to your spiritual turning points. How often we hear, “When I was (pick one) in the army / at my mother’s knee / having bypass surgery … “
The danger here is not boorishly retelling stories your listeners have already heard. The greater danger is that such preaching tends to focus on crisis, while in reality, life is much more of a process. When we relate dramatic turning-point stories, we give the impression that whenever God acts, he does so with the impact of lightning. Most people’s actual experience with God, then, seems to be mundane, anticlimactic, unglamorous, unreal.
As a result, people come to expect the Christian life to consist of a series of spiritual turning points. But the true skill in life lies in faithfully handling the ordinary.
The Danger of Subtle Self-promotion
Not many pastors would brag consciously in the pulpit. Not many set out to make themselves appear heroic in their stories. But even so, some ways of recounting personal incidents become a subtle form of self-promotion. And the effect is not lost on the congregation.
At times it’s done by telling about “a conversation I had with a nonbeliever,” and when the nonbeliever asks a question, the preacher tops him with a clever response, which may have been refined several times between the actual conversation and the sermon.
At other times it’s name dropping—titles of books read or important people met.
Yet other times, it’s unintentional exaggeration. After leading a chapel service for a minor league baseball team, I’m really not “a spiritual counselor for the athletes of the nation.”
Years ago, I described in a sermon how we handled family devotions. My son, Torry, was with me, and in the car on the way home, he said, “Dad, can I ask you a question about the sermon?”
“Sure.” I was honored that as a child, he was listening. Then he said, “Is it all right to say things that aren’t really true when you’re preaching?” I gently probed for more information. “Well, Dad, we’ve done what you talked about, but we only did it once or twice. You made it sound like we did it every week.” He wasn’t being rude. I had tried to look too good and sound too wise.
We fall on our faces morally when we say something happened to us when it didn’t. I was not lying consciously. I merely was attempting to make a point. But it’s an easy move from “this is what I did” (one time) to “this is how I do it” (as a regular practice). Anyone who speaks regularly recognizes how quickly you can cross that line.
And yet, not by intention but by implication, I lied to the congregation. And when somebody sits in the congregation who knows the truth (in this case. Tony), the sermon becomes a holy masquerade. In or out of the pulpit, we shall not bear false witness.
My stories must illustrate. I must avoid the other agenda that makes myself look too good or too wise. Love overlooks a multitude of homiletical sins, but once people lose confidence in your integrity, your ministry is severely damaged.
When people listen to a minister they don’t know well, they tend to ask. Is what he says true? But the more people know you, the more they tend to ask. Does he do what he’s talking about? Is the person in that illustration the person I know?
Any time we make ourselves look holy or shrewd, it’s good to test our motives with the hard question: Why am I using this? To illustrate a point? To elevate my standing? To identify with the people? Any of these may be legitimate and necessary, but self-promotion usually backfires.
Our effort to earn the admiration of the congregation can turn them against us. People may question whether we’re trying to impress them, dominate them, or set ourselves above them. The rule to follow: An illustration should illustrate the truth, not elevate the speaker.
The Power of Personal Experience
At times, the purpose of the illustration is not to offer an immediate solution. Rather, it is to reflect on the fact that this is a common human struggle with which both you and the congregation can identify. You are saying, “It’s a human condition. I understand it. I’ve been there.” You may not have resolved the dilemma, but you’re allowing people to know that you’re not preaching out of an antiseptic life. In such cases, the illustration should be carefully worded.
In one message, I said, “If you think of sin only in general, it’s like trying to envision the national debt. It’s beyond comprehension. The only way I know to understand how sinful we are is to focus on one sin and really take a look at what it is.
“Years ago when my father was living, he needed constant care, and we kept him for a time in our home in Dallas. He was confused, and he constantly opened the patio door to go out, and then turned around and came back in. Then he would go out, and come back in, and go out, and come back in. He did this twenty or thirty times in ten or fifteen minutes.
“Finally I said, ‘Dad, we’re losing the air conditioning. Could you stay in or stay out?’ He kept doing it. I went over and grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him in the eye. ‘Dad, now listen to me. Either you stay in, or you go out.’ But he just continued to go in and out.
“And I hauled off and spanked him as I would spank a small child. He looked at me. Then he opened the door to go out. And I spanked him again. At that moment, I could have killed him. I was furious.
“Here was the man who gave me life. He had raised me and loved me. And yet at that moment, I struck him in anger. What is that power of sin that resides within each of us?” I went on to discuss the reality of sin and God’s offer of forgiveness to sinful people.
I was careful with that one. The congregation needs to know whether the illustration was meant to introduce the problem, present a solution, or both. …
After sharing that story with one group, a man asked me, “How can you make yourself that vulnerable?” I didn’t consider myself vulnerable—at least not in the sense of putting myself at risk. It was self-revealing, but I hoped it also helped illumine God’s astounding offer of grace to people capable of such behavior.
But then another man said, “When I heard that story, I thought about my infant daughter, how sometimes she would cry and cry and cry and cry. I’d walk her, rock her, sing to her, but she’d continue to scream. Finally I’d find myself wanting to throw her against the wall. I’d never really admitted my fury to myself until I heard your story.” He gained a new understanding and appreciation for God’s offer of salvation.
Somehow the personal illustration enabled him to identify what he had experienced and apply God’s Word to his life.
In other cases an illustration helps a listener understand and experience the truth of Scripture. There, personal illustrations can give added power. Pastor Joel Eidsness reminisced about an outing with his daughter and plunged his people into a sermon from the Book of Revelation:
“When my oldest daughter was 7, we spent an afternoon at the city dump. Our purpose was not to dump garbage but to observe waste. I backed my Oldsmobile up against the mounds of refuse and placed my daughter on its roof. With pencil and paper in hand, I asked her to list every item she could identify. The results were astounding. There was a plastic swimming pool, a barbecue, and several old lawn chairs. There were Barbie dolls, bicycle frames, skateboards, play refrigerators and stoves, radios, televisions—everything a young girl dreams of and more.
“As we drove back into the city, we happened to pull alongside a double trailer truck. Piled high atop each trailer were five hunks of scrap metal bundled together. Had you turned any of them upside down, you probably would have found made in detroit stamped on their underbellies. They were hardly in mint condition. And yet, there they were—ten crumpled cars—magnificent object lessons for a father and daughter who at that very moment were discussing the value of ‘things.’ I can still remember leaning over and reminding my daughter that the beautiful Delta Royale in which we were riding was ultimately headed for the same scrap heap.
“That was a day Kristen and I will never forget. It was a powerful reminder that someday everything we own will be junk. In some city dump the things that have captivated our attention and dominated our lives will smolder beneath a simmering flame, amidst stinking mounds of rotting garbage. But the picture portrays not only the end of our lives and that of our children. It also portrays the ultimate collapse of human history as we now know it. History is not destined to grind on forever. It awaits—wittingly or unwittingly—the awesome and terrible judgment of God. Few chapters in the Bible describe this frightful end more pointedly than Revelation 17 and 18, and few people need to hear its message more than we Americans.”
Certainly preachers who take their lead from the Scriptures know that God loves stories. The Bible deserves a blue ribbon as one of the world’s best story books. Its narratives and parables show us what sin and faith, cowardice and courage, alienation and obedience look like dressed in skin.
While preachers are not commissioned to compete with Garrison Keillor as story tellers, we must understand the power of the phrase “for example.” Those two words promise to connect an abstract truth to the human condition. Five-star generalizers in the pulpit resemble hovercrafts that skim across the bay but never touch down anywhere. The fact that we happen to be right does not give us the right to remain up in the air, detached from the experiences of our listeners.
Real-life illustrations help us apply the truth personally—to ourselves, and to our congregations. And that, of course, is the purpose of preaching.
Copyright © 1989 by Christianity Today
