Jesus As Master Sermon Illustrator
A joke about preachers says that whatever the preacher’s stage of life and whatever his hobbies, the whole church will certainly know as well. Every sermon illustration and every application comes from the preacher’s wheelhouse. If he has young children, you’ll hear about diapers and sleepless nights and the weight and joy of fatherhood. If Sparky went to the vet for a mystery illness, he’ll tell you. Is he a history buff? Guarantee you’ll hear about the latest Ken Burns documentary and how the Allied forces almost lost the war. And if he hurt his back in a pickleball tournament, oh brother. The updates will last for weeks.
We can laugh about this, but we’d probably prefer the rut of personal stories and applications from what the preacher knows best than the other extremes. Some preachers use no illustrations and make no applications to everyday life. Other preachers have undergrads in the humanities but make complicated allusions to astrophysics that they read about on Wikipedia. No thanks and no thanks.
Recently, two people noted that over the years our church has done little teaching and preaching about spiritual warfare and parenting. I understand why someone might say I don’t preach much about spiritual warfare. In part, it’s because I neither think about it much nor understand it as well as I should. It’s an area of growth for me.
But I’m not sure why I haven’t preached more about parenting. For the last two decades, raising six children has dominated our lives, so I have no shortage of material. Maybe part of my limited applications to parenting come from my intentional choice to only rarely tell stories about my own family. It’s hard enough being a teenager and growing up in the church, let alone being the son or daughter of the lead pastor. I might also be too afraid of losing a limb if I make a misstep as I walk through our cultural parenting minefield. I’m not sure. Or, perhaps deep down, I sense that I’m making up godly parenting as I go, a kind of Spirit-led, Bible-informed winging it. I envy those parents who always have ten solid, wise reasons for everything they do.
Regardless for the reasons I do and do not cover certain subjects, I contrast my own limited preaching with the expansive preaching of Jesus, and I marvel at his ability to address issues and experiences outside of his carpenter and rabbi experiences. We’re all aware of the agricultural material, stuff about sowing and reaping and grains of wheat, but when you really stop to notice, there’s so much more. Even though I’ve read through the Gospels a few dozen times and preached through most of them, it still amazes me to reflect on the variety Jesus employed in his teaching.
John Broadus highlights this variety in his book On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons. He was an American Baptist preacher who lived through most of the 1800s. In preaching lore, Broadus is called “the father of the expository sermon.” Reading Broadus the other week, I marveled afresh at the breadth of illustrations Jesus employed. It’s a long quote, but look at what Broadus observes about Jesus’s preaching:
One should not forget that many of the best illustrations are derived from the most common pursuits and the most familiar experiences of life. The great mass of our Lord’s illustrations are drawn from ordinary human life.
Jesus referred to sowing wheat and various circumstances which help or hinder its growth, to harvesting, winnowing, and putting in barns, to the management of fig trees and vineyards, and to bottling the wine.
In domestic affairs, he speaks of building houses, various duties of servants and stewards, leavening bread, baking, and borrowing loaves late at night, of dogs under the table, patching clothes and their exposure to moths, lighting lamps, and sweeping the house.
As to trade, he mentions the purchase of costly pearls, finding hidden treasure, money entrusted to servants as capital, lending on interest, creditors and debtors, imprisonment for debt, and tax-gatherers.
Among social relations, he tells of feasts, weddings, and bridal processions, the judge and the widow who had been wronged, the rich man and the beggar, the good Samaritan.
Of political affairs, he alludes to kings going to war; and the parable of the ten pounds (Luke 19) corresponds in every detail to the history of Archelaus as it occurred during our Lord’s childhood. The story of the prodigal son contains beautiful pictures of real life.
And who can think without emotion of Jesus standing in some marketplace and watching children at their games, from which he afterwards drew a striking illustration?
All these form only a part of the illustrative material which, in the brief records of his teaching, he derived from the observation of human life, and in nearly every case from matters familiar to everyone. The lesson is obvious, and it should be emulated. (John A. Broadus, On the Preparation and Delivery of Sermons, 4th edition revised by Vernon L. Stanfield in 1979, 186–7, paragraphs added for readability)
Spending a day reading all four Gospels, noting this variety for ourselves, would open our eyes to the fullness and diversity of the world and the people God created—all of which Jesus saw and noted. When the Bible says that he saw the crowds, and that they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a Shepard, he really saw them.
The book of Hebrews even speaks of Jesus being tempted “in every respect” (4:15). This doesn’t mean Jesus experienced every single possible temptation but that he did experience enough of the cross-section of life that he can identify and even sympathize with us. And apparently not only can he sympathize with us, but he can preach to us—all of us. Indeed, his “I am” statements appeal to all our senses. Just the statement, “I’m the bread of life,” hits sight, taste, smell, and touch.
Preachers will never have this kind of kaleidoscopic variety, not the way Jesus did. But as preachers grow in godliness and experience, would that congregations could also notice preachers growing in variety. And would that congregations could say that a pastor’s sermons became richer and more layered over time, rather than becoming myopic and narrow, another old, blowhard preacher riding his hobbyhorses into retirement. May it never be.
* Photo by Haylee Marick on Unsplash
