Page 53 - Homiletics I Student Textbook

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In general, you get illustrations from three sources: study, experience and imagination.

But how do you get them? Hardly by leafing through books of them, although it could happen that
you find what you are looking for. Rather you work at cultivating an awareness of similarities . . .
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[S]ome preachers constantly look for illustrations.

But however you get them, the moment of need comes as you are completing your sermon
skeleton and are looking for means to develop a given point…

Stare at it. Wait. Your mind will sooner or later suggest parallel situations. If you do not like what
comes up, push it aside and wait for something else. As you pray and then canvas your memory,
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the illustrations should come.

It is not necessary to use only true stories, so long as you don’t try to pass off the fictional stories as
having actually happened . . . All you must do is honestly indicate what you have done.

You can do so by some simple introductory phrase like, ‘Suppose a person were to . . .’ or ‘What I
am talking about would be like a person who . . .’ or even ‘You have all met people who . . .’

You see, when you make up your own stories, you may base them on real events that happened to
you, or of which you were an observer, adapting them, as necessary, to fit the point you want to
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make. They are yours from the outset; you don’t have to make them yours.

We preachers isolate an aspect of some event, conversation, perception, or relationship in our
experience, and associate it with the principle, the concept, or the proposition we wish to relate . . .
An illustration thus becomes a snapshot from life.
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Once you find a good illustration, you need to save it for the future. Here are some filing suggestions:

1. You can try to keep the illustration in memory. Most of the time, this will work for only a few days.

2. Paper files (by text, subject, or illustration title, on index cards or sheets of paper)

3. Computer files (by text, subject, or illustration title)

Never underestimate the usefulness of sermon illustrations in helping people move beyond the
theoretical to the practical. Their wise and frequent use will make the difference between a good
sermon and a great sermon.

54 Delnay, Robert G., Fire in Your Pulpit, (Schaumburg: Regular Baptist Church, 1990), 63.
55 Delnay, 63.
56 Delnay, 63-64.
57 Adams, 102-103.
58 Chapell, 179.
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