“Every preacher must be constantly on the lookout for illustrations. Not that we read books and listen to people only to collect sermon material!”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 65
Brim Full
“Radavic couldn’t quite catch what he was saying, but Bradford could see the prosecutor’s neck get bigger. He had never seen a neck so full of righteousness” ().
Not That Simple
Introduction: Within the last few weeks, Scott Clark circulated a quote from Southern Slavery as It Was, and then Anthony Bradley retweeted it. As a consequence, that whole business got chased around the ...
Audio Reading of Post
Covenantal Obligation
The late public intellectual Roger Scruton once observed that the difference between the conservative and the progressive visions is that the conservative believes in unchosen obligations while the progressive believes that choice is the foundation for all obligations. We have seen in recent years that this dogma even extends down into one’s biological sex. If …
Shaped by Our Worship of Him/Ps. 115
The Twelfth Decade of Psalms: Introduction: God alone is the God of all glory, and so we must turn to Him in order to bless Him alone. And when we give glory to Him, He in His divine grace has fashioned the world in such a way as to allow us to become a reflected …
Making Illustrations Walk on Their Hind Legs
“Illustrations transform the abstract into the concrete, the ancient into the present, the unfamiliar into the familiar, the general into the particular, the vague into the precise, the unreal into the real, and the invisible into the visible” ().
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, p. 63
With a Big Spatula
“The judge told the bailiffs to get a medical spatula crew, scrape Mr. Warner off the floor of his courtroom, and take him somewhere else.”
The Lost Virtue of Sexism
Last Tuesday night I spoke on the campus of the University of Idaho on the subject mentioned above. There were some protesters there, and I want to thank the UI for the excellent job they did on security. The protesters worked hard at being a nuisance (clickers, rustling papers, dropping things, etc.), but I was …
Any of Her Friends Could Have Told Her That
Use All the Crayons in Your Box
What we put in words we must always supplement with images or illustrations. The word ‘illustrate’ means to illuminate, to throw light on a dark object, and this is what our sermon illustrations should do. People find it very difficult to handle abstract ideas; we need to convert them either into symbols (as in mathematics) or into pictures.”
Stott, The Challenge of Preaching, pp. 62-63