The Power of Sermonic Illustration

“We human beings find it very difficult to handle abstract concepts; we need to convetrt them either into symbols (as in mathematics) or into pictures. For the power of imagination is one of God’s best and most distinctive gifts to mankind . . . Illustrations transform the abstract into the concrete, the ancient into the modern, 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, Between Two Worlds, pp. 238-239)