The NOW Podcast (Practical Advice for New Pastors) Episode 08: How to Find Sermon Illustrations

Sermon Illustrations as “Meat on the Bones”

Welcome to Not Only Water. This podcast is dedicated to providing practical advice for new pastors. In 1 Timothy 5, verse 23, Paul tells Timothy to drink not only water, but to use a little wine for his stomach's sake.

This short piece of practical advice is the inspiration for this series. Get ready to dive into today's topic. Here's your host, Keith Foskey.

Welcome back to Not Only Water, practical advice for new pastors. My name is Keith Foskey and I am your host. We've talked in previous episodes about how to put together a sermon. We've talked about how to go out and get commentaries and resources and what it looks like to research things.

And we've talked about observing the text and creating your own observations from the text. And we've talked about how to begin to interpret based on those observations. And then we've talked about how to apply the text.

And all of that's been what we've worked on so far as practical application for young pastors, new pastors, who are having to do sermon preparation every week. That's what this show is all about, just helping you to learn how to do that week in and week out job of preparing to preach.

The old joke is that ministers only work one day a week. But if you were a man who was preaching the word of God on Sunday, maybe a couple of times on Sunday and on Wednesday nights, then you know that your work is more than just one day a week because you're mining the texts of scripture.

You're pulling out the truths of the scripture. You're preparing to present those truths in such a way that the people of God can receive them and apply them in their own life by the power of the Holy Spirit.

So all of that is important. But today we're gonna begin to talk about putting meat on the bones. That's what old pastors I've heard talk about. Well, you've got the structure of the message. You've got the outline.

You've put the sermon together. You know where you're going. And I talked in an earlier message about your introduction and conclusion and all those things. You know that. But now you're gonna ask the question, how do I put meat on this?

How do I really drive home these points and what illustrations can I use to really make these points understandable, relatable, and applicable to the people that are listening? So today we're gonna talk about the subject of illustrations.

We're gonna talk about illustrations that are good. We're gonna talk about illustrations that maybe are not so good. We're gonna talk about how to look at our message and create messages that are illustrated well.

We're gonna talk about putting meat on the bones. So the first thing I wanna mention is that this has not been consistent for me in the way that I've done it from the time I began preaching to today because I have more experience now and therefore I have more illustrative material to draw from now than I did when I first began.

Using Illustration Books and Marking Useful Quotes

So one of the things that I did early on in my ministry is I actually got books that were intended to help put together illustrations for particular subjects that I was talking about. And I brought one of those books with me today.

I actually had, I've had this book since I first started preaching. I think I purchased this book from the Paxson Christian Bookstore, which was over on Normandy Boulevard here in Jacksonville. And so I've had this book for a long time.

And if you were to look at this book, and I know you can't really see it, but if you were to look, you would see that there are many pages that are dog-eared. And I know some of you bibliophiles out there, you don't like to see somebody who dog-ears books, but I do, and I know that I probably lost some of you on that because you don't wanna hear that.

But I write in books, I dog-ear books. If you ever see a book that I've read, it's well-worn and well-used. And what you'll notice is that as I was reading through this particular book, I would mark a page for a specific subject or a specific illustration, or on some of the pages, you'll actually notice that I've drawn lines and circles around certain ones.

And I know you can't really see this from your vantage point, but like right here, I actually wrote notes. And again, these notes are probably 15 years old. I wrote funny, sad, and good advice. And these are all on the subject of church.

And that's what this book is. It's called McKinrey's Stories for the Soul by Raymond McKinrey. And it's basically just a book of stories. And so each of these illustrations is intended to give some kind of way to draw a picture in the minds of your listener, some way to help them to see what you're talking about and have a visual of what you're talking about.

Or maybe you might use an illustration as your introduction or your conclusion, something to either get a point started or to drive a point home. And again, I haven't looked at these in years. So I'm gonna read a couple.

So this is one that I marked as funny. Now, I don't know if I'll find it funny 15 years later, but this is what it says. It says about the church, "'Churches can be like Noah's Ark. "'If it were not for the storm outside, "'you could not handle the stench inside.'".

That's pretty funny. That's Howard Hendricks, one of my favorite teachers said that. "'Churches can be like Noah's Ark. "'If it were not for the storm outside, "'you could not handle the stench inside.'".

That's a pretty good quote. And that might be something, if you were talking about difficulties in the church, if you were talking about the structural, or not structural, but social problems that deal with, church is filled with people, people are sinners, therefore church is always dealing with problems.

And so you might come and find yourself in need of an illustration like this. You might be preaching on issues within the church and say, you know what? It's better to be in the church than not be in the church.

It's like being on the Ark. It's better if, you know, there are storms outside, it's better to be on the inside. And sometimes the storm outside helps us to be able to handle the stench inside. See, all I did was I took the same quote and just sort of put it in my own words.

And I probably would have said something to the effect of, like Howard Hendricks used to say, and then I would quote this from the book. The very next one down, it says, sad. Now, again, I haven't read this in a while.

It says, 80 of church growth in the United States results from transfer of membership. Boy, what a thought that we're not really seeing churches grow based upon conversion, but rather we're seeing churches grow based upon dissatisfaction.

Because why do people go from one church to another? Usually it's because of dissatisfaction. And that's a real serious issue to think about, that many churches are growing not out of conversion, but rather out of dissatisfaction with other churches.

And so this book is not where I would start to write a sermon. I wanna say that very, very clearly. I don't go and find a great illustration and then build a sermon around that. What it is is I have a sermon that I've already constructed the outline.

I've already constructed the bones. And this helps me simply to put some meat on the bones. This helps me to, okay, I'm preaching about the church. I can open up this book and there are, let's see, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16.

There's multiple pages. There's well over 20 different illustrations regarding the church. Here's a few on Christmas. Here's a few on commitment. Communication. Communication has a couple of pages. Compassion has a couple of pages.

And again, if you're young or new to the ministry, maybe you are teaching and you're teaching through a book of the Bible, you come to a subject that you don't have as much life experience to draw from to provide illustrations.

And this book can help with that. And again, I'm not trying to get you to go run out and buy McKendree's story for the soul, but I can tell you I'm proof that this can be used. As you can see, I have used this book over the years and I'm gonna say, I don't do it as much now.

In fact, it's been years since I've touched this book because my method for drawing out illustrations has sort of evolved. But this is a wonderful resource when you first get started. And again, back when I was 25, 26 years old and I just started preaching full-time, I started preaching full-time January, 2005.

And when I had just started preaching full-time, I needed as much help as I could get in the production of sermons. And again, I was preaching two or three times a week every week. And if you think 45 minutes per sermon, 35, 45 minutes back then, now I'm more of a 45, 50 minute sermon, but back then it was 35 to 45 minutes was a standard sermon.

But that's still an hour and a half or more of material if you're preaching two or three times a week. And so this is simply giving life to these ideas and these thoughts and giving illustrations and how this works and what this looks like in real life.

And so I would draw from books like this and I had several of them. There was also websites that provided good illustrative material. Sermoncentral .com was a place that I actually contributed to a lot in my early ministry because I would write sermons and I would send those sermons into Sermon Central and Sermon Central would publish them on the website and other ministers would be able to go in and look at those sermons and get ideas and borrow outlines and things.

And we're gonna talk later in another episode about plagiarism. I wasn't trying to encourage plagiarism even though I did find out later that there were men who were plagiarizing my sermons because I actually got calls from their churches.

Hey, did you write this sermon? Yes, I did. That's a story again for another time. The point is putting that information out there, it was doing sort of what I'm doing now, but early on I wanted to be a blessing to other ministers and I wanted to draw from other ministers' experiences as well.

So I would go on Sermon Central and if I were preaching in John chapter three, I would go and see how other men had outlined the text, how other men had preached the text and it was a way to help me formulate ideas and put meat on the bones and even to help me structure the outline because that was new to me and something I hadn't done before.

So all of this is simply to say, we have tools that are available in print, we have tools that are available online, Sermon Central, you can just go and look up just illustrations. If I came up with a good illustration or I found a great quote, I would post just that under the illustrations portion or I would post my outline under the outline portion and those are still available.

I believe sermoncentral .com is still out there. There are whole websites dedicated to sermon illustrations that you can go and look for. It doesn't have to come out of this book but the one good thing about having a book like this to start with is you can sit through it at night and you can just sort of thumb through these stories and they're like little mini adventures.

You can just sort of thumb through this and find, wow, this is a wonderful story about missions, this is a wonderful story about ministry, this is a wonderful story about mistakes. This is funny, this is Ivan Ball.

I just pulled this up. This is on mistakes. This is a quote. It says, some people learn from the mistakes of others but most of us are the others. I thought that's pretty funny. And so this is, this again is just a tool.

It's not intended at all to replace the word. It's just intended to help you in putting your sermons together. Now, I said, I don't really use books like this anymore and I don't even really use the website too much anymore.

So where am I drawing illustrative material from now with a little bit more experience, a few more years under my belt? What am I doing now that's different? Well, primarily now what I try to do if I can, and I should have been doing this earlier on, so I'm telling you this as a new pastor, these types of books are great but the greatest illustration book in the world is the Bible.

And so what I try to do now is I try to find illustrations that are biblical to be able to draw from. So I'll give you an example of what this looks like. Last Wednesday night, just actually it was last night because I'm doing this on a Thursday.

Last night I preached on Proverbs chapter five. Proverbs chapter five is on fleeing the forbidden woman, beware of the forbidden woman, the woman who will try to drag you down into sexual immorality. So I wanted to introduce this sermon with an illustration.

So I introduced the sermon with the illustration of Samson and Delilah. I said, here's a man who is considered to be one of the strongest men in history, certainly within the Hebrew scriptures, the strongest man who's ever lived, he was able to beat entire armies by himself.

This was a man who was powerful in all of the physical ways but he was weakened by the lust of the flesh and the desire for sexual immorality. And so here's a man who is powerful in all ways except one.

He's not powerful in regard to his lust. And so that begins the sermon, that leads me into the message to talk about Solomon's warning about the dangerous woman whose lips are sweet and her words are smooth like oil.

And this is the woman who is gonna lead you down to the pit if you follow after this forbidden woman. And so that was an example, an illustration that I didn't draw from a illustration book but rather I drew it from the scriptures.

And the way that you're going to be able to increase your ability to draw illustrations from the scriptures is spending your time in the scriptures, spending your time reading the scriptures, reading the Old Testament, reading the New Testament, reading the narratives and making notes for yourself.

Okay, I'm reading through the Old Testament and I come across this narrative and this is just in my daily Bible reading, I come across a narrative and I say, boy, that is a good example of this, whatever this illustration is, let's say Samson Delilah, that's a good example of lust overtaking a man and him failing as a result and falling as a result.

So here it is, I can use this illustration in a sermon where that is the subject, where that's the focus. And again, this can be done in various different ways. Now you wanna be careful though, because it is important that we understand that the Bible is not allegory.

So we don't want to allegorize texts in a way that would make someone think that the text that we're citing or the illustration that we're citing is somehow mythical or untrue. We don't wanna turn the true stories of scripture into parables, that is not what they're intended to be.

But they can be good illustrative material. Certainly David is an example of a man who had genuine repentance. And we see that in Psalm 51, where he repented of his sin with Bathsheba. And so if you're preaching on repentance, if you're preaching on turning from sin and recognizing sin and repenting before God, what better example is David's repentance for his sin with Bathsheba, having been confronted by the prophet Nathan.

So right there, you have multiple places in scripture that you can draw from. You can draw from the Psalm, that is his prayer of repentance. You can draw from the story, which is about his repentance.

And so let's say you're in a New Testament passage that's on the subject of repentance, and you want to draw in an illustration that is going to drive the point home. Well, there's your illustration right there.

So my recommendation to you now, as I said, as I have evolved, is these books can be valuable, but the scripture is always more valuable. And another place to go that is often overlooked, if you're looking for illustrative material, is hymn books and songs.

Songs of the faith often have words within them and expressions within them. This coming Sunday, I'm going to be preaching about Joseph before Pharaoh, interpreting Pharaoh's dreams. And I'm going to be talking about the fact that he said, when Pharaoh said, I understand you can interpret dreams, and Joseph says, no, I can't do that.

God will give you an interpretation. Essentially what Joseph is saying is, it's not me that's going to do this, it's God who's going to do this. That is such an important distinction. And it makes me think of the Apostle Paul in the New Testament.

In the New Testament, the Apostle Paul said, it's not I, but Christ in me. Okay, that's a passage that I can use as a cross-reference, but even more than that, there's a song that we sing in our church, yet not I, but Christ in me, I think is the name of it or something to that, but it's that song.

And so what I did as I was preparing the sermon, as I went out and I found that song and I looked through the lyrics of the song and I found a verse of that song that really expresses the idea of what we're learning here when Joseph says, it's not me, it's God.

And the one who's going to give you this interpretation is God. This reminds us whenever we're, whenever we are expressing our gifts before men, we need to always remember that any gift that we have, any talent that we have, any ability that we have is ultimately God working through us.

It's God who does these things, not us. So those are all just ways that we can look at the scriptures, that we can look at books like this, at hymnals as ways to draw and get illustrations for our sermons.

Cautions About Family, Church Members, and Self-Exalting Illustrations

Now, I want to leave you with a little bit of a warning. Where should we avoid illustrations? Because there's all kinds of places you can draw from, things I didn't mention. Like you can mention news of the day, if there's something that happens to be relevant to something that you're preaching on, there's nothing wrong with mentioning that.

However, you don't want to make, you don't want to build your sermons on newspaper articles or things like that where like the news of the day is the sermon. I would caution against that. But another place to be careful of is illustrations from within your family or within your church family.

So, and there have been times where I have done this and I've looked back and said, that was probably not very wise. And the old joke is, I even have a shirt, my wife bought it for me, I should have worn it for the program today.

The shirt says, I'm a pastor, beware or something, no, it says, warning, I'm a pastor, anything you say or do can be used in a sermon. And that's a joke in our family is, oh, that's going to end up in a sermon or oh, that's going to end up in a sermon.

But the reality is I don't try to do that. I consciously try not to make my family objects for the sermon and certainly not to try to make myself an object of the sermon. Because that takes away from me pointing towards Christ.

If I become the hero of the story, Christ is always the hero, Christ is the savior. Keith Foskey is not the savior, you're not your people's savior, you need to be pointing them to Christ. So if you're going to tell a story where you end up being the superhero, you're the one with the big S on your chest and Christ is diminished and you're exalted, then you've missed the point and you've made yourself the hero and rather than Christ.

Or on the other hand, a warning even more is if you embarrass someone in your family. Oh, you know, my children are always X and Y or my wife, she's always X and Y. That can be dangerous as well because you can begin to breed animosity within your family unintentionally because your children, your wife begin to think, okay, I can't do anything that dad's not going to call me out for from the pulpit.

And that is, that's a no, that's a no go guys. We gotta be careful that we don't never, that we never try to embarrass our family or make a joke that would later be hurtful for our family. So keep that in mind when you consider the idea that yes, you are at times going to reference your family.

I referenced the love I have for my wife and I've talked about trips we've been on, things like that, those are fine. But again, making yourself the hero or embarrassing someone in your family should be an absolute no in your mind as you're thinking through illustrations.

And the same goes for other church members as well. Church members and friends that are in the church, be careful because you have lives with these people and you have a ministry to these people. If they don't feel like they can tell you things, if you're not gonna repeat them, that's bad.

And if you, well, this brother was telling me the other day about this, you know, hopefully we wouldn't be that foolish as to repeat something like that. But I have certainly seen some really, really bad examples of ministers either oversharing in the pulpit or using a person example.

Somebody comes up afterwards, you were talking about me and the pastor knows he was talking about them. It's one thing to have somebody come up to you after the sermon and say, pastor, I think you were talking about me and say, no, I wasn't, I didn't have any idea.

I just was giving the illustration, I had no idea this affected you. But it is something else. If you know there's a person in your church and you're talking directly to them from the pulpit or using their name in the pulpit, that's not right.

The pulpit is not a place for bullying and we have to be very cognizant of that. So again, the primary place I would recommend you pulling illustrations, first and foremost, the scriptures. If you can pull illustrations from the scriptures, use those to drive the point home that the Bible is sufficient for everything.

Outside of that, good Christian songs, spiritual songs, hymn books, those are wonderful. Tools like this book, McKendree's Stories for the Soul. This is useful and can be helpful. And again, stories from your own experience can be good.

Just be careful making yourself the hero or embarrassing members of your family or your church. So that's my thoughts on the issue of how to illustrate your sermon, how to draw in and put meat on the bones.

I'm gonna be talking about more of these things as we go along through this series. And I wanna remind you, if you have a question, especially if you're a new pastor and this has been a benefit to you and you have questions about things you want me to address in the future, please email me at calvinispodcast at gmail .com.

Thank you for listening to Not Only Water. My name is Keith Foskey and may God bless you and your ministry.