Yesterday I ate some chips. During the sermon. That I was giving.
It was a fairly simple illustration: You can’t eat just one chip. Sit down at a Mexican restaurant. Get that basket of chips. You’re gonna chow down. But every chip has a consequence. Google says a single chip is, on average, 14 calories.
Sin is like that. You can’t stop at just one. And every sin has a consequence. Just one sin has a consequence! If you keep the whole Law, every commandment of God, but break it at one point, you’re guilty of breaking all of it. And let’s be honest: We don’t stop at one sin.
And as I talked about it, I brought a basket of chips out. I started chomping on them throughout the sermon. And people got it. The illustration stuck. They talked about it after church.
(By the way, the point of the sermon was that our hope isn’t that we fight temptation, but that Jesus did. He defeated temptation, and he gives us his record!)
A good illustration can go a long way. A few weeks ago someone asked me about living as foreigners in this world. What does that mean?
And I explained it was like Harry Potter. Harry lived with the Dursleys. They were jerks and preoccupied with being normal. Now, Harry still lived with them, but he was nothing like them. He lived among them as a foreigner.
We should be like that. We live in this world, but we belong to a different family. We belong to God’s family.
And maybe you noticed… but I’m a bit of a geek. What’s fun is that the person I was talking to is also a geek. She got it!
So yeah. Just some fun illustrations. Do you have any illustrations that have stuck with you that explain a spiritual concept?
Ordained for Growth 