Sermon Illustrations
The Dangers of Peephole Driving
As the recent winter approached, USA Today writer Larry Copeland wrote a story about the danger of "peephole" driving. Anyone who lives in the frozen north has likely been a peephole driver at some point. You're in a hurry to get to work on time, and when you walk out into the cold you find that your car is encased in a layer of snow and ice from an overnight storm. You start the car and turn up the heater. You get out your scraper and battle to chip out a clear space on your windshield. After a few minutes you have cleared away an opening the size of a large pepperoni pizza. You are now shivering and miserable, and you realize this will take 10 more minutes. So you move to the rear window and scrape off a narrower opening the size of a small sausage pizza with extra olives and do the same with the side windows. You throw caution to the frigid winds and get in the car and drive away.
Then it hits you: you can hardly see. You drive really slow and lean up close to the windshield and peer out your peephole and hope against hope that you don't run into anyone before the heater and defrosters melt more of the ice away from your windows. Worse yet, as you peer out your peephole, you notice that other drivers are peering out their peepholes!
Copeland's article ends with this warning from the North Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles: "Peephole driving is an invitation to disaster."
Peephole driving is an apt picture of what it's like to go through life with the limited vision that comes from limited understanding and wisdom—the kind of limitations that come from not knowing the Scriptures.