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This is part three of a three-part series. In parts one and two, Larson shared several skills for gleaning illustrations from everyday life, including the use of both figurative and literal speech.

Metaphorical Ability

As the previous point emphasizes, all illustrations are not metaphorical, but Jesus himself shows that metaphors can play a powerful role in preaching. Developing them is worth our time.

Metaphors compare two different things with one or more similarities. Through their differences and similarities, the one reveals something about the other.

When I look for metaphor in a slice of life, I begin by noting the feelings and connotations suggested by it, because that contributes to how metaphors give insight (again, it is both the similarities and the differences that make metaphors valuable). For example, if I call a big football player a tank, the metaphor gives understanding because it implies more than big. Lots of things are big—giraffes, buildings, puffy cumulus clouds, waterfalls—but they obviously don't suggest the same thing. Tank has associations of invincible movement, destructiveness, and unstoppableness.

Next, I break down my slice of life into its parts. To know what this thing is like, I first must know what this is. So I describe its nature and characteristics, especially its dominant, defining characteristic. Then I ask myself what it resembles.

For example, my small backyard has a power line running along the back of our property, about 10 feet off the ground. Connected to it is a power line that stretches over our yard to the house so that the two wires make a T. On one occasion, I noticed that the line stretching to our house bounced for seemingly no reason; neither birds nor squirrels had landed on it, and no wind was blowing. This piqued my curiosity. First, I noted how the bouncing power line connected to the perpendicular power line at the back of our property. Then I scanned that line from one end to the other. Sure enough, 10 yards from where the two wires joined at the T, a squirrel was walking the tightrope.

My illustration antennae sensed something, and I began considering how this could serve as a metaphor. I started with feelings. The image had mixed connotations: power lines are more or less unsightly, and squirrels can be looked on either as cute or as pests. Then I broke down what I saw: (a) an action with no immediately visible cause; (b) a connection; (c) a second related part; (d) a distant, indirect cause.

I realized the bouncing power line could serve as a metaphor of cause and effect, where the cause is not immediately apparent. This metaphor could illuminate the common situation of trying to solve a problem. Suppose a man and woman have an intelligent son who flunks classes in school. The teachers can't explain it. Neither incentives nor discipline have solved it. What the parents may need to do is "follow the power line," look for connections to other factors in their son's life not directly related to school work. Perhaps he is depressed that his mother had to resume working full-time and no longer has as much time to spend together. Or the "squirrel" may be a bully mistreating him in gym class.

Again, the key mental skill for finding metaphors is breaking down an experience to its distinctive parts, then using the pyramid of abstraction on them.

Vision

I have saved till last what may be the most important ability for gathering moving illustrations from everyday life, and that is vision. Vision sees what those lacking eyes miss. A person with inspirational vision sees uplifting things others are blind to. A person with a vision for joy or beauty, hope or purity, love or the glory of God sees these things where others do not.

For example, I have heard stories told in a way that evokes tender sympathy for a person. The preacher saw details in the subject's dress, speech, action, or facial expressions that signaled hardship and courage. He noticed these details because he had a sympathetic heart, and he communicated these details sympathetically.

We see with our heart. Whatever is in our heart, we look for around us and resonate with. A cynical person picks up constantly on the worst in those around him, while a hopeful person sees promise in a convict.

I was thinking about this principle as I sat in the park on a blistering summer Saturday, and I decided to experiment. I began to meditate on something positive and then intentionally looked for inspiring illustrations around me. I noticed an elderly woman on a walk. The heat index was well over 100 degrees, and she was using a walker. She passed under the shade of a small tree, stopped, slowly turned around, and sat on a little seat on the walker. To my surprise, after maybe three minutes she stood up, slowly turned around again, and then resumed her walk at a quick pace.

I thought: Now, there is a woman who hasn't given up. She's exercising, overcoming heat and hardship in conditions that younger people—me included—aren't anxious to exercise in. What fortitude.

I don't think I would have seen this illustration if my heart had not been tuned in to inspiration. As hot as I was feeling, I would have simply thought, That woman is going to kill herself.

Closely related to vision is imagination. Through imagination we see something in a different perspective, as I did when I saw the robin hunting worms as a vicious killer rather than a sweet harbinger of spring. Through imagination we see more than is there, or even what is not there. Imagination is an essential skill for developing metaphors, humor, and the stories used in fictional parables.

For example, in Dangers, Toils & Snares, John Ortberg writes:

When we take our children to the shrine of the Golden Arches, they always lust for the meal that comes with a cheap little prize, a combination christened, in a moment of marketing genius, the Happy Meal. You're not just buying fries, McNuggets, and a dinosaur stamp; you're buying happiness. Their advertisements have convinced my children they have a little McDonald-shaped vacuum in their souls: "Our hearts are restless till they find their rest in a Happy Meal."

I try to buy off the kids sometimes. I tell them to order only the food and I'll give them a quarter to buy a little toy on their own. But the cry goes up, "I want a Happy Meal." All over the restaurant, people crane their necks to look at the tight-fisted, penny-pinching cheapskate of a parent who would deny a child the meal of great joy.

The problem with the Happy Meal is that the happy wears off, and they need a new fix. No child discovers lasting happiness in just one: "Remember that Happy Meal? What great joy I found there!"

Happy Meals bring happiness only to McDonald's. You ever wonder why Ronald McDonald wears that grin? Twenty billion Happy Meals, that's why.

When you get older, you don't get any smarter; your happy meals just get more expensive.

Imagination comes from imagining, from creating, like children at play. The older we get, we may allow this faculty to atrophy because we play less and because imagination can certainly be abused in persuasion and storytelling (the word for imagination gone wrong is lying). But there is a great difference between lying and fiction, as well as the creative figures of speech used in literature. So imagination has a place, and it can be reawakened by the simple decision to imagine.

Listen to Max and John, and you will notice their vision and imagination.

Strength Under Control

To build muscle and gain a sense of how much illustration material surrounds you, try this exercise. Take a seat in your office or backyard, look around, and find an illustration angle for everything in your field of vision by intentionally using each principle from this article. With exercises like this, you'll find that the more you use these abilities the better you become at illustrating.

I hope you become an inspirational illustrator on par with John and Max. I also hope that your illustrations shed light on the Word, as theirs do, for great illustrators must resist one temptation. We can become so enamored with our illustrations that, in effect, they become the texts of our sermons. We can preach our illustrations rather than the Bible. Biblical preachers, on the other hand, ensure that their illustrations serve in a support role to the ideas that come from the biblical text. Often that means holding back a stellar illustration for another message.

Speaking of holding back, I conclude with one of my recent favorite slice-of-life illustrations that I have not yet been able to use in a sermon—but perhaps you can:

After several months of pain in one joint of my right thumb, I went to a hand specialist. I did not remember injuring the thumb, and I didn't want it to get worse. When the doctor came in to examine my hand, a nurse accompanied him. He sat down, greeted me, and got right to work. He looked closely at my hand, said, "Atrophy," and then said, "No." The nurse wrote on her clipboard. He named something else—an acronym like CLJ—then again said, "No," and the nurse wrote on her clipboard.

At that moment I realized he was proceeding through a checklist of possible problems with my hand. As he named the next item on the checklist, I found myself hoping, wishing, that he would again say no.

I want my thumb to be free from pain and strong all the days of my life. In the months prior to this appointment, I had begun curtailing my use of the thumb to see if that would bring it back to normal. When typing on the keyboard, for example, I started using my left thumb to hit the space bar instead of my right, thinking that perhaps that had brought on repetitive motion injury. I had to be careful how I turned the key in the car ignition. I had stopped shaking hands with my right hand. I was careful not to open bottles with my right hand. On and on.

And so it was that when the doctor again said, "No," I felt a quick sense of relief. He named another item on the checklist. I again hoped and longed for him to say no.

"No," he said. The nurse wrote on her clipboard. And so it went for some seven items. For each item on his list, he found nothing wrong, and so he finally sent me for X-rays. Minutes later, the doctor showed me the black-and-white images and said, "Here is the problem." Apparently, the ligament on one side of my joint had stretched, and the thumb had gotten out of alignment. He went on to describe treatments and to imply that this may never get better. The nurse wrote on her clipboard. This was not what I wanted to hear.

As I thought later about this experience in the doctor's office, I couldn't get over the visceral yearning I had, as the doctor went through his checklist, to hear him find no fault in my hand.

If that is so regarding my hand, which I will be using for a limited number of years on Earth, how much more when I stand before the One who judges my soul?

Like this unspectacular visit to the doctor, most daily-life illustrations are ordinary, but infused with unique power to lift heavy sermon loads. They are worth the effort to find them.

If this article has helped you, you can help me and a lot of other preachers around the world. Please write up your best illustrations and send them to me to consider for use on PreachingToday.com. If your illustration is accepted, you will receive an honorarium of $30 and the joy of knowing that multiplied thousands of people around the world were enlightened by your work. E-mail your illustration to us. Thanks!

Craig Brian Larson is the pastor of Lake Shore Church in Chicago and author and editor of numerous books, including The Art and Craft of Biblical Preaching (Zondervan). He blogs on Knowing God and His Ways at craigbrianlarson.com.