The Curious Case of the Illusive Illustration

When you find a good illustration, determine which topic it describes. Type the topic into a cell in the first column of an Excel worksheet. Excel allows selected sets of cells to be alphabetized. Being able to sort illustrations by topics in alphabetical order puts all your material into easily accessible order.  

Into the cell of the second column, type the name of the speaker. Record the source of the illustration with bibliographical information in the third cell. The fourth column allows you to note the date you found the illustration so you can cull old illustrations from your database.

The illustration itself goes in the fifth column. It can be typed or copied and pasted from another location, Web site, e-mail or document. (Hint: Paste copied data into the active cell of the formula bar to avoid having information placed in multiple cells.) The illustration can be as large as you need without unduly distorting the appearance of the worksheet. Simply format the cell to “wrap text.” If the height of the row becomes unwieldy, format the row height to “13.”

Hyperlinks provide another option for larger illustrations, scans of magazine articles, sections of books, maps or pictures. Simply save the scan, jpeg picture or other material into a Word document or other file. Right-click on the active cell into which you want to create the hyperlink and click on “hyperlink” in the drop-down menu. This simple box allows you to hyperlink the cell to the document saved elsewhere on your computer. You also can hyperlink directly to a Web page that has a story, statistic, quotation or other illustration. Of course, you risk the good chance that the provider may change the Web site, and you’ll lose your content.

Put the date and place you use the illustration into the sixth cell. You may want to use the illustration again—but not at the same church. People may forget your sermons, but they will remember good illustrations. Finally, if you want to associate this illustration with a particular biblical text, type the textual reference into the seventh column.

As you add rows of illustrations, you can find illustrations by alphabetized topic or by searching for specific words within an illustration. Using the edit function of Excel, click on “find” and simply type the key word for which you are hunting.

You can view the entire illustration by clicking on the active cell. The formula bar will open a box with the whole text available for viewing, editing or copying and pasting into a Word document containing your sermon outline.

Don’t Save Junk in Your Trunk

Once you have a database to store sermon material, make sure what you save is worth the effort. Too many sermonic illustrations are weak and only remotely relate to the textual point. Determine to locate, save and use only the most powerful illustrations.

Illustrations are meant to connect people with the exposition or the application of sermonic points. A good illustration does more than shed light on an idea; it moves people emotionally and intellectually. Unfortunately, like Pastor Holmes, the average preacher relies on personal experiences, stories from church history, quotations from long-departed preachers or scriptural references.