A few weeks later, I was sitting on the front pew on a Sunday morning, just moments away from preaching. Thinking through the sermon and my impending delivery, suddenly a thought came to me, a point that I wanted to add. Maybe I was just looking for an excuse to use my pen, but I effortlessly reached a hand into my coat pocket and unholstered my elegant writing instrument. Uncapping it, I began to record on my sermon outline my last-minute flash of brilliance when, to my abject horror, my $500 pen would not write. I scribbled, shook it, tapped it, and tried again, but with the same fruitless results. All that was left on the paper was the indentation of my increasingly frustrated pressure on the gold nib. Finally, I the beast to see what foreign matter might be impeding the flow of the cobalt blue blood through its noble artery. No ink. Not a drop. It was at that moment that an obscene thought pierced through my mind and hit me right between the eyes. An S. T Dupont Chinese black lacquer Orpheo fountain pen that has run out of ink is no more helpful than a broken Bic.

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A couple of Sundays later I was preaching from a passage in 2 Timothy in which Paul commends his friend Onesiphorus for the way he refreshed him with his presence after tenaciously seeking him until he found him, even in the great metropolis of Rome. I was struck by the way Onesiphorus hardly appears in Scripture. If Paul did not mention him in 2 Timothy, he would be completely unknown and unsung to us today. But simply because of his friendship, the way he refreshed Paul like a cool breeze on a hot summer afternoon, he is immortalized in the pages of Scripture. I was looking for a way to get that point across, urging my listeners that they, too, had to leave a legacy of friendships and rich, refreshing relationships if their lives were to be remembered and treasured after their passing.

So I asked, "How can I really picture the importance of friendship? What image can I present to them that captures how empty their lives will be without real relationships?" So I began to think about the words empty and useless in the context of friendships, but it took me to the "empty, useless" Dupont. All my studies in 2 Timothy 1:16-18 made me confident that I had a handle on the conceptual aspects of the text, but now I needed to move to the perceptual. I had to explain the text in a way that gripped them and pinned their minds to the meaning of the text. I knew that in the story of the pen, I had an image that could make my congregation visualize a life without meaningful relationships.

So after working through the text, explaining its context, its content, the applicational concern that it required in us, I closed the sermon with one final exhortation to be an Onesiphorus for someone, to refresh someone as he had refreshed Paul. Then I told the story of my Dupont. I told it much like I wrote it above, but with all the added visual cues that oral communication affords. At the end of the story they were laughing and smiling at my affection for this pen that would not write because, for all of its fine craftsmanship, it was out of ink. I let the laughter subside, a pause hang in the air, and then I said, barely above a whisper, "Friendships are the ink of life, the indelible substance with which we write our legacies. You can drive a fine car, live in a palatial estate, and enjoy every material possession imaginable, but if you are never a true friend to others, if your entrance into a room never lightens the load or alleviates the pain of others, you will die without a legacy, as meaningless as a pen without ink."

While that story is not dramatic, it is effective because it sneaks up on listeners. They aren't really sure where the story is going until I draw the parallel at the end, but when I do, it makes sense. The experience is common enough and simple enough that listeners can relate. While not many people have a Dupont pen, everyone has tried to write with a pen that has run out of ink. Connecting that with the legacy that we leave, the legacy that Onesiphorus left, simply works. The response to that sermon, especially to that illustration, was overwhelming. It made that emotional connection — reaching the heart first — that is prerequisite to reaching the mind.

Excerpted from Preaching with Bold Assurance by Hershael W. York and Bert Decker. Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers. Copyright 2003. Used with permission.

Hershael W. York is Associate Professor of Christian Preaching at the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.