It’s an important message, but I have a problem. We’re approaching the end of March, so I’m going to have more than one person thinking about the upcoming deadline for income tax returns. As I step behind the pulpit, several will be thinking, April 15 is right around the corner and I don’t have enough to cover the amount owed, so I probably need to get a loan…I need to snap them out of their distraction. I need to grab their attention with something that says, You can’t afford to miss what’s going to be said in the next forty minutes.I plan to begin Sunday’s message with “Life is often like a jungle.” I’ll say it with a deep sense of foreboding and let it sink in before continuing. When I have used a line like that in the past, I’ve seen people lean to one side to look around the person in front of them, suddenly giving me their complete attention. I’ll then follow that opening line with this illustration:
For years, I have kept close at hand a newspaper clipping about a man who fought a snake. He was hunting for deer in a remote wildlife area of Northern California when he climbed onto a ledge and whoomp!, a snake lunged at him, barely missing his neck. He instinctively grabbed the serpent several inches behind the head to keep from being bitten as the snake wrapped itself around his neck and shook its rattle furiously. When he tried to pull the reptile off, he discovered the fangs were caught in his wool turtleneck sweater…and he began to feel the venom dripping down the skin of his neck.He fell backward and slid headfirst down the steep slope through brush and lava rocks, his rifle and binoculars bouncing beside him. He ended up wedged between some rocks with his feet caught uphill from his head. Barely able to move, he got his right hand on his rifle and used it to disengage the fangs from his sweater, but the snake had enough leverage to strike again. The serpent lunged at him, over and over and over. He kept his face turned so the rattler couldn’t get a good angle with its fangs, but he could feel the snake bumping its nose just below his eye.At this point, I’m fairly certain no one will be thinking about income tax forms! The majority of the congregation may have never seen a snake outside a cage, but at this moment, all of them are fighting for their lives against a venomous enemy wrapped around their necks. And that’s exactly how I want them to feel. I will make the point that jealousy is like that poisonous snake.By using this illustration in the introduction, I will not only make the point that jealousy is hard to cast off, I hope to convince everyone that getting rid of jealousy is sometimes an urgent matter of life or death.A Good Illustration Is RealHow would you respond if I told you I made up the whole story? How would you feel about me, the points I made, and the entire sermon if I admitted that the hunter doesn’t exist and his life-or-death struggle never took place?
