Sermon Illustrations And Quotes

In solitude, struggles occur that no one else knows about. Inner battles are fought here that seldom become fodder for sermons or illustrations for books. God, who probes our deepest thoughts during protracted segments of solitude, opens our eyes to things that need attention. It is here He makes us aware of those things we try to hide from others.

Reading Scripture merely to look for doctrinal proof texts or sermon illustrations, rather than as the blazing Word which is alive and active, kills our spirit.

We accept what Scripture teaches as far as our doctrine is concerned; but when it comes to practice, we very often fail to take the Scriptures as our only guide. ... Dare I give an obvious illustration? The question of women preaching, and being ordained to the full ministry.

We cannot be satisfied with illustrative sermons, great music, and friendly services. We have been called to see the powers of darkness destroyed and our ruined cities restored.

one who felt himself to occupy morally that vast middle space of Laodicean neutrality which lay between the Communion people of the parish and the drunken section,—that is, he went to church, but yawned privately by the time the congregation reached the Nicene creed, and thought of what there would be for dinner when he meant to be listening to the sermon.

Instruction ends in the schoolroom, but education ends only with life. A child is given to the universe to be educated.

Jesus illustrated the principle of wu-wei beautifully in his Nature Sermon. The wild birds neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, yet they are fed; the lilies of the field neither toil nor spin, yet they are clothed. Wu-wei is not about being lazy and doing nothing. Rather, it is about following the way of nature and not wasting energy. It is about the beauty of "letting it be"!

[They] pervert the course of nature [by saying] the sun does not move and that it is the earth that revolves and that it turns. [John Calvin illustrating his opposition to heliocentrism in a sermon due to the Bible's support of geocentrism]

The following is one of the oldest sermon illustrations used in the Christian church. It also tests one’s understanding of the Christian life. There once lived an ugly, hunchback dwarf. No one ever invited him to a party. No one showed him love or even attention. He became disillusioned with life and decided to climb a mountain and throw himself from its peak into the abyss. When he ascended the mountain, he met a beautiful girl. He talked to her and discovered that she was climbing the mountain for the same purpose. Her suffering was at the other extreme. She had everyone’s attention and love, but the one she loved had forsaken her for another girl, one with riches. She felt life had no meaning for her any longer, so they decided to make the ascent together. While they climbed, they met a man who introduced himself as a police officer in search of a very dangerous bandit who had robbed and murdered many people. The king had promised a large reward to the person who captured him. The police officer was very confident: “I will catch him because I know he has a feature by which he can be recognized. He has six fingers on his right hand. The police have been looking for him for years. For the last two or three, nothing has been heard from him, but he must pay for a multitude of past crimes.” The three climbed the mountain. Near its peak was a monastery. Its abbot, although he had become a monk only recently, had quickly attained great renown for saintliness. When they entered the monastery, he came to meet them. You could see the glory of God in his face. As the girl bowed to kiss his right hand, she saw he had six fingers. With this, the story ends. Those who hear this story are perplexed. It can’t finish like this! What happened to the dwarf, the girl, the policeman? Was the criminal caught? The story’s beauty is that it does finish here. Something beautiful has happened: A criminal hunted because of his many robberies and murders has become a great saint, renowned for his godly life. All the rest is of no further interest. The great miracle has been performed. Christ has been born in the heart of a man of very low character.

Their faith may be described as childlike, but the end it serves is often sinister. It may, indeed, “keep them happy”—a phrase carrying the inescapable inference that the way of life imposed on Negroes makes them quite actively unhappy—but also, and much more significantly, religion operates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: white people own the earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it; the bad will be punished and the good rewarded, for God is not sleeping, the judgment is not far off. It does not require a spectacular degree of perception to realize that bitterness is here neither dead nor sleeping, and that the white man, believing what he wishes to believe, has misread the symbols. Quite often the Negro preacher descends to levels less abstract and leaves no doubt as to what is on his mind: the pressure of life in Harlem, the conduct of the Italian-Ethiopian war, racial injustice during the recent war, and the terrible possibility of yet another very soon. All these topics provide excellent springboards for sermons thinly coated with spirituality but designed mainly to illustrate the injustice of the white American and anticipate his certain and long overdue punishment.

Have you noticed,' she asked, straightening the counting frames to her liking before closing the cupboard doors and turning toward him, 'that at church when the clergyman is giving his sermon everyone's eyes glaze over and many people even nod off to sleep? But if he suddenly decides to illustrate a point with a little story, everyone perks up and listens. WE were made to tell and listen to stories, Joel, It is how knowledge was passed from person to person and generation to generation before there was the written word, and even afterward, when most people had no access to manuscripts or books and could not read them even if they did. Why do we now feel that storytelling should be confined to fiction and fantasy? Can we enjoy only what has no basis in fact?

VI: A SERVICE OF SONG. Some keep the Sabbath going to church; I keep it staying at home, With a bobolink for a chorister, And an orchard for a dome. Some keep the Sabbath in surplice; I just wear my wings, And instead of tolling the bell for church, Our little sexton sings. God preaches, — a noted clergyman, — And the sermon is never long; So instead of getting to heaven at last, I’m going all along!

You are the salt of the earth.” Some modern teachers seem to think our Lord said, You are the sugar of the earth, meaning that gentleness and winsomeness without curativeness is the ideal of the Christian. Our Lord’s illustration of a Christian is salt, and salt is the most concentrated thing known. Salt preserves wholesomeness and prevents decay. It is a disadvantage to be salt. Think of the action of salt on a wound, and you will realize this. If you get salt into a wound, it hurts, and when God’s children are amongst those who are “raw” towards God, their presence hurts. The person who is wrong with God is like an open wound, and when salt gets in it causes annoyance and distress and the person is spiteful and bitter. The disciples of Jesus in the present dispensation preserve society from corruption; the salt causes excessive irritation, which spells persecution for the saint.

Formulate your sermon proposition in a consequential format (“Because . . ., then . . .”). 2. Pattern the main points that will structure your entire sermon. 3. Develop the subpoints that will supplement your main points. 4. Build the transitions, paying close attention to the logic and flow. 5. Generate appropriate applications. 6. Include insightful illustrations. 7. Create your introduction. 8. Create your conclusion. 9. Compose the sermon. At

The excluded when on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true leper are only the illustration ordained by god to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying “lepers” we would understand “outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities” but we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign. Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear, or to produce, every sermon that, harking back to the words of Christ, would condemn the behaviour of the dogs and shepherds and would promise their punishment one day. The powerful have always realised this. The recovery of the outcasts demanded a reduction of the privileges of the powerful, so the excluded who became aware of their exclusion had to be branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine. This is the illusion of heresy. Everyone is heretical, everyone is orthodox. The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers.

Sermon On the Mount: "You have heard it said of old..." "Jesus was referring to the 'letter of the Mosaic law' of the OT then went on to illustrate that He embodied the fulfillment of that 'law' and that now we may walk in the 'Law of the Spirit' thereby realizing the 'liberty' He came to 'engift' us with. We therefore are no longer subject to judgement but rather Grace as we 'abide' in Him. Additionally, the 'early church' fathers of which Paul was the first are what God intended the Ecclesia to be developed and built upon". ~R. Alan Woods [2012]

Among these heavy yeomen a feminine figure glided, the single one of her sex that the room contained. She was prettily and even daintily dressed. She moved between them as a chaise between carts, was heard after them as a romance after sermons, was felt among them like a breeze among furnaces. It had required a little determination—far more than she had at first imagined—to take up a position here, for at her first entry the lumbering dialogues had ceased, nearly every face had been turned towards her, and those that were already turned rigidly fixed there.

When I was a child, I always hated being used in my father's sermons, shrunk to a symbol to illustrate some larger lesson, flattened out to give other people comfort or instruction or even a laugh. It did some violence to my third dimension; it made it difficult for me to breathe. 'That's not me,' I would think, listening to some fable where a stick figure of myself moved automatically toward a punishing moral. 'That has nothing to do with me at all.' If I had a soul, I thought, it was that resistance, which would never let another human being have the last word on me.

Their faith may be described as childlike, but the end it serves is often sinister. It may, indeed, “keep them happy”—a phrase carrying the inescapable inference that the way of life imposed on Negroes makes them quite actively unhappy—but also, and much more significantly, religion operates here as a complete and exquisite fantasy revenge: white people own the earth and commit all manner of abomination and injustice on it; the bad will be punished and the good rewarded, for God is not sleeping, the judgment is not far off. It does not require a spectacular degree of perception to realize that bitterness is here neither dead nor sleeping, and that the white man, believing what he wishes to believe, has misread the symbols. Quite often the Negro preacher descends to levels less abstract and leaves no doubt as to what is on his mind: the pressure of life in Harlem, the conduct of the Italian-Ethiopian war, racial injustice during the recent war, and the terrible possibility of yet another very soon. All these topics provide excellent springboards for sermons thinly coated with spirituality but designed mainly to illustrate the injustice of the white American and

Too many preachers have been like the cowed Israelites across the valley from Goliath, trembling at the reverberations of his authoritative voice. There have been, however, praise God, many Davids . . . who have picked up five smooth stones known as facts and hurled them with deadly aim and effect.4 He was delighted to see that his homiletic mentor confronted the issue of race: Jesus’ most effective sermon on race relations was not really a discourse on that subject at all. It was the parable of the Good Samaritan . . . the hero was a despised and unjustly treated member of another race, a Samaritan. That is indirect and superb preaching on appreciating and honoring other racial groups. Jesus did not make a frontal attack; he made a strategic flank movement. So a preacher often gets farther into the minds of his congregation, not by announcing and preaching another sermon on the Negro problem, but by using, as an illustration in his sermon on courage, a Negro performing an act of great courage. He will not have to look far for that!5

The testimony of Charles Spurgeon as to his own conversion illustrates what I have labored to explain: "One week-night, when I was sitting in the house of God, I was not thinking much about the preacher's sermon, for I did not believe it. The thought struck me, 'How did you come to be a Christian?' I sought the Lord. 'But how did you come to seek the Lord?' The truth flashed across my mind in a moment - I should not have sought Him unless there had been some previous influence in my mind to make me seek Him. I prayed, thought I, but then I asked myself, How came I to pray? I was induced to pray by reading the Scriptures. How came I to read the Scriptures? I did read them, but what led me to do so? Then, in a moment, I saw that God was at the bottom of it all, and that He was the Author of my faith, and so the whole doctrine of grace opened up to me, and from that doctrine I have not departed to this day, and I desire to make this my constant confession, 'I ascribe my change wholly to God'" (Charles H. Spurgeon, Autobiography, vol. 1, The Early Years, 1834-1859 [reprint ed.; Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 1973], p. 165).

Folks in the church just glean things about the PK’s life from sermon illustrations (and pastors wonder why kids hate being used in sermons) or from a conversation here and a passing comment there.

The Buke of Ye Chess used the game as the basis for a series of sermons on morality. Neither book illustrates play or player improvement, but uses the chessboard and pieces to ‘allegorize a political community whose citizens contribute to the common good’2.

It is simply impossible for the church to not allow some aspects of culture to come into its worship or programming.21 He explains: The minute we begin to minister we must “incarnate,” even as Jesus did. Actual Christian practices must have both a biblical form or shape as well as a cultural form or shape. For example, the Bible clearly directs us to use music to praise God. But as soon as we choose a music style to use, we enter a culture. As soon as we choose a language, as soon as we choose a vocabulary, as soon as we choose a particular level of emotional expressiveness and intensity, as soon as we choose even an illustration as an example for a sermon, we are moving toward the social context of some people and away from the social context of others. At Pentecost, everyone heard the sermon in his or her own language and dialect. But since Pentecost, we can never be “all things to all people” at the very same time. So adaptation to culture is inevitable.

The aim of the sermon—forcefully indicated by its concluding verses—is to help people come to hopeful and realistic terms with their lives here on earth by clarifying, in concrete terms, the nature of the kingdom into which they are now invited by Jesus’ call: “Repent, for life in the kingdom of the heavens is now one of your options.” The separate parts of the discourse are to be interpreted in the light of this single purpose. They are not to be read as one disconnected statement after another. One must discern the overall plan of life within which the separate parts of the discourse make sense. So far from being additional laws to crush us or show us we can’t make it on our own (of course we can’t!), the separate parts are distinct perspectives on the sweet life of love and power, of truth and grace, that those who count on Jesus can even now lead in his kingdom. “The law came by Moses, but grace and truth came through Jesus the Anointed” (John 1:17). His teachings illustrate how those alive in the kingdom can live, through the days and hours of their ordinary existence, on their way to the full world of God.

Finally, in chapter 5, we turn toward the art of the sermon, exploring ways in which an enhanced emphasis upon contextuality in preaching can also contribute to sermons that are more fitting for local congregations in regard to their language, illustrations, and form. Here preaching is likened to folk art-more particularly to a circular folk dance-in which the preacher stays close to the ground of the hearers, enfleshing the sermon in language, rhythms, and forms that encourage local hearers to want to put on their own dancing shoes and join in the dance of faith.

Focus" and "function" statements (which articulate respectively the central theological affirmation of the sermon and the sermon's intended "affect" upon the hearers) are to be prepared with specific congregations in mind, acknowledging that a shift in congregational context may well necessitate a shift in sermonic focus and function." Illustrations and examples are to be selected which can address and are reflective of the diversity of life situations and experiences congregants bring to the preaching event.

every sermon, full of Christ, that we preach, rolls away some of the mists and fogs from the surface of the planet; at any rate, morally and spiritually, if not naturally.

The New Testament itself is written that way: the risen Christ coming back at dawn to the Sea of Tiberias, Jesus with the mystery of life and death upon him, standing there on the beach saying, “Have you any fish?” (John 21:5). Have you any fish, for Christ’s sweet sake! Precisely that. The Christ and the chowder. The Messiah and the mackerel. The Word and the flesh. The first voice and the second voice. It is what the great text is all about, of course, this mystery, this tension and scandal; and the text itself, with this antiphony of voices, is its own illustration. Somebody has to do the vacuuming. Somebody has to keep the accounts and put out the cat. And we are grateful for these things to the second voice, which is also of course our own voice, puny and inexhaustible as Faulkner said. It is a human voice. It is the only voice the universe has for speaking of itself and to itself. It is a voice with its own message, its own mystery, and it is important to be told that it was not the Baptist, it was Jesus—not that one standing over there bony and strident in the Jordan, but this one with the queer north-country accent, full of grace and truth. Behold, the Baptist said, that is the lamb of God. Not this one, but that one. We need to know.

Story has staying power. We remember the illustrations from Sunday’s sermon for months afterward, but by coffee hour we’re already struggling to recite the pastor’s three main points, despite various acronyms meant to help us.

I believe it will be the experience of every man and woman on the face of the earth, I believe that everyone will be obliged to testify in the evening of life, that if they have complied with the condition, the Lord has fulfilled His word to the letter. Joshua, the old Hebrew hero, was an illustration. After having tested God forty years in the Egyptian brick-kilns, forty years in the desert, and thirty years in the Promised Land, his dying testimony was: “Not one thing hath failed of all the good things which the Lord promised.” I

Lot and Abraham are a good illustration Lot turned away from Abraham and tented on the plains of Sodom. He got a good stretch of pasture land, but he had bad neighbors. He was a weak character and he should have kept with Abraham in order to get strong. A good many men are just like that. As long as their mothers are living, or they are bolstered up by some godly person, they get along very well; but they can’t stand alone. Lot walked by sight; but Abraham walked by faith; he went out in the footsteps of God. “By faith Abraham, when he was called to go out into a place which he should after receive for an inheritance, obeyed; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By

A true development, then, may be described as one which is conservative of the course of antecedent developments being really those antecedents and something besides them: it is an addition which illustrates, not obscures, corroborates, not corrects, the body of thought from which it proceeds; and this is its characteristic as contrasted with a corruption.

for instance, a sermon from Romans on the difference between the man under law and the man under grace may not make much impact, but a story illustrating the difference, like Les Miserables, might make an impression.

Garrison explains why concreteness empowers illustrations and furthers understanding: “If I were to talk at length about my having been deeply moved by watching the setting of my son’s broken arm, this would constitute a report of my feelings. But when I describe some factors that contributed to my mood, you are brought into the experience and feel with me. To re-create a moving situation is quite different from testifying to having been deeply moved.

Crisis results from having sufficient, relevant facts to create a problem that listeners have an interest in solving and that forces them to journey through a narrative to discover the resolution found in the climax. If preachers do not bring an audience to the edge of wonder, grief, anger, confusion, fear, or discovery, then their words have no point—no hook on which to hang meaning. The internal tensions of illustrations hold a congregation because they spotlight the very types of experiences that bring people to hear the minister.

(6.) Scripture. The Scriptures present materials of illustration suited to every legitimate subject of preaching, and belonging to almost every one of the above-mentioned classes, especially history and biography, poetry and proverbs, and all manner of pointed sayings. Several causes combine to make this the best of all the sources of illustration. The material is to some extent familiar to all, and thus the illustration will be readily intelligible. Again, this material will be much more impressive than any other, because of its sacredness, and its known and felt relation to ourselves. Besides, the frequent use of Scripture illustration serves to revive and extend the knowledge of Scripture among the hearers.

The topical sermon begins with a particular matter that the preacher wants to preach about. The topic could be prayer or justice or parenting or holiness or even expositional preaching. Having established the topic, the preacher then assembles various texts from various parts of the Bible and combines them with illustrative stories and anecdotes. The material is combined and woven together around this one topic. The topical sermon is not built around one text of Scripture but around this one chosen theme or idea.

And if it be asked why the priest says Mass in Latin, an unknown tongue, instead of in the vernacular, we reply: The Holy Mass is not a sermon, it is not intended for the instruction of the people; it is the offering for them of the sacrifice of the New Testament. There are good reasons why this should be done in a language which never can change. Some languages are called dead, others living; the former are no longer in common use and are consequently unchanged; the latter are the modes of speech of the various peoples and are subject to constant variation. If the Mass were said in one of the living languages, there would be great risk that, as the meaning of words changed, the original significance of the formulas would change also, and against this danger the Church must guard. As the integral part of religion cannot be altered, so the language of religion must ever remain the same. The unity of doctrine in the Catholic Church throughout the world is beautifully illustrated by the identity of the languages she employs. In whatever part of the globe the Catholic finds himself, there the great mystery of the faith he professes is celebrated in the same manner, in the same language. And lest the ordinary Christian should reman in ignorance of the meaning of the Latin prayers of the Mass, holy Church in her maternal care for her children, provides that in the prayer-books (i.e. the hand-held missals used by the laity to follow the Mass) they should be translated into the vulgar tongue of each country.

In Acts 10–11, in the encounter of the Torah-observant Peter with the God-fearing Gentile Cornelius, we see what “fulfill” looks like for the apostles: it means some radical revisioning without abolishing. Paul’s words about accommodating himself to Gentile ways in 1 Corinthians 9:19–23 also illustrate how the apostles “applied” this claim by Jesus. Second lesson in Bible reading: looking to Jesus means following him and through him the Torah.

Yes. We were talking about those excluded from the flock of sheep. For centuries, as pope and emperor tore each other apart in their quarrels over power, the excluded went on living on the fringe, like lepers, of whom true lepers are only the illustration ordained by God to make us understand this wondrous parable, so that in saying ‘lepers’ we would understand ‘outcast, poor, simple, excluded, uprooted from the countryside, humiliated in the cities.’ But we did not understand; the mystery of leprosy has continued to haunt us because we have not recognized the nature of the sign. Excluded as they were from the flock, all of them were ready to hear every sermon that, harking back to the word of Christ, would in effect condemn the behavior of the dogs and shepherds and would promise their punishment one day. The powerful always knew this. Acknowledging the outcasts meant reducing their own privileges, so the outcasts who were acknowledged as outcasts had to be branded as heretics, whatever their doctrine. And for their part, maddened by their exclusion, they were not interested in any doctrine. This is the illusion of heresy. The faith a movement proclaims doesn’t count: what counts is the hope it offers. Scratch the heresy and you will find the leper. Every battle against heresy wants only to keep the leper as he is. As for the lepers, what can you ask of them? That they distinguish between two definitions of the Trinity or of the Eucharist? Come, Adso, these games are for us men of learning. The simple have other problems. And mind you, they solve them all in the wrong way. This is why they become heretics.

The philosopher Alvin Plantinga said it like this: Could there really be any such thing as horrifying wickedness [if there were no God and we just evolved]? I don’t see how. There can be such a thing only if there is a way that rational creatures are supposed to live, obliged to live. . . . A [secular] way of looking at the world has no place for genuine moral obligation of any sort . . . and thus no way to say there is such a thing as genuine and appalling wickedness. Accordingly, if you think there really is such a thing as horrifying wickedness (. . . and not just an illusion of some sort), then you have a powerful . . . argument [for the reality of God].7 In short, the problem of tragedy, suffering and injustice is a problem for everyone. It is at least as big a problem for non-belief in God as for belief. It is therefore a mistake, though an understandable one, to think that if you abandon belief in God it somehow makes the problem of evil easier to handle. A woman in my church once confronted me about sermon illustrations in which evil events turned out for the good. She had lost a husband in an act of violence during a robbery. She also had several children with severe mental and emotional problems. She insisted that for every one story in which evil turns out for good there are one hundred in which there is no conceivable silver lining. In the same way, much of the discussion so far in this chapter may sound cold and irrelevant to a real-life sufferer. ‘So what if suffering and evil doesn’t logically disprove God?’ such a person might say. ‘I’m still angry. All this philosophising does not get the Christian God “off the hook” for the world’s evil and suffering!’ In response the philosopher Peter Kreeft points out that the Christian God came to earth to deliberately put himself on the hook of human suffering. In Jesus Christ, God experienced the greatest depths of pain. Therefore, though Christianity does not provide the reason for each experience of pain, it provides deep resources for actually facing suffering with hope and courage rather than bitterness and despair.

Simple Bible statements, apt illustrations, and pertinent anecdotes,

Simple Bible statements, apt illustrations, and pertinent anecdotes, were the more common weapons that he used. The consequence was that his hearers always understood him. He never shot above their heads. Here again is one grand element of a preacher’s success. He must labour by all means to be understood. It was a wise saying of Archbishop Usher, “To make easy things seem hard is every man’s work; but to make hard things easy is the work of a great preacher.

Ladies and gentlemen, might I remind you that Hosea the prophet married a prostitute for the sake of a sermon illustration. You think maybe we Christians might stay married to illustrate the grace of God? You’re a bonehead and God loves you. Go and do likewise to your spouse.

Apart from explicit general application in principlizing the main parts in the exposition, the expositor is not compelled to give a set number of points of specific application before a sermon can have an appli-cational impact. That is not to say he should not make some illustrative applications, but if the text is allowed to speak fully, applications will multiply far beyond what he can anticipate as the Spirit of God takes His Word and applies it to each listener.

In one of his sermons, the Buddha described reality as a display of pearls—each pearl reflects all of the others, as well as the palace whose façade they decorate, and the entirety of the universe. This comes down to saying that all of reality is present in each of its parts. This image is a good illustration of interdependence, which states that no entity independent of the whole can exist anywhere in the universe.

The three “undervalued" components of expository sermon preparation include introductions, illustrations, and conclusions. Due to the complexities of pastoral ministry in general and message preparation particularly, pastors tend to let these three slide. The congregation, in contrast, eagerly looks forward to how its pastor will handle these elements of the message. This discussion, which intends to equip the preacher for a new level of expository excellence, is built around purposes, sources, variations, guidelines, and preparation tips for these three parts of an exposition.

Because later Christians such as Paul do not develop story parables, they are distinctive to Jesus in the NT. Most scholars of all persuasions thus usually deem the Gospels’ parables authentic to Jesus, not the sort of sayings that some scholars believe later Christians would have invented for him. By contrast, some more skeptical scholars have doubted that the interpretations of parables offered by Jesus in the Gospels were really uttered by Jesus. More recent scholarship has challenged such skepticism, however. Other Jewish parables frequently have interpretations, as Jewish scholarship on parables recognizes. It is in fact parables that lack interpretations that appear more unusual in antiquity. Parables were like sermon illustrations, but they often made little sense without being connected to a sermon. Because Jesus often offered the illustrations independently, interpreting the parables only privately to his disciples afterward (Mk 4:10–12), they served as riddles to the crowds, inviting the hearers to consider Jesus’ point. Some scholars have questioned Jesus’ interpretations particularly in cases such as the parable of the sower, where his interpretation identifies meanings for multiple points in the parable (in this case, the four soils, the birds, and so forth). This objection arose because some interpreters, reacting against the overinterpretation of parables by earlier writers, insisted on each parable having only a single point. Often Jesus’ parables do have a single main point, and many details merely contribute to the story. Comparison with other ancient Jewish parables, however, demonstrates that parables could include multiple figurative points of contact, just like the interpretations the Gospels provide for Jesus’ parables. There is no historical reason, then, to question their authenticity. ◆