Sermon Illustrations on disillusionment

“Christianity promises to make man free,” Anglican priest William R. Inge writes; “it never promises to make them independent.” Freedom and independence are polar opposites. The former leads to wellne...

Worthy goals are generally motivated by something deeper than success. In her conversations with Nobel laureates, [researcher Xiaodong D.] Lin said she has found that “they all have insatiable passion...

The Oxford scholar and apologist C. S. Lewis... once closed a lecture to a group of apologists like this:  I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologis...

Our Story starts with a person for another reason…God is the very first piece of the Christian Story because the Story is all about him. God is the central character. The Story does not start with us ...

A few days ago I met with a young couple. Their toddler was injured in a car accident. When I visited them in the hospital, the child was on life support. As we stood outside the ICU and spoke, I saw,...

In this tragic world, we are surrounded by discontented people. Every minute of the day, it is possible to see evidence of this restless discontentment in the way people respond to circumstances. Peop...

It happens sooner or later in every relationship: someone will let you down. We have a term for the earliest stages of a relationship: the “honeymoon phase”—that rosy time period when everything but d...

Psychologists tell us that one of the most difficult conditions a person can be forced to bear is light deprivation. Darkness, in fact, is often used in military captivity or penal institutions to bre...

Karyn L. Freedman points out that one of the serious effects of trauma is “the shattered worldview.” After a traumatic experience, the survivor experiences cognitive dissonance as a whole new set of b...

Scripture also speaks of “discernment of spirits” and encourages us to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God.” This aspect of discernment helps us to distinguish the real from the phony, ...

There may have been a time when people found it easy to believe anything. But we are finding it vastly easier to disbelieve anything. Both processes save the human mind from the disgusting duty of dis...

To me one of the most terrifying scenes in all of literature is in Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman . Willy Loman is a traveling salesman who feels that he is largely a failure. His self-pity...

Self-deception . . . blinds us to the true causes of problems, and once we’re blind, all the “solutions” we can think of will actually make matters worse. Whether at work or at home, self-deception ob...

The simple truth of our being gets lost in the metanarratives we spin. We become the fictions we live. Consequently, our way of being in the world is so false and unnatural that our presence is thorou...

In Annie Dillard's Pulitzer Prize winning book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, she mentioned the work of Marius Von Senden who became curious about the effect it had on people who had been born blind to...

Writer Michael Novak says that doubt is not so much a dividing line that separates people into different camps, as it is a razor’s edge that runs through every soul. Many believers tend to think doubt...

Sometimes our successes can be more devastating than our failures. We fight, strain, and struggle in pursuit of something or someone that looks to be good, and after days or months or years, we obtain...

Frustration is something that does not exist—except within the self. It translates my world to me through the filter of my own need to control it. Frustration becomes the space we put between ourselve...

On the effect of seeing for the first time after Cataract Surgery: The mental effort involved in these reasonings proves overwhelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do ...

The character Quentin from Henry Miller’s Play, After the Fall explains a life without God: For many years I looked at life like a case at law. It was a series of proofs. When you’re young you prove ...

Let’s take stock of the challenge once again: the work of spiritual transformation, by which we come to live in God in the midst of our neighborhood, is the most difficult process in the universe. Thi...

It’s important, then, to have our eyes open to this deception. How is it that so many modern promises sound true but in the end lead to our deception, or even our destruction? A long, long time ago, t...

In this short excerpt, pastor and author Austin Fischer summarizes the late 19th century book Flatland as an analogy for the often-one-dimensional faith that exists our time: tIn 1884, an English sc...

The more complicated the landscape, the more the wanderer relies on patience. The more confusing the scene, the more tolerant his outlook becomes. He not only has an awareness of his own ignorance, bu...

It is a spiritual disaster for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself. Is his life merely in his fingerprints?

Have you ever seen the movie The Sixth Sense ? Okay, I’ve actually seen only a few clips…but the movie has so permeated popular culture that even people who haven’t seen it know about the twist endin...

Thomas Merton once said, “Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self, This is the man I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. A...

For some reason I have always had a tendency to be a hero worshiper…Unfortunately I carried this tendency into my life in the church. Even those I learned to love and admire let me down. From an early...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously declared that experiencing a story—any story—requires the reader’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” In Coleridge’s view, a reader reasons thus: “Yes, I know Coleridg...

God uses our identity crises to reveal who we are and who he is. Sometimes these crises come out of nowhere. Something devastating happens. Someone close to us dies. We are diagnosed, or someone we kn...