Sermon Illustration: Great Quote

Okay, so this may not be a good sermon illustration. However, I have a pretty good feeling you (preacher) can use this somewhere. In a sermon. In an article you write. In a talk you give. In a counseling session in your office. For the good of your own soul. This is one of the best paragraphs I have read in a while. Winn Collier wrote this in chapter 6 of his book Holy Curiosity: Encountering Jesus’ Provocative Questions.

Enjoy.

Jesus did not come to help us maneuver around our brokenness; Jesus came to enter our brokenness with us. The gospel is not a therapeutic system tooled for enhancing our ability to cope by believing hard enough and smiling big enough and quoting just the right mixture of Bible verses so we can distance ourselves from our negative emotions. The gospel is the story of the world as it actually is, our lives as they actually are. The gospel tells us we are broken, more broken than we know, and that our world is in shambles. Jesus does not encourage us to ignore what we have lost, but rather to mourn it, to feel deep sorrow over the devastation we were never supposed to know. The gospel instructs us to want and wait and hope for God to make the world right again. We do not need a God removed from our destruction and insisting we are all okay. We need a God who knows in his bones how sick we are and who will not leave us to ourselves. We need God to rescue us.

Amen.