Preachers find illustrations for sermons from every sphere of life, including their own personal experiences and, of course, the hilarious things their children say.  Many pastors also glean sermon illustrations in the course of their reading as well.  I am currently reading Peter Ackroyd’s lengthy (1083 pages!) biography of Charles Dickens, entitled simply, Dickens.  Ackroyd asserts that he has read every extant piece of personal correspondence available from the pen of Charles Dickens, published and unpublished, and that is obvious from both the length and detail of information presented in book.  It is not dry or pedantic, however, but very insightful and even entertaining reading regarding the life of the beloved author some call the father of Christmas as we know it. 

As is my custom, while reading I have been highlighting and underlining various stories and comments which might be used to illustrate a point in a sermon or devotion.  I know that finding the perfect illustration for the message one is working on for Sunday can be one of the preachers most daunting tasks, so if you find something from my gleaning in Dickens which helps you in that task, I will be most pleased!

I will begin with a few illustrations and hope to add to them over time.  I am currently (4-17-12) still reading Dickens and am “only” on page 753! 😉

The first illustration might be of use to someone for an upcoming Fathers Day sermon:

Father’s Influence/Vision

In Chatham, the town where Charles Dickens spent a number of his early years, there was a house known as Gad’s Hill Place, which the young Dickens admired. 

“My father, seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, ‘If you were to be persevering and were to work hard, you might some day come to live in it …’” And so, thirty-six years later, he bought it.  Anyone who doubts the influence of Charles Dickens’ childhood upon his later predilections and obsessions may take their skepticism no further, for without doubt only a man heavily influenced by his father’s praise would spend the next thirty years of his life trying to earn it. (p. 32)

Death/Inevitable

One biographer who has studied Dickens’s medical history in some detail suggests that Dickens was “foredoomed from his youth”, the kidney stone eventually leading to a deterioration of the smaller arteries and an eventual paralyzing stroke.  But in a sense we are all foredoomed from youth, dying perhaps from the same network of disease which kills our parents and their parents before them … (p. 50)

“All things work together”

Referring to Dickens’ childhood trauma of being forced to work in a boot blacking shop, Ackroyd writes:

And yet it is often a calamity of such a kind which elicits strengths of which the sufferer may have little idea.  Dickens at least seems to have realized the fact that “all these things have worked together to make me what I am”, and in a pseudo-biographical passage of David Copperfield he makes the point more dramatically: “As the endurance of my childish days had done its part to make me what I was, so greater calamities would nerve me on, to be yet better than I was …” (p. 97)