Last week I was talking to an Elder from a church I have often preached at and he told me that a couple of Sundays previously he put a can of cream on the lectern and said to the congregation, "What are we going to look at this morning?" Apparently there was a quick response with people shouting, "Ephesians 1". I was again reminded that preachers often lament the fact that their illustrations are remembered long after the point of the illustration has been forgotten. Perhaps my saddest example of this was when I was preaching in Brighton, years ago, about Paul's imprisonment in Caesarea. I observed that Paul kept being brought in for trial or examination but without a verdict being reached, it was as though he never got to the front of the queue. I likened it to waiting in a supermarket queue where you forever seem to be waiting to get to the front and pay, but the queue is slow, people in front of you are given the bill and then seem astonished that they have to pay and start slowly looking in purses or wallets for money, and then the till operator has a change of shift and you wait again, and then the till roll runs out and has to be changed....
The temptation is always to change queues, but I've learnt over the years by bitter experience that this never works, because as soon as you change queues the one you are now in slows to a crawl while the queue you've just left sails through in moments. As a passing piece of pastoral advice I therefore said, "Whatever happens, don't change queues." I've found over the years that no-one remembers the context but that time and again someone will say to me something like, "I was queuing in the supermarket the other day and it was so slow that I decided to change queue, but then I remembered that John Hosier once said, 'Don't change queues'." Was this really the best bit of pastoral counsel I ever gave?
In Ephesians 1 Paul speaks of 'the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us...' and I have often illustrated this by the fact that I love eating strawberries and cream in the summer. It's possible to buy a can of cream, push the button at the top and spray the cream lavishly over your strawberries (the more you can hide this from your wife then the more lavish you can be). So I tell the congregation that in heaven God holds an enormous can which is marked 'grace', that he has his finger permanently on the button and pssssh he constantly sprays us with his lavish grace. Needless to say I act this out at the same time. It's a very simple illustration but more than any other that I've ever used it is the one that people still mention to me, sometimes many years after they first heard it. But here's the thing, they also remember the point, it was an illustration about God's lavish grace. An illustration whose point is remembered - it must be the grace of God.