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Wiersbe is an unusual person. He is an expositor who believes in imagination. While the two have not always coexisted in homiletic writing, Wiersbe takes care to show how the imagination is a critical element through the Scriptures themselves. While not strictly dealing with the application or the final movement of the sermon, this book does champion the imagination as a meaningful part of the contemporary sermon.
Some exerpts…
“If we have learned anything else,” wrote Norman Cousins in his book Human Options, “it is that the ideas of the poets and artists penetrate where everything else has failed.” (17)
It takes time to paint pictures. It takes time for our listeners to see those pictures and in their imagination place themselves in the scene. ... I fear that too many of us who speak professionally – and this includes schoolteachers, politicians, and university lecturers as well as preachers – have the wrong idea of what it means to deliver a message. Too often we are guilty of unconsciously accepting what Michael J. Reddy calls “the conduit metaphor.” We envision ourselves as fountains of knowledge and our listeners as empty receptacles ready to receive what we know. As we speak, our words are supposed to build an invisible conduit between us and our listeners, so the information we have automatically moves from one mind to the other, and communication is successful. To “conduit speakers,” thoughts are “things” that are “contained” in “words” and transferred to “minds” by the spoken word. ...
If you don’t respond to the picture of a sermon as a “conduit,” try seeing your sermons as “conveyer belts.” You study hard all week, do your exegesis, apply all the rules of hermeneutics, and come up with a lot of helpful biblical material that you want your congregation to know. You organize it on your homiletical “conveyer belt” and, as soon as the choir finishes its anthem, you throw the switch and start the belt moving. All of this marvelous material passes from the pulpit to the pew and the worshipers are supposed to pick it up and make it their own. But it just doesn’t work that way. (19-20)
Imagination is the image-making faculty in your mind, the picture gallery in which you are constantly painting, sculpting, designing, and sometimes erasing. “God is the Supreme artist,” Clyde S. Kilby reminds us; and since we are made in the image of God, we share in His creative ability. That creative gift resides for the most part in the imagination. Dwight E. Stevenson defines imagination as “the capacity to see old and familiar things in new associations from new perspectives, to combine things not previously put together.” ... (25)
This isn’t a plea for the abandonment of an intelligent and reverent critical study of the Scriptures, using all the helps we can get. I’ll have more to say about this later, but I want to assure any troubled seminary professors reading this book that I do not in any way advocate eliminating biblical languages, exegesis, hermeneutics, or homiletics from the curriculum. I’m only asking that we include something that’s been left out for too long: the proper use of a sanctified imagination in the study and preaching of the Word of God. (39)