112 Sermon Illustrations on Attitude

We are hearing much today about the tremendous importance of young people. We are all impressed by that importance, but the attitude adopted today-that it is impossible to do anything with grown-up people, is very discouraging. It is a gospel of despair. If you cannot teach grown-up people anything, how are you going to get at the child, who is in their hands and so much under their influence?

Another account told by Spurgeon is about a street sweeper in Dublin, who, "with his broom, at the corner, and in all probability his highest thoughts were to keep the crossing clean, and look for pocket change. One day, a lawyer put his hand upon his shoulder, and said to him, "My good fellow, do you know that you are heir to a fortune of ten thousand pounds a year?" "Do you mean it?" said he. "I do," he said. "I have just received the information; I am sure you are the man." He walked away, and he forgot his broom. Are you astonished? Why, who would not have forgotten a broom when suddenly made possessor of ten thousand a year? So, I pray that some poor sinners, who have been thinking of the pleasures of the world, when they hear that there is hope, and that there is heaven to be had, will forget the deceitful pleasures of sin, and follow after higher and better things.

A gentleman relates overhearing a conversation between a father and his son who was an architectural student in a certain university. The father told him that he must study to please the people if he would succeed in building up a profitable profession. The boy replied: "I cannot consent to try to please people who have no artistic knowledge or natural sense of beauty. I would rather be great than be rich. Millionaires there are in plenty, some of them both useless and vulgar. I am willing to be poor all my life if I can do something toward educating the people to high ideals for their homes and public buildings." That young man could not have paid a higher compliment to his teacher. There is no grander work in the world than to put high ideals into the minds and hearts of young men and women. The youth with high ideals will in the end rise far above the one who has low ones.

A boy in Boston, rather small for his years, worked in an office as errand boy for four gentlemen who did business there. One day they were chaffing him a little about being so small, and said to him, "You never will amount to much-you never can do much business-you are too small."

"Well," said he, "small as I am I can do something which none of you four men can do."

"Oh, and what is that?" they asked.

"I don't know as I ought to tell you," he replied.

But they were eager to know and urged him to tell them what he could do that none of them were able to do.

"I can keep from swearing," said the little fellow.

There were some blushes on four manly faces, and there seemed to be very little anxiety for further information on the point.

In his careful manner of illuminating the extraordinary within the ordinary, English author F.W. Boreham tells of an early autumn day when he and a friend were traveling by airplane. On the ground that morning, many were grumbling under the gloomy canopy of clouds; it was a dull and heavy day. Yet hundreds of feet above those clouds, every window of the author’s plane was flooded with sunlight. “Thus we discovered,” writes Boreham, “that, all through life, sunshine is simply a matter of altitude.”(1)

To three teenage girls, my parents were in the habit of saying something similar. Each of us was highly prone to grumbling (as teenagers sometimes are). But they would often respond to our incessant negativity with the imperative: “Make your own sunshine.” No doubt it was our parents’ euphemistic way of instructing us to stop complaining. But perhaps like Boreham’s experience in the clouds, there is something more here.

The Scriptures report that there is the “power of life and death” in the tongue. That is, the spoken word goes forth and does not return void. As God’s Word became flesh and transformed all of time, so our words similarly change things. We create or tear down with the things we say. We shape attitudes, expectations, and situations. We foster life or we further death.

Complaining is an expression of resentment over unmet expectations. But it is an expression that serves only to affirm our own expectations -- whether they are based on faulty visions of reality or not. It is an expression that says, “I refuse to reevaluate my perspective, to reposition my gaze to a higher altitude. I am right and this is all that I will see.”

When Jesus proclaimed “I am the bread of life,” the crowds had a hard time accepting his words. The Gospel of John reports, “When many of his disciples heard it, they said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’ But Jesus, knowing in himself that his disciples were grumbling about this, said to them, ‘Do you take offense at this? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before?’” (John 6:60-62).

To those who refuse to see the shining logic used by Christ, the book of John should largely be avoided. In Jesus’s questions to a grumbling crowd, we see light revealing the darkness, words of life revealing words of death. He seems to say, “Do you realize what you are saying? Will you only see what you expect to see? If the truth itself were in front of you, would you even then refuse to believe?” Jesus’s words pierce our canopies of expectation, offering a glimpse of life above the canopy, beyond our make-shift borders and limited vision. He offers a glimpse of the highest reality and he offers it that we might truly see.

But it is easy to find ourselves offended by pierced canopies. It is easy to grumble; no one complains without feeling they have justifiable reason to do so. It is easy to disguise our grumblings within well-crafted concerns for what is wrong with the world, or kids today, or the church, or my situation at work. We can excuse our negativity as just “being honest” or even “venting.” But how often do we find ourselves grumpier for having vented? What we speak further shapes what we see. A Christian friend of a particularly joyful disposition said to me recently, “I don’t understand why we so thoroughly express our concerns and complaints to God, while often keeping a lid on praise and joy.” Have we conditioned ourselves to see the need more readily than the one who fully meets it?

As finding sunshine may be a matter of lifting our gaze, so joy is a matter of vision, and our words speak life or death to that vision. Peter writes of our certain hope in Christ, “You will do well to be attentive to this as to a lamp shining in a dark place” (2 Peter 1:19). Are we gazing only at the looming darkness? Do we grumble among ourselves in the dark of failed expectation? Might there be more to see? If we attend to the glimpses of God’s presence even as his Word pierces our hearts and expectations, we are lifted to new sights. We find in Christ a light emerging by which we can see all things.

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1. F.W. Boreham, Ships of Pearl (New York: Abingdon Press, 1935), 7.

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Copyright © 2006 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.

Regarding life as a game, or attempting to “game it,” allows us to believe that we are in control — that each life choice results in a clear set of advantages and disadvantages, and that racking up more of the former than the latter will lead to satisfaction. On the other hand, games have long dramatized the ruthlessness of chance. Before the wheel of fortune became an iconic piece of game-show imagery, it was the instrument of Fortuna, whose reliance on blind luck brought low the prosperous and parceled out hardships to the wicked and the noble alike.

This tragic view of life, however, was not entirely fatalistic: people’s lives may have been governed by capricious gods, or by the aimless roll of the dice, but they had a say in how they responded to misfortunes. Nietzsche spoke of amor fati, or “love of fate,” an idea he drew from the Stoics, who taught that it was possible to transform the turns of Fortuna’s wheel into virtue, or art. “Floods will rob us of one thing, fire of another,” Seneca writes. “These are conditions of our existence which we cannot change. What we can do is adopt a noble spirit.”

Adopting that spirit is a creative act by which the sufferer transforms life’s afflictions into something useful. If our technocratic age has grown more optimistic about the potential to control or eliminate unwanted suffering, it has made it harder, at times, to believe in this imaginative capacity.