10 Vivid Illustrations

prodigal son. One of the great messages of this story in Luke 15 is found in the attitude of the elder brother. When his younger brother came home after squandering all his father’s inheritance in a distant country, the elder brother saw his father receive him back not as a slave, but as a son. The father reinstated the younger son to his previous condition of full sonship. The elder brother got very upset.

Jesus believed the Pharisees were like the elder brother. When Christians read this story, we tend to condemn the younger brother more than the older. The older brother reprimanded his father and said, “When this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!” (Luke 15:30).

What he said revealed what had really been in his heart. The elder brother needed to have a mental catharsis. He was good on the outside. He was clean on the outside like the scribes and the Pharisees. But inside, he was filled with sin.

I can certainly relate to this because I was always a good kid externally. I learned that external rebellion was a dangerous and unpopular thing. So, my rebellion was internal. I could go through all the externalities of conformity, but inside there was total rebellion, anarchy, lust, and everything else going on in my mind. I didn’t need to go to a faraway country because I carried it with me all the time in my mind.

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This was the story of the elder brother, and it is one of the great problems that religious people have. Those of us reared in Christian settings learned quickly to restrict certain external behavior. What we did instead was imagine internally what we could not or would not do externally.

Jesus is saying we need to have a real catharsis take place in our minds, not just appear so externally. It is what comes out of our mouth that defiles, because what comes out of our mouth testifies to what is really on the inside. When spoken or acted out, these things that come out of us not only show the defilement that is in us, but they also reach out and defile other people. The lustful things, the profanities, the lewd stories, the bad jokes just testify to what’s going on inside us.

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Pardon the crude illustration, but defilement is like regurgitating or vomiting on people. People go around and constantly defile others with the defilement that’s inside of them. When I’m among certain company and hear those kinds of things, I want to just turn and say, “Keep your garbage inside. Quit vomiting on me!”

Jesus said that it’s not what goes into a man that defiles him. It’s what comes out of a man that defiles him. What comes out testifies to the defilement that was on the inside all along. This is why it’s so important that we have this mental cleansing or catharsis, so that the inside can be clean. Then the root will testify with pure fruit.

Jesus said, “For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of” (Luke 6:45). What comes out of your mouth is an eloquent testimony to the contents of your heart. This is precisely what Jesus is saying. So, if you want to change what comes from your lips, then change the content of your heart. Have the necessary mental and emotional catharsis and it will lead to a radical alteration in the externals. The principle, then, is this: The way to stop bad habits such as evil thoughts and profanities is washing your mind out with the Word.

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My dad was a Methodist minister and we lived in parsonages on the property of the churches. The lawn of one of the parsonages adjoined one of the main walkways in town. When my older brother was very young, he often sat out there a great deal and would hear some colorful conversations from those passing by.

One day when he was seated at the table, there were visitors there for dinner. He began to recite all that he had heard to the great embarrassment of my mom and dad. There were very profane things coming out of his mouth. My mother looked back on it many times and laughed. She tried everything to stop my brother’s bad habit, including washing his mouth out with soap to try to stop him from saying those things.

Parents used to do that as a way of punishing bad language. But we all know that washing one’s mouth out with soap is not going to change language. We must wash our minds out with God’s Word. This is what Jesus is saying. His Word will cleanse our minds, and when our minds and hearts are cleansed, then the words we speak will be pure words.

Of Bread and Brides

In the first five verses of 1 Corinthians 5, Paul is dealing severely with disobedience and immorality in the church at Corinth. He then says, “Your boasting is not

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good. Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump of dough? Clean out the old leaven so that you may be a new lump, just as you are in fact unleavened. For Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed” (verses 6–7 nasb).

There’s that word again: clean (or cleanse). If you know the nature of leaven, or yeast, you know that it quickly permeates a whole lump of dough. Leaven must be cleansed out so that it will not permeate everything. Jesus is saying through Paul exactly what He had said in John 15. We must have the leaven of our old self cleansed out (that is, have a catharsis) so it will not poison the rest of our being. In any area where we have not allowed the catharsis of God’s Word to cleanse us, we are not holy.

Ephesians 5:25–26 is another important and beautiful illustration. The context is Paul speaking about the husband and wife relationship. The husband is to love the wife in the same way that Christ loved the church. Paul says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word.”

What Christ is doing is preparing the church as His bride. One day at the feast known as the marriage supper of the Lamb, the bride (the church) will be presented to the bridegroom (Christ) without spot, blemish, wrinkle, or any imperfection. What is the process for this? It

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is the cleansing that is to take place corporately within the body of Christ.

The Bible tells us that we not only need to be cleansed individually, but also corporately. Paul made no bones about cleaning out any kind of immorality within the church. This is what we call church discipline.

Anytime there was a person in the early church who continued in flagrant immorality and had no intention of changing, Paul said they should be put out of the church. Why? You must cleanse the church or it will destroy the integrity of its witness to the watching community. Just like you cannot allow defilement in your own life, you cannot allow it within the corporate body of Christ.

The Records in Our Mind

One of the most important applications of deprogramming the mind is the healing of the memories. All of us have certain mental and emotional memories that tend to constantly hound us and destroy the quality of our lives. We have certain thought patterns and memories going back to childhood or our teenage years or early in marriage that continue to haunt us. We try our best to get rid of them, suppress them, repress them, and run away from them. We try to ignore them, but try as we may, they keep constantly coming back to us—and oftentimes unexpectedly.

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