Sermon Illustration: Prison Gates

I ran across two AWESOME sermon illustrations this week. For my preacher readers I thought I'd post them for you. These are my own in that I found them myself - they're not from an illustration database somewhere. Feel free to adapt and use for yourself. I'll post each one separately.

This one I used in my Easter sermon. It was the perfect sermon illustration. I kid you not when I say that I got tingles up and down my spine when I found it. Honestly - I think God must have shown it to me. Serious.

Prison Gates That Lie

The gist of the illustration is this: Dachau was a World War II Nazi Concentration camp. 200,000 prisoners. Over 31,000 died there. The gate to Dachau that each prisoner had to walk through (and apparently several other concentration camps such as Auschwitz) had stamped into it the words arbeit macht frei meaning literally "work makes free" or "work brings freedom." Bitter irony for the prisoners, I'm sure. --- Point: The words on the gate, however intended, were a lie - work did not free the prisoners. But those words transcend the prison in Dachau. People everywhere are in "prison." They believe that "work makes free." They don't realize that those words are on the gates of their prison. Reality: "Jesus makes free." That's the point and the celebration of Easter.

That was a great metaphor. I was able to carry it all the way through my sermon and it really drove the point home. Below is the illustration as I manuscripted it. This is the "image" of my sermon. I make the point about us being in similar prisons and Jesus breaking through those prison bars later in the sermon. Again, feel free to use!

The Holocaust was a terrible thing. 6,000,000 Jews were murdered by the Nazi’s in a few short years. None of us were there. Most of us weren’t even born. Yet the memory of the Holocaust stands out vividly to us because of how awful it was. Many movies and books on the Holocaust have been made. All recount the horror. Right after college Desiree, my wife, and I used some money we had saved, packed two backpacks, and spent the summer traveling through Europe. When we were in Germany we visited the Dachau concentration camp. Dachau was one of the first concentration camps. And it served as a model for the ones that followed it. It housed over 200,000 prisoners over the course of the war. It didn’t have the death chambers like some of the others did so “only” 31,000 or so prisoners were believed to have died there. Only? That’s the entire population of our county. SHOW PIX OF DACHAU - Those are the beds. Triple bunks, 1,600 to each building. Disease ran rampant through the camp, killing many. SHOW PIX – Those are the ovens where they cremated the dead. The sign on the rafters says in several languages, “prisoners were hanged from here.” SHOW PIX - Those are the gates that each and every prisoner had to walk through to reach the camp. Those words on the gate read, “arbeit macht frei” – literally “work makes free” meaning “work brings freedom.” I can’t imagine what it must have been like to walk through those gates and be a prisoner in a concentration camp. To be arrested. To see your friends and family die. To wonder if you’ll be next. To be fed so little that your body wasted away until it was literally nothing but skin and bones. It was a sobering place to visit. And its sobering to think about the evil that went on there – even now. But as World War II drew to a close, Dachau was one of the first concentration camps that was liberated. So it is hard for me to imagine what it must have been like for the prisoners on April 29, 1945 as the American troops of the 42^nd Infantry Division cracked open those steel gates and offered them freedom. I can’t imagine what they thought. Is it a dream? Is it real? Did they have the strength to dance or sing? Or did they just sigh in relief? I’ve read the story of several survivors that stated they were very numb for a long time. It was only after they had eaten a few good meals, and actually slept in a soft warm bed that they finally began to realize that life had changed and that they were safe now. The impossible was true. It had happened. They were free.