Perhaps the greatest challenge as you develop your talk is to choose which life experiences to include. You want to share those that most effectively illustrate the advantage of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. The natural inclination is to go with major experiences – life-shaping events that altered your approach to life; however, this is not always the best route to take.
I recently read Kay Warren’s book Choose Joy: Because Happiness Isn’t Enough. Knowing her son had committed suicide, I found the title intriguing. To my surprise, she never once mentioned her son’s death. While her book was filled with excellent personal examples to illustrate her thesis, not even one paragraph was given to that most life-altering experience. By limiting herself to ordinary, daily-grind examples of living joyfully in the messiness of life she made herself relate-able to every reader. That is exactly what we want do as speakers! While it might have been her son’s death that taught her how a spirit of joy can supersede any circumstance, it was her small, ordinary examples of feeling joy in the midst of daily realities that gave credibility to her words.
An excellent exercise to filter through all your possible illustrations is to construct a time line of your life. Draw a line down the middle of a sheet of paper and write down key life events and experiences, placing positive ones on the left and negative ones on the right. To organize your thoughts divide the line into segments: childhood, teens, early adulthood, etc. Not only will this process produce fascinating insight (e.g. seeing how a negative event paved the way for a positive event), it will help you sift through your experiences and choose those which will most winsomely show the advantage of your relationship with Jesus Christ. You will very likely be surprised to see what shows up on your line that you’ve never considered using – and the direction this takes your talk!