Missing Pieces

missing pieces sermon illustration

Puzzles are a great way to view worldviews, especially because they’re made up of many individual pieces. When all the pieces fit together, you’re able to clearly see the big picture. Of course, to get the picture exactly right, you have to work with all the right individual pieces. If you are missing pieces, or if you have mixed puzzle pieces, you can’t and won’t get an accurate picture. Here’s the bigger problem, though. If someone were to dump a puzzle box at your feet, it would represent where some Christians are in their theology and worldview. It’s a box full of pieces that have never been put together. It’s just a pile of pieces. These individual pieces can be made up from your church upbringing, what you’ve learned at home, perhaps a Christian school environment, discussions with friends, podcasts, and other spiritual influences. But it’s possible you’ve never taken the time to put the pieces together. Furthermore, you can’t see if you’re missing any important pieces. You also have never figured out if you’ve got pieces of the wrong puzzle in with yours—bits of other worldviews—mixed in by accident that don’t fit picture on the box. Or, you might get confused when others take some Christian pieces and fit it in with their worldview pictures. Even with all the right pieces sitting in the box, few Christians have assembled their puzzle in order to make sense of the whole thing. The result is a skewed reality.