Skip to main content

Trialling an illustration: the salvation water wheel

I'm going to try an illustration this coming Sunday, to try and show how faith operates in connecting us to Jesus. I'm posting it here for comments because I want to avoid accidental heresy, or confusion.

The point I'm trying to illustrate is this: The Bible says faith is not meritorious in our salvation; but it is instrumental in saving us.
  • Faith is not meritorious. That is: faith is not a work. We don't deserve salvation because we have faith in Jesus.
  • But faith connects us with Jesus. Unless we put our trust in Jesus, we are not actually saved. So, faith is the instrument whereby Christ's benefits flow to us.
The illustration I'm trialling is: a water wheel.
  • The power is in the water. That’s what makes the wheel go round.
  • The pipe (the "flume") gets the water to the wheel. Without the pipe, the water wouldn't get to the wheel, and the wheel wouldn't work.
  • But there’s no power in the pipe itself. If there’s no water in the pipe, the wheel won’t turn. The water, not the pipe, makes the wheel go round.
The analogies are:
  • Jesus is like the water. Jesus - especially in his death and resurrection - is God’s power to save us.
  • Our faith is like the pipe. When we trust Jesus, we access God’s salvation power. We actually get saved. Without faith – if we don’t trust Jesus – we don’t access Jesus’ saving power.
  • But our faith, in itself, doesn't actually do anything to save us. The power is in Jesus, not in our faith.
  • The water wheel is our personal salvation. When we put our trust in Jesus, he makes us to actually be saved - that is, justified, reconciled, at peace with God, adopted by him, part of his beloved people, with a sure hope of glory.
To collocate a few Bible verses: We are justified by Christ alone, through faith alone – not by works (Rom 3:24, 27-30; 5:1; 1 Cor 6:11; Gal 2:16).

What do you think? Feedback, please.
Labels:

Comments

Alistair Bain said…
Mate. I like what you're doing here.

But it feels a bit too complicated. I'm not familiar with how a water wheel works so the first part of the illustration involves me learning something new.

And then I don't really have a picture in my mind of that. So when you move on to the analogy, it gets lost in translation.

It's a bit like the analogy that Jensen and Grimmond used for that preaching book that's doing the rounds at the moment. Good. True. But a bit too much to take in.
11 January 2011 at 22:32
Anonymous said…
Interesting. My great great great grandfather was a Methodist preacher. I recently found his life story. He often used the analogy of wheel and cogs in his sermons.He was born in 1802 and build the first textile mill in a Yorkshire village.
20 March 2011 at 08:44
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A better understanding of nonbelief

The Nones Project is an ongoing study into the belief systems of people who call themselves non-religious. A few weeks ago one of the project leaders,  Ryan Burge  of Washington University,  posted some really interesting preliminary results  on his Substack.  1. We've probably heard of people who are spiritual but not religious (SBNRs). SBNRs were "the largest group of nones" in the sample. They believe in the supernatural realm but not necessarily in "a God." They are "deeply skeptical of religion but highly interested in spirituality," therefore individualistic and anti-institutional.  2. But this study differentiated SBNRs from people they called Nones In Name Only, NiNos. They different to SBNRs by being religious about their spiritual. They believe not just in the supernatural but in "God." And they tend to engage in traditional communal religious practices while SBNRs practice individualised eclectic bespoke spiritual practices. The s...
Post a Comment
Read more

The different distractions of secularity and spirituality

There has been a lot of discussion about the recent 'vibe shift' away from radical atheism back towards an openness to the supernatural. I don't think this new spirituality is necessarily an openness to the unique claims of Christ. It will more probably replace one set of commonly-accepted misunderstandings about Jesus with another.  Under radical atheism, people dismissed the Biblical claims about Jesus' resurrection because they 'knew' that it was impossible. Jesus hadn't really died. He just passed out (after being beaten and whipped and crucified) and then woke up in the tomb (and rolled away the stone himself and overcame several guards). Or the disciples hallucinated that they saw him (even though Jewish beliefs of the time didn't expect one person to rise possessing eternal life himself; they expected a general resurrection at the end of time - see John 11:24 ). Or something else.  The so-called 'explanations' of Jesus' non-resurrectio...
Post a Comment
Read more
TGC Australia recently published an analysis by Dr Sarah Quicke of whether we are experiencing a 'quiet revival' of interest in and/or conversion to Christianity  here in Australia. It does it a good job of describing the difficulties involved in both gathering and interpreting data about religious beliefs and behaviours, e.g. the difference between the 44% who (still) call themselves Christian and the 8% of people aged 18-35 who actually "believed and lived out the gospel."  Quicke refers to the very insightful McCrindle report An Undercurrent Of Faith , released in March 2025, which uses an analytical method called cohort analysis to try and work out how a particular group of people tend to behave over time. The purpose of this post is to draw attention to one element of that report which agrees with Quicke's analysis but also adds some detail to it.  Here is what the cohort analysis showed about different age groups' identification with Christianity:  As y...
Post a Comment
Read more