56 Sermon Illustrations on Optimism

Charles Goodyear inspired the tire company and hundreds of other businesses, but he won no riches from his great invention. The American inventor (1800-1860), had devotion and perseverance that resulted in one of the great discoveries of the 19th century: the industrial use of rubber. In 1834, this New England merchant set out to solve the "the Holy Grail" of the rubber industry: how to make it useful. Rubber's bouncy promise for the industrial age was slight. The reason? It couldn't take heat or cold. Raincoats turned to goo in heat and shoe soles froze in cold. Goodyear made a five-year effort to discover a solution.

While other men in the industry had given up trying, Goodyear experimented in his home laboratory. His wife and children made their way around the foul stench of turpentine and sulfur. In the kitchen, every cup and saucer was covered with rubber. With his friends telling him to give it up, bills piling high, and his family nearing starvation, Goodyear found himself sentenced to debtor's prison.

But this man was on what he felt to be a God-ordained mission. With his Bible for support and with tanks of optimism, he pushed forward with experiments in jail. "In his mind," writes Charles Slack, "Goodyear stood forever on the precipice of success."

A man, Goodyear wrote, may "derive lasting advantage by having proved to himself, that, with a clear conscience and a high purpose, a man may be happy within prison walls, as well as in any other (even the most fortunate) circumstances in life."

Persistence and self-sacrifice were rewarded in 1839 when a batch of rubber that Goodyear had mixed with sulfur and white lead fell onto a hot stove. To his amazement, it didn't melt. Indeed, it had hardened! Here at last was the solution - later named "vulcanization" - to rubber holding its shape. Waterproof and airtight, it stretched and could be reshaped. Forty years later came the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., which had no connection to Charles other than that they had borrowed the name of the man who had solved the great mystery of rubber.

Speaking of the discipline the inventor must bring to the process of wrangling an idea from conception to fruition, Goodyear wrote: "Between the bare conception of an idea, and the demonstration of the practicability and utility of the thing conceived, there is almost always a vast amount of labor to be performed, time and money to be spent, and innumerable difficulties and prejudices to be encountered, before the work is accomplished."

"Noble Obsession" offers the reader enough rubber trivia to dazzle at least one dinner party. For instance, you'll learn that a molecule of rubber contains some 20,000 units of eight hydrogen and five carbon atoms. The reason it stretches - think rubber band here - is because a single molecule is a virtual line dance of 20,000 of these C5H8 combinations. "Noble Obsession" also reminds us what a determined individual is capable of achieving. It shows how successful enterprises need the right mix of qualities. Goodyear had persistence in spades but lacked business acumen - "money simply annoyed him," writes Slack.

That sets the stage for scoundrels who licked their chops for Goodyear's hard-won secret and crawled out from under various rocks. A host of patent disputes ensued. Goodyear naively sent samples of his successfully vulcanized rubber to an English competitor, Thomas Hancock, who later would claim to be the inventor and would beat Goodyear to the British patent rights.

Giving us a final impression of what motivated the man, Slacks notes that when Goodyear died in 1860, deeply in debt, his last words to his wife were that he "bore no ill will" toward those who had stolen from him.

"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty."

-- Sir Winston Churchill

"The foolish man seeks happiness in the distance; the wise grows it under his feet."

-- James Oppenheim

"When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us."

-- Alexander Graham Bell

"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds."

-- Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Philosopher and politician; from Bits & Pieces 3/12/02

"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."

-- Thomas Edison

"We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations."

-- Charles Swindoll, clergyman and writer

“Opportunity often comes disguised in the form of misfortune, or temporary defeat.”

-- Napoleon Hill

“Effective people are not problem-minded; they’re opportunity-minded. They feed opportunities and starve problems.”

-- Stephen Covey

“If opportunity doesn’t knock build a door.”

-- Milton Berle

"A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds."

-- Francis Bacon, QFTM 3/6/04

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In his essay called “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell shared a crucial insight about the decline of language: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

Or, as my friend Mike Bauman often says, “Sloppy language makes sloppy thought possible.” In Orwell’s “1984,” the masses are fed redefining slogans like “War Is Peace,” “Freedom Is Slavery,” and “Ignorance Is Strength.”

The battle over cultures is often in the defining and redefining of words. Language has often been used to lower horizons and keep people from really thinking. Today, as we discuss hope, we must confront bad definitions.

We hear a lot about hope these days, from “the audacity of hope” to “hoping against hope.” Unfortunately, the word has been redefined — and, I must say, shrunken — by bad definitions.

Hope has been reduced to a kind of naïve optimism that things will get better. We hope for a changed situation, a new job, a better love, hitting the lottery, or LeBron James winning his first championship.

But real hope — biblical hope — isn’t hope for; it’s hope in: Hope in Christ — what He did for us on the Cross; and what He will do for us when He comes again and sets up His kingdom. A hope for is never better than wishful thinking. Hope in Christ is an expectation based on the certainty of who Jesus is and what He accomplished.

When hope is defined down to a limp, pallid, and ultimately useless imitation of the real thing, people and cultures are unable to live above naïve optimism or heartless despair.

But real hope is neither optimistic or despairing, and one of Chuck Colson’s closest colleagues, the late Richard John Neuhaus, described why: “Optimism,” Neuhaus said, “is not a Christian virtue. Optimism is simply a matter of optics, of seeing what you want to see and opting not to see what you don’t want to see.”

Hope is different than optimism. But we also can’t despair. As Neuhaus added, “We have not the right to despair, for despair is a sin. And we have not the reason to despair, quite simply because Christ has risen.” And that’s where biblical hope squarely rests.

This is no “pie in the sky when you die” kind of hope, but a hope that empowers us for effective service in this world right now.

For Neuhaus, hope involved calling the church to embrace the truth and power of the Gospel even in a culture he called “American Babylon.” For Chuck Colson, it meant proclaiming the sanctity of human life, marriage, and religious liberty.

And for us, true, biblical hope — hope in Christ rather than a hope for an improved situation — empowers us to keep on keeping on in the myriad battles to which the Lord calls us.

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Copyright (c) 2012 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.