Winchester Mystery House (Sermon Illustration)
Without a purpose for your life or ministry, you will have a lot of activity with little progress.
Nestled in the suburbs of San Jose, California, is an interesting tourist attraction: an estate built by the heir of the Winchester rifle fortune. In 1884, a wealthy widow named Sarah L. Winchester began a thirty-eight-year construction project guided by a superstitious fear. Evidently, Mrs. Winchester was convinced by a medium that continuous building would appease the evil spirits of those killed by the famous “gun that won the West” and help her attain eternal life. So Sarah kept carpenters’ hammers pounding twenty-four hours a day. The Victorian mansion came to be filled with so many unexplained oddities that it is now known as the Winchester Mystery House. Even though it has 160 rooms, three elevators, forty staircases, and forty -seven fireplaces, its size alone does not account for the architectural marvel—what does so is the bizarre purposelessness of the design. Stairs lead into the ceiling; windows decorate the floor, and doors open into blank walls! Random features reflect excessive creativity, energy, and expense, from exquisite hand inlaid parquet floors to Tiffany art glass windows. Busyness, not blueprints, defined success.
Will Mancini, Church Unique (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2008), 40.
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