Preaching Tools

For sake of safety, let’s say his name is Andrew. He was a brother in our congregation from Muslim-dominated Uzbekistan. He described the threats on his life when he became a Christian. Among other things, his uncle pressed a knife to his side, demanding he turn away from his faith in Christ.

Jahong told us, “Before Christ I didn’t like my family. But when I saw Christ and Christ transformed my heart, Christ give me big love for my family, for my parents. I was really a good son. I obeyed my parents and I love them with Jesus’ love, but [even though] I loved them they hated me…. I love my family, my brother and sisters, but they beat me, they hate me and it was hard to understand. I said, ‘Oh God, I am losing one valuable thing—my family—and it was very hard to understand.’ But God said, ‘I will give you a new family.’”

My friend Jacki was an interior designer, focused on public buildings. She told me her Masters Degree had focused on wayfinding, a word I’d never heard before. She explained that in a hospital, for example, there are signs and even lines on the floor to help you get where you’re going. Same with highways and city streets. That’s wayfinding.

She also mentioned that part of that process is giving people “reassurance points”—arrows and signs that tells us we’re on the right track to the room or exit we’re looking for. “Rest Stop: Two Miles.”

Ever since the beginning, God has offered us wayfinding and reassurance points. Abraham, Moses, Joshua…. till Jesus said, “I am the way,” and “I will come again.”

After the fall of the Syrian regime in December 2024, CNN reporter Clarissa Ward was led deep into a Syrian prison where the Assad regime imprisoned, tortured, and killed thousands of people. This particular prison held men condemned to death, usually for reasons they knew nothing about.

Ward and her guides came upon one locked cell with what looked like a pile of blankets against the wall. When the soldier carefully poked at it, a man emerged, frightened, hands in the air.

“You’re ok. You’re ok.” Ward tells him over and over as he grips her arm tightly with both hands. They start to walk outside.

The soldier says, “Thank God you are safe. You are free.” The man says he’d been in this, his third prison, for three months. His captors had fled four days before, leaving him without food or water.

Then they lead him outside. The reporter says, “After three months in a windowless cell he can finally see the sky.” “O God, the light,” he says, “O God, there is light! O God, there is light!”

A rebel fighter says, “There’s no more army, no more prisons, no more checkpoints.” The astonished man says, “Are you serious?” A paramedic came and another man who says, “You are safe. Everything you are afraid of is gone!

https://youtu.be/mUzruGhBVpI

And that is what God has done for us! From slavery and bondage far worse. From condemnation to death and hell. He delivered us. He set us free. “Thanks be to God who delivers us through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

The comedian, Emo Phillips, tells…

I was walking along one of the bridges one day when I saw a man about to jump off. I tried to dissuade him from committing suicide and told him simply that God loved him. A tear came to his eye. I then asked him, ‘Are you a Christian or a Jew or a Hindu, or what?’

He said, ‘I’m a Christian.’

I said, ‘Me, too, small world. Protestant or Catholic?’

He said ‘Protestant.’

I said, ‘Me, too, what franchise?’

He said, ‘Baptist.’

I said, “Me, too. Northern Baptist or Southern Baptist?’

He said, ‘Northern Baptist.’

I said, ‘Well, me too. Northern Conservative Baptist or Northern Liberal Baptist?’

He said, ‘Northern Conservative Baptist.’

I said, ‘Well, call Ripley! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist or Northern Conservative Reformed Baptist?’

He said, ‘Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist.’

I said, ‘Remarkable! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region or Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Eastern Region?’

He said, ‘Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region.’

I said, ‘A miracle! Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1879 or Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912?’

He said, ‘Northern Conservative Fundamentalist Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.’

I said, ‘Die, Heretic!’ And I pushed him over.”

In his book, “Wisdom of Tenderness,” Brennan Manning tells:

Several years ago, Edward Farrell of Detroit took his two-week vacation to Ireland to celebrate his favorite uncle’s eightieth birthday. On the morning of the great day, Ed and his uncle got up before dawn, dressed in silence, and went for a walk along the shores of Lake Killarney. Just as the sun rose, his uncle turned and stared straight at the rising orb. Ed stood beside him for twenty minutes with not a single word exchanged. Then the elderly uncle began to skip along the shoreline, a radiant smile on his face.

After catching up with him, Ed commented, “Uncle Seamus, you look very happy. Do you want to tell my why?”

“Yes, lad,” the old man said, tears washing down his face. ‘You see, the Father is fond of me. Ah, me father is so very fond of me.”

Jack Hayford, the beloved pastor from Los Angeles, told this story:

It was a deeply sobering day when I came to Carl’s room in the hospital knowing there were only a matter of hours to live. And as we sat beside the bedside, I said, “Carl, how are you feeling?”

A man of deep faith and commitment to Jesus Christ and a very experienced and highly respected lighting director at CBS, he looked at me, his eyes misted slightly, he said, “Pastor Jack, you know when you’re in my business, it’s the combination of lights, the skill at blending things together in order to create special effects, that’s what this job is about.” He said, “This morning I woke up and in the quiet of my heart, Jesus spoke to me and he said, ‘Carl, how would you like to direct a sunset?’”

The bouquet of red roses caught my attention. Just before Christmas two women and a little girl found seats near the fireplace in the coffee shop where I hang out. They brought the roses. One of the women, a pastor’s wife, recognized me, and we chatted for a moment. “Who are the roses for?” I asked. “We don’t know yet,” she replied. “We’re going to ask God who we should give them to.”

Later, I had to find out what happened with those roses so I tracked down the woman I’d met. She said this idea of giving away Christmas roses had been passed down to her from her mother-in-law. The year before, she and her 8-year-old daughter, roses at the ready, were in a store when her daughter pointed out a woman. (“My daughter doesn’t have the Holy Spirit, Jr.,” the woman told me. “The Holy Spirit speaks to her!”) When they gave her the roses, the woman was stunned and wept. Turns out her husband had died recently, and the roses were a miraculous love gift from God.

That day after I’d left the coffee shop the three of them prayed and her daughter spotted a woman sitting alone in a corner booth. So, they walked over and told her that God wanted her to have the roses. Of course, she was shocked. She had gotten out of the house for some quiet while her husband stayed with their two sick kids.

My friend said that after they parted she felt like the gift hadn’t been as special as the year before; “kind of a bust,” she said. But then the Lord whispered to her, “Do you think I wouldn’t see a tired mom with two sick kids at home and want her to have roses?”

The verse that prompts my friend’s grace-giving is from 2 Cor 5:14 NLT, “Whatever we do, it is certainly not for our own profit but because Christ’s love controls us now.”

In the early days of Christianity people concocted fables about miracles that they said Jesus performed as a child. For example, he Infancy Gospel of Thomas, written in the late 2nd century. One of the episodes involves Jesus making clay birds which he then proceeds to bring to life, an act also attributed to Jesus in the Quran. There are a couple of stories of Jesus killing other children who aggravate him. Then later he later resurrects them. He produces a feast from a single grain and stretches a beam of wood to help his father finish constructing a bed. He heals his brother James from snake poison and resurrects a man who died in a construction accident.  It’s all bogus, pure hooey!

It was like this press agent who made up all that stuff because he thought people would be more impressed with Jesus if he acted like the Son of God even when he was a boy. They thought we needed Jesus to do miraculous things right from the get-go. Surely the Son of God would do things only God could do. Surely he would throw his divine weight around even as a little child. Of course, that’s bogus. Luke in particular emphasizes Jesus’ humanity. Jesus refers to himself as Son of Man 26 times in Luke alone. He wanted to portray Jesus as the Son of Man, shaped from his youth to be the human being we need as our Savior.

Today, “Les Misérables” — the story of Jean Valjean, a former convict, being relentlessly pursued by Javert, an unforgiving police officer — is an icon of musical theater. It has run for over 15,500 performances in London and is a staple of school theater programs in the United States. … It’s also been translated in 22 languages and staged in 53 countries.

The idea of turning Victor Hugo’s sweeping 1,400-page novel about poverty and social upheaval in 19th-century France into a musical was actually that of two Frenchmen — the composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and the lyricist Alain Boublil — who, inspired by British and American shows, created “Les Misérables” in 1980 and staged it in Paris.

So Caird, Nunn, Schönberg and Boublil, along with James Fenton, a poet, were soon reading Hugo’s tome and trying to work out a new structure, eventually deciding to open the musical with a scene in which Jean Valjean steals silver candlesticks from a bishop, only for the prelate to forgive him.

Suddenly, Caird said, the character’s motivations were clear: Valjean believed in the New Testament idea of forgiveness, while Javert, his pursuer, adhered to a sterner Old Testament form of justice.

“As a bunch of liberal humanists, we had tried to avoid every mention of religion,” Caird said, but “sewing God into the show was what animated the characters.”

The National Bible Bee competition, which is fast rising in popularity, demands feats of memorization that make the National Spelling Bee look like a game of tic-tac-toe.

Daniel Chew, a 9-year-old from Sugar Land, Texas, memorizes Bible verses. Lots of Bible verses! At the National Bible Bee finals (Nov. 2024) “under spotlights on a stage in Orlando, Fla., Daniel smoothly recited 19 verses from the New Testament book of Romans to win the finals for his age group at the 16th annual National Bible Bee.

He was one of about 360 children and teenagers assembled this week for a competition whose slogan is “To know God’s Word and make Him known.”

The Bee … demands astonishing feats of memorization that make the televised National Spelling Bee look like a game of tic-tac-toe. Competitors at Daniel’s level memorized more than 570 verses, which they were expected to be able to recite on command.

At the senior level, ages 15 to 18, participants memorize 938 Bible verses, adding up to more than 20,000 words. In some rounds of competition, making even a single error in a long passage — an errant plural or wrong verb tense — leads to elimination.

Extravagantly powerful and noisy engines helped make Ferrari the ultimate sports car brand. Now the company wants to persuade the superrich to buy a model with no engine at all.

The Italian carmaker this week started lifting the hood on its first fully electric vehicle, a yearlong project that has cost the brand hundreds of millions of dollars and promises to set a benchmark for how battery-powered sports cars should look, sound and drive.

…EVs pose a particular challenge for luxury sports-car brand, which say roar and rumble are central to their identities and appeal. Ferrari, perhaps more than any other automaker, has built its brand on internal combustion engines.

Ferrari said its EV wouldn’t mimic engine sounds, as some competitors have. Instead, it will pick up the sound of what it calls the “electric engine” and amplify it into the cabin to give the driver feedback when required.”

Maybe Ferrari is onto something but for many who adore their cars a Ferrari without a roar seems like a love sung played on a kazoo or a passionate love that goes unspoken, or a marriage without warmth and fire, or a honeymoon without a dessert, or a love poem written by autocorrect, or finally a romantic dinner on paper plates. It may all be there but it’s missing something essential.

Exploration of the open sea grew and flourished rapidly after Columbus’s discovery of America in the late fifteenth century. There were so many new regions of the world waiting to be explored and discovered. Innate curiosity along with the opportunity for adventure and economic gain were the principle driving forces behind these bold pioneers of the sea, However, their voyages were taken at great cost and with great risk. Many men died in these quests and explorations.

The adventurers and explorers who had set sail and discovered new routes, returning safely, possessed knowledge that was of great value. These men had learned the secrets of safe passages to new worlds. They kept detailed records in a small book called a “rutter,” which held all the secrets of a particular route to a specific destination and was of great importance to those who might make future voyages.

Obviously, a rutter held such great value because it recounted someone’s long journey, someone who had braved an unknown distance and returned as a witness to others. The rutter offered greater certainty for those who would travel in the future. With rutter in hand a sailor had confidence the same voyage could be retraced with a measure of safety.

The idea of a rutter is important when we consider the journey we will take at death. In one sense, when we depart this life, we too will be traveling to a distant, mysterious place. We too need a rutter, we need a guide who has experienced this journey and returned to share knowledge with us.

Jesus has revealed all that we need to know about death and the afterlife. It is so important to know that God became a man, and, most significantly, suffered a human life and death in its fulness, just as each of us will, and He came back to share with us what to expect and what awaits us.

A New York Times article explored how our world has changed in the aftermath of the pandemic.

At first, the solidarity was breathtaking. Out of concern for ourselves and one another, we suspended nearly all interpersonal activity for months, wiping our lives almost entirely clean of the very people we were trying to protect. But, perversely, that solidarity destroyed our social fabric… For several months the daily lives of many Americans were reduced to the boundaries of their nuclear unit and their phones and televisions and computers. Isolated, we saw one another first as threats and then as something less than real… Politics started to look more like a zone of virtual reality, too, and many Americans came to see their fellow humans as mindless drones.

It was deeply unsettling to realize that our modern, wealthy world was no fortress against contagion, mass death and pandemic hysteria of various kinds. The end of the end of history has been declared countless times since 2001, but no event punctuated the point as clearly as Covid-19.

The emergency began at a time of geopolitical uncertainty, but it ended in an unmistakable polycrisis: beyond Covid, its supply shocks and inflation surge, there was a debt crisis and an ongoing climate emergency, wars in Europe and soon the Middle East and renewed great-power conflict with China…

It looks like we finally got those Roaring Twenties we were promised. In 2020, the phrase was used to suggest an age of parties and sex and social recklessness was on the way, as 330 million cooped-up Americans let off some steam. [But] in 2025 … the world does not seem now more buoyant or full of hope, but abrasive and rapacious and shaped nearly everywhere by a barely suppressed rage. We have still not reckoned with all we have lost.

A New York Times article was titled, “The Meaning of the Boston Marathon Finish Line, Then and Now.” This was the opening line: “For many runners, the marathon finish line feels holy, and reaching it divine.” Then it said, “The Boston Marathon is arguably the most elusive finish line of all, and not just anyone can cross it.”

We are in a race like that! And the finish line is everything to us! Paul wrote, "I have finished the race."

The church father, Jerome, around 400 AD, recorded a story that had been handed down to him, about John the apostle who recorded the words we’ve studied here, and whose three epistles emphasized this love we’re to have for one another.

"The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, 'Little children, love one another.' The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, 'Teacher, why do you always say this?' He replied with a line worthy of John: 'Because it is the Lord's commandment and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.'"