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Last week I talked with Russ, a seminary student in our church family, about a sermon he was preparing. He sensed that one of his illustrations was not compelling. Russ was trying to illustrate how Jesus made himself accessible to people who needed his help. The illustration went like this:

Have you ever known somebody in a helping profession who would always help out even after posted office hours? Someone who was available even after the office had closed? Someone who is willing to help even when his or her work day is finished? Jesus was like this. He went out of his way to make himself available and help people.

But Russ knew the illustration was flat. It lacked punch. As soon as I listened to it, I recognized the problem. It’s a problem I face constantly when I’m creating illustrations, images, and application ideas.

Each week I struggle with evaluating the sermon I preached ‘last Sunday.’ Oh, I can measure certain aspects of the sermon. Did I do the hard work of exegeting the text and presenting it creatively like Jesus and the prophets presented it? Did the transitions hold the various ideas together and create a good flow of thought? Did I give clear explanations of difficult issues in the text? But I struggle with evaluating last Sunday’s sermon because God’s knack for showing His strength through my weakness often turns my assessments upside down!

In 1981, Andrea Jaeger was the world's second-ranked female tennis player at the tender age of 16. Now, Jaeger claims to have been "relieved" when a shoulder injury ended her tennis career shortly after the 1983 Wimbledon finals. Why?

"I thought, 'Finally I can go and be me,'" she says, as reported in the February 2, 2007 issue of THE WEEK (pg. 8). What that looks like for her is serving the Lord as an Episcopal nun. She further explained her joy: "God gave me a gift to play tennis, but it wasn't my right to say whether I had it for 5 years or 50 years. It was his right."

This illustration could be useful for several sermon themes: calling, gifting, God's sovereignty, witness. Other ideas?

I returned to my comfort zone last Sunday as I did a final sermon on the full section in Ephesians 4:1–6. (I really do love preaching by sections. I feel there is more balance to my sermons and more rich content to break open.) And this message brought the extra excitement of a doctrinal riff in verses 4 to 6 that offers the life-giving knowledge of God and his kingdom. Nothing gives a sermon greater power and weight than talking about God.

In my last post, I asked the question: How would you summarize the storyline of the Bible in one sentence? The response was underwhelming! I take that as a reflection of how difficult it is to capture the ‘big idea’ or storyline of the Bible in a single sentence. Thanks, John Mark, for your solid suggestion. Here is my proposal: The Bible is the story of God re-establishing His presence among His people.

I’ve been paying more attention lately to an obvious feature of the Bible. It’s obvious, and yet our approach to Scripture sometimes obscures it. I’m referring to the Bible’s overall shape as a story or drama. Eugene Peterson describes well this feature: “The Bible turns out to be a large, comprehensive story, a meta-story. The Christian life is conducted in story conditions. The Bible is basically and overall narrative – an immense, sprawling, capacious narrative” (Eat This Book, p. 40). So what impact does this have on my preaching?

One of our central leadership tasks is cultivating a culture of creativity. And it is more than a leadership technique--it is a stewardship issue.

Think of the two hemispheres of the brain as parallel processors. They certainly overlap in function. And this is a gross simplification of something that is divinely complex. But the left-brain is the logical half of the brain, and the right-brain is the creative half of the brain. Now juxtapose brain topography with Matthew 22:37: "You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind."

Loving God with half your mind doesn’t cut it. Half-minded is no better than half-hearted. But many leaders are trying to lead with half their brain tied behind their back. And it’s about as effective as running on one leg, clapping with one hand, or twiddling one thumb!

Our houses are bigger; our families are smaller; but Americans are still running out of room to put all their stuff. We currently devote a whopping two billion square feet to rental storage space, and 11 million U. S. households are renting storage units--an increase of 90 percent since 1995.

A New York Times article comments on the proliferation of junk and a new type of patient: the "pathological hoarder."

Subscribers to PreachingToday.com may also want to check out this illustration:"Americans Busy Storing Their Stuff."

My ‘day off’ is Friday. By this time in the week, my sermon is usually 90% complete. I’ll apply the finishing touches to my sermon preparation on Saturday morning. Then, I’ll talk through and pray through the sermon on Saturday night and again early on Sunday morning. But I step away from it all on Friday.

Not this week. Yesterday, four needs surfaced which demanded my attention. I got a couple staff members involved in two of them. But as relentless as I am about guarding my time, delegating tasks, and concentrating on the two or three areas where I contribute the most, I could not ignore these four needs. So here I am today, working on my ‘day off.’ What’s a pastor do to?

In a front-page article in the Monday February 19, 2007, USA Today (the office copy made the rounds very slowly), titled Katrina "voluntourists" make labor a vacation, there is a useful phrase--"mucking out" a flood-damaged house--that has obvious relevance for sanctification, repentance, and so on. The photo accompanying the article shows a man dressed in white, chemical-waste protective gear and scraping a large white shovel along the floor of a ruined house. Article author: Larry Copeland.

Last Sunday I completed my in-depth look at Ephesians 4:2 with "be patient, bearing with one another in love." As so often happens, as I began thinking about the message, my first concern was how I would find anything interesting to say on this that would change anyone's life because the call for patience is such a commonplace in both Christian and secular morality.

I’m convinced that all the homiletical variety we desire is found in the biblical texts themselves, if we will pay attention to form. Expository preachers should pay attention to how the Bible speaks as well as what it speaks. But how do you do this with parables? Sometimes our Lord left them open-ended and didn’t spell out the “point.” Should we leave things open ended? Maybe.

Several months ago, I ran across an article that encouraged pastors to plagiarize sermons. The article came from a well-known U.S. pastor who exhorted pastors to “stop all of this nonsense of spending 25 or 30 hours a week preparing to speak on the weekend.” Instead, he held up as a model some pastor-friends who get “approximately 70 percent of their messages each week from other people – word for word according to them. They fill in their own personal illustrations and stories, of course.”

Why don’t more pastors adopt this model for success? Pride. He writes: “In my mind there is a tremendous amount of pride (let's call it what it is) when we insist on being completely original as communicators. In our desire to give ‘killer messages’ we are dishing out something far less.” My humble response . . . “HOW ABSURD!!!!”

John Ortberg, one of our editorial advisors, wrote to say, "Nancy (my wife) just did a talk on what a glorious thing work can be (verses the typical sermon 'warning against workaholism'). Guy Kawasaki ended up putting it on his website where it's prompted a firestorm of both response and questions about faith-based messages in the public square."

See Nancy's message on Guy's blog.

“Churches that bombard people with too many ‘little ideas’ can miss the big idea.” Dave Ferguson, Jon Ferguson, and Eric Bramlett argue this point in The Big Idea, a new book in the Leadership Network innovation series (Zondervan, 2007). The authors insist that more information equals less clarity and leads to less action. Here is their solution for their multi-site church: “Every week, we give all of our people of every age and at every location one Big Idea and ask them to put it into action.”

For more than three decades, Haddon Robinson has championed ‘big idea’ preaching. He argues that preachers should communicate the main idea of a biblical passage. Now, don’t misunderstand what he is saying. He does not claim that sermons fail because they contain too many ideas. He argues that sermons fail when they contain too many unrelated ideas.

I heard a phrase recently that could make a nice illustration or sermon idea. One of the other guys in the office said he was not driving on a particular errand because he wanted "to reduce my carbon footprint." I googled to find the meaning of the phrase and found the carbon footprint website.

Several phrases come to mind as possible uses in a sermon: gospel footprint, spiritual footprint, sin footprint, righteousness footprint. Other ideas?

"God is not on facebook. We hereby demonstrate that our souls are not enslaved to this vice."

So claims one student in a Chicago Tribune article on a new Lenten trend among college students--fasting from Facebook. Students assert that abstaining from their favorite social network is more difficult than giving up sweets or soda, and plan to use the extra time for prayer and "old-fashioned communication."

During the past year, God has been raising my level of passion for His mission. Oh, I realize that “mission” and “missional” are the latest buzz words. But it’s critical for those of us who serve as pastors to recapture our zeal for equipping and leading our churches to reach lost people with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Evolutionary science doesn't care whether God exists--that's the battleground of theologians and philosophers. It does care, however, about why anybody would think he does.

A recent New York Times Magazine article wonders, "Are we hard-wired to believe in God? And if we are, how and why did that happen?"

As I write about my current preaching, I find myself feeling defensive, defensive because my current series is topical and I am committed to biblical preaching, as are the Preaching Today family of resources. But as someone has said, biblical preaching is true to Scripture and true to life. Topical preaching can be solidly biblical and expositional, but topical preaching is a label that is often used with disdain because topical preaching has been abused.

Actually one practical reason I try to avoid topical preaching is, I don't have time to do it well (I'm a bivocational pastor).

To list or not to list? That is the question for preachers who prepare expository sermons. I listen to a fair share of sermons online and even live. At least half of the sermons which can be classified as ‘expository’ employ a list as an organizing principle. These sermons unpack a biblical passage by presenting five facts about God’s love, three marks of a committed disciple, four principles about the testing of our faith, or three strategies for finding God’s will. Is this an appropriate approach? To list or not to list? That is the question!

The midnight wanderings of "ambulatory" children are disrupting marital beds nationwide, and a New York Times article shares stories of the co-sleeping pandemic.

One mother admits, “It’s just so oddly part of the routine. [My husband] and I wonder, will we ever sleep together again?”