As vulnerable as it can be, every week I ask my family for feedback on my messages. They are usually honest. They know who I am and what I’m called to do, and they (mostly) like me, so they aren’t looking to hurt my feelings or feed their egoist agendas.

Yesterday, one of them rightly observed that I used a lot of personal examples and stories. Maybe he knew why I did (It’s not AI-generated, I do make these sermons personal, but to use so many is out of character), but he stopped short of asking. I told him, though, and I’ll tell you.

It would be impossible for me to love the art form of the sermon more than I do. It’s immediate, vital, and very alive. When you watch one online, the teaching can be excellent, thought-provoking, and even life-changing, but the electricity is missing. At its best, a sermon has an undeniable power, in us soaking in the Gospel together. It’s tangible and obvious. You can feel it in your skin and your soul. The Scriptures transcend an intellectual lesson, context and interpretation, touching us in our hearts and imagination. A great sermon fills us with the hope/dream that this, THIS, truly can change the world. That we can change the world.

Any Bible study is funneled through the person teaching, hearing, and experiencing. We show up as we are, all of us, give what we have, we are faithful, take chances, and God takes our paltry everything and turns it into Heaven, pierces our hearts and lives, transforms us and everything else.

Sometimes, the form itself becomes the illustration, the medium becomes the message. The wild creative artistry of Creation is perfectly transferred in poetry. Nothing else could capture the indescribable beauty in quite the same way. Lamentations uses line numbers and first letters for its heart wrenching content – we don’t even know why we feel what we do, we don’t know first letters or Hebrew alphabets, we just know it’s wholly devastating.

I have played with this kind of thing before, in very shallow water.

Yesterday, for Ecclesiastes 3 (“a time for… and a time for…”), we went through each one, in the same way, the same format, with the same main point. Of course, we did. The passage is repetitious and monotonous – 40 minutes talking about it were equally repetitious and monotonous. Is it over yet??? We get it already! Right?!!?

And at the same time, to do almost exactly what Solomon is doing in this book, I taught one thing through its opposite. The poem is completely absent of any humanity. Buildings rise and fall, big deal. And he’s right, without God or the His image, His Spirit, His animating energy, a building is simply a building. So, we talked about the buildings we spent time in, made memories in, loved. In that context, he couldn’t be more wrong, those things absolutely do mean something.

I told lots of stories of a full life. How do you do marriage? A marriage can just be a piece of paper in a drawer, OR, it can be God’s revolutionary gift that He’s given to bless us all. It’s all in the Hows and Whys. And NOT the Whats. I gave a message overflowing with hows, whys, personal detail and gratitude, to contrast with their absence in the text.

My son knew it was different. And it stuck with him. They usually say things like, “too long,” or “it was good.” This day, something was different. And I’ll take that. What I did wasn’t great, it probably wasn’t even particularly good, it was a risk. Maybe you thought it was boring or that I was too self-obsessed with my own story. Getting to do what we get to do (teach the Gospel in any/all circumstances, to everyone, all the time) carries an enormous responsibility, but it’s also a wonderful opportunity. We get to jump into this river that has flowed since the beginning of time, the Story of our Creator, Savior, Redeemer, Father, and all words in between. And we get to use the gifts He’s given us to worship & witness to His life, not in the way everyone else has done, but in the way we do.

I don’t take these messages lightly. I take them so seriously, in fact, that I’ll risk “boring” or “self-obsessed” to get through in new ways, to do my part to help The Most Valuable Story we will ever hear stick.