PLANNING One day the King in the Wizard of Id announces: "The Army is ready, we must set a date to attack the enemy!" He turns to the Wizard to select the most propitious date…
Sermon Illustrations
THE POWER OF ASSUMPTION A man was inviting a friend to his wedding anniversary celebration and was explaining how to get to his place. He said: "We're on the seventh floor, apartment D. Just touch…
PRAYER POWER Once upon a time there was a man who went hunting. He was hunting bears. As he trudged through the forest looking for bears, he came upon a large and steep hill. He…
CHILD STATISTICS A statistician who had never taken care of his four small energetic children by himself reluctantly promised to look after them one Saturday afternoon while his wife went shopping. When she returned, he…
PROSPECTS FOR THE FUTURE A fortune-teller studied the hand of a young man and said, "You will be poor and very unhappy until you are 37 years old." The young man responded, "Well, after that,…
THE ABILITY TO JUDGE "That's a mean-looking dog you've got there," a man said to his friend. "Mean as he looks, too," replied the friend, "and a real fighter." Just then the dog took off…
PRAYER AND PARENTS About a century ago, there died a distinguished Presbyterian minister. When he was a young man, he had attended college at Yale. An awakening broke out on the campus while he was…
KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER A young salesman walked up to the receptionist and asked to see the company's sales manager. Ushered into the office, he said, "I don't supppose you want to buy any life insurance,…
DETERMINATION Among other qualities of personal character, what makes a man great is his determination to keep going. Most sports buffs know that from 1960 to 1966 the record for the most stolen bases was…
COURAGE During hard times in the darkness of winter in an Alaskan Eskimo village a young man of unequaled courage would go out into the bitter cold in search of food for his people. Armed…
THE WORD GOES OUT -- EVEN IN TATTERS I 've recently enjoyed reading Ruth Tucker's book, From Jerusalem to Irian Jaya: A Biographical History of Christian Missions. It is a fascinating survey of Christian missions…
LIKE A FORT Deep in the Arabian desert is a small fortress. It stands silently on the vast expanse of the ageless desert. Thomas Edward Lawrence, known as "Lawrence of Arabia," often used it. Though…
MORE ON STORIES And, speaking of stories, there's a terrific article in the December 16, 1981 issue of Christian Century entitled "Rabbinical Stories: A Primer On Theological Method" by Belden C. Lane of Saint Louis…
THE EXPERTS HAVE SPOKEN I 'm sure that you get a belly full of the experts who speak with knowing arrogance about what will and can happen. Here's a few of them you can add…
IT COULDN'T BE DONE Listen to these examples of inventions and ideas which some people said "couldn't be done" so they resisted the new. 1. The first successful cast- iron plow, invented in the United…
A GOD WHO'S AVALIAVLE TO ALL Among the kind of stories we most welcome are those true stories that come from your own life or from the lives of your people. Many such stories come…
GESTURES One example of friendship remains with me as vividly as the moment I first heard of it as a boy. In his first season with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Jackie Robinson, the first black man…
EMPATHY "Bishop Kennedy has a delightful story about a little girl who was sent on an errand by her mother. She took much too long in coming back. Mother, therefore, demanded an explanation when she…
COMFORT Tom Givens, Pastor of Fruitdale Baptist Church in Wheat Ridge, Colorado sent in this heart- warmer he found in the Reader's Digest. A little girl came home from a neighbor's house where her little…
YOUR NICHE He had been round from church to church trying to find a congenial congregation, and finally he stopped at a little church just as the congregation read with the minister: "We have left…
