*****

Once there was a man who, when he was backing out of his garage at the start of a busy day, saw his neighbor, a carpenter, building something on two sawhorses in his driveway.

The man said to his neighbor, “Come with me and I’ll show you what I’m building.”

So the man’s neighbor set his tools down and got into the man’s car.

Their first stop was a sales meeting over breakfast. The man did all the talking and his neighbor sat their quietly, nodding and smiling in agreement. From there they went to man’s office. His neighbor sat in a chair in the corner, only speaking when spoken to.

After a conference call, the man asked his neighbor, “How did I do?”

“Great,” his neighbor said.

After writing an email addressing a delicate matter, the man asked his neighbor to read it. “What do you think?” he asked.

“I like it,” said the neighbor. “You’re really good.”

The whole day went like that. The man did his work and his neighbor watched and listened. He never intruded. He ever interrupted. The man would occasionally look over at him and his neighbor would give him an encouraging thumbs up.

After work, the man asked his neighbor to go with him to his daughter’s basketball game. She didn’t play much and the man spent most of the game complaining about how the coach wasn’t doing a very good job with the team.

On the way home, after the game, the man asked his neighbor for his opinion. His neighbor said, “You’re right. Your daughter is the best player on the team. The coach should be playing her more.”

“I knew it,” sad the man.

When they pulled into the driveway, the man invited his neighbor to come inside and watch TV with him to unwind from their busy day. His neighbor said yes and he came in and spent the rest of the evening on the man’s couch. The man appreciated how his neighbor liked all the same shows and laughed at the same jokes he did. He was, in the man’s eyes, a perfect friend.

He even took the man’s side when he and his wife had a slight disagreement about who was supposed to give their daughter a ride home after the game.

When it was finally time for bed, the man walked his neighbor to the door and thanked him for the day.

As the neighbor walked across his front yard, the man called out to him, “Hey! Do you want to follow me around tomorrow?”

The neighbor hesitated and looked at the unfinished project in his driveway, then said, “Sure, why not. Same time tomorrow morning?”

“Yep,” said the man. “By the way, I’ve been meaning to ask: what are you building?”

“It’s a project I’m working on for my dad. I’m having a hard time finishing it,” said the neighbor.

“What is it?” asked the man.

His neighbor said, “Well, it will eventually be a cross.”

“Oh,” said the man. “See you in the morning.”

“See you in the morning,” said his neighbor.

Not really, but I needed a dramatic opening sentence.

I have written before about the length of an ideal sermon. A sermon should be only as long as is necessary for you to make your point in a memorable way. This means, in most cases, a sermon should rarely be longer than 25 minutes. I think I probably believe a sermon needn’t be longer than 22 minutes, but 25 is a nice round number so let’s stick with it.

I believe the 25 minute rule should be followed religiously.  Here are the times of my last twelve sermons.

28:42

25:29

22:54

30:55

32:10

31:52

31:12

30:19

37:34!

30:26

30:49

27:45

Egad! Eight of them have been over 30 minutes long. No one has complained about it. I’m sure I’m the only one at my church who pays attention to how long my sermons are (wink). The last three are under 30 because I intentionally made them so, after I noticed my sermons were getting longer.

As I have watched my sermons get longer—like I’m somehow a spectator to the sermon writing process-I sense that their growth was unnecessary, maybe even indulgent, like a singer who can’t finish a phrase without adding a vocal run to fill in the white space (aaaaaeeeeiiiiiiooohhh). Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

So I have been thinking about ways we preachers can shave 5 to 7 minutes from our typical over-long sermons.

1. Speak from only one text. Almost all of the messages listed above have been topical studies of a theological concept. I’ve had my church flipping to passages all over the Bible and tracing threads related to themes such as salvation, justice and love. It has be been a good study, but some of the messages have felt scattered to me. Every time we flip to a different passage, it takes a few extra minutes to set the context, explain the passage and make the connection. The only message in which I have stuck to one text was the shortest one, which clocked in at a brisk 22:54. And no one complained about it being shorter than the rest.

2. Most preachers I listen to on podcasts can shorten their sermons by 2 to 3 minutes by eliminating the opening comments in which they review the main idea of each message they’ve preached in the series so far. This wastes the best opportunity you have to grab your audiences attention and it doesn’t help those who missed a previous week catch up as much as we think it does. Instead, try summarizing the series in one sentence and remind your listeners of your podcast where they can find previous messages.

3. Take out all the bits where you’re trying to impress your listeners with what you know or how much study. I love to throw in historical details, but many of these asides don’t move the message forward. They can end up becoming distractions for skeptics who abandon the sermon for Google to see if what I said was true. I can eliminate many of these details from the message and no one will notice.

4. Keep your prayer at the end of the message short. Tacking a three minute prayer onto a 30 minute sermon is not a sign of spirituality. It’s usually a sneaky way of reviewing the main points of your sermon. Your listeners know what you’re doing.

5. Don’t use three examples to make your point when one will do. It is tricky to know when one is enough and when you need to push harder to make your case. In a recent sermon during our first service, I realized as I was preaching that a couple of the scriptures I read were redundant. When I was writing the message, I really thought I would need multiple passages to solidify the point, but I could see my listeners losing focus as I read them. During second service, I eliminated the redundant passages and the message was tighter and more focused.

What would you add to this list?

I alway get pushback when I write something about preaching shorter sermons. This pushback almost always comes from preachers who can’t imagine saying everything they need to say each Sunday in less than 35 minutes. (It rarely comes from those who listen to these preachers.)

Someone also always says that gifted communicators can get away with preaching longer sermons. That may be true. But there is also something to be said for always leaving your listeners wishing you had spoken a little longer, rather than wondering why you didn’t shut up five minutes sooner.

******

Dear Wade,

How’s it going?

You’re never gonna believe what happened to us this past week. We had one of the worst ice storms in the history of the world hit us squarely between the eyes. Thousands of households all over the state lost power. Ours too.

We were actually a bit shocked when the lights went out on us. We were sitting at the table having dinner. They told us to expect it. Still, it came as a surprise. We had heard that other people were losing their power, but we never thought it would happen to us.

We’re not the kind of people that bad things usually happen to. We’ve always managed to avoid most minor and major inconveniences. We’ve always believed that we have a special relationship with God. Our preacher calls it a covenant, but we like to think of it as more of an understanding. We keep God’s commandments and God keeps us out of trouble. We thought we had been doing enough. We had been saying our prayers and putting our money in the plate. We were nice to almost all of our neighbors and we put up our Christmas lights every year, just after Thanksgiving and not a day before, just like the Bible says to do.

We had assumed that the other people who had lost their power did so because they had done something wrong. Maybe God was mad at them because they’d been skipping church. Or maybe they’d just been foolish. Installed cheap wiring in their house or chosen to live in a bad part of town or in a remote area where they seem to lose power every time a thunderstorm blows across the sky.

It gives our family comfort to be able to figure out why bad things are happening to other people. It’s one of our favorite ways of passing the time over dinner.

But there we were, sitting in the dark just like the rest. We had to rethink our theology. We also had to light a few candles and turn on the gas fireplace to keep the main living room warm.
After that we decided to play our favorite game. We call it the blame game. It’s based on the premise that you can always find someone to blame if you look hard enough.

So why were we in the dark?

Maybe it’s the home builder’s fault. Shouldn’t he have installed a back up system for all the critical functions of our house just like NASA does?

Maybe the weatherman is to blame. He didn’t give us much of a warning did he?

We managed to pin some of the blame on the president. He always gets some of the blame no matter what happens. If the buck stops at his desk, then so must the power cord.

We passed out a lot of blame that night. We blamed the ice, the tree, the wind, the arctic air, global warming, the electric company, Ben Franklin, and yes, I must confess, we blamed God for abandoning us in our darkest hour.

We almost blamed ourselves, but got distracted by the sound of a frozen tree firing off like a gun as its limbs blew out in all directions. None of it landed on our house. But my neighbor wasn’t so lucky. It was our tree that landed on his house. I’ll come back to that later.

Blaming others made us feel a little better. So we decided to make the best of it. This isn’t going to be so bad, we told ourselves. It might even be fun.

It was a chance to go back to simple living like the preacher had been talking about recently. We’d go unplugged for a while and see how well we liked living off of the grid. We don’t need power, we said, we’ve got each other.

We were glad to have more time together as a family. We’d eat marshmallows toasted over a natural gas fire. No school, no official bedtime, no alarm clocks, we’d all sleep together in the same room. We’d make a big pot of beans and cook some skillet cornbread on the stove the next day. We started feeling like we were pioneers living on the prairie, in a little house, in the middle of nowhere.

The first night was charming. We played games and told stories by candlelight. The kids thought it was the greatest adventure of their young lives: camping out in the house, everyone gets their own flashlight. They played hide and seek in the dark deep into the night.

I decided the next day to get to know the neighbors a little better. It would be like old time community. We’d help each other out. Share our resources. Take care of each other. No one would be in need. It sounded sort of biblical.

Well, we gave all of that our best shot and it was a fine way to live for a day or two. Then it all started unravel.

We caught each other cheating at board games. We got sick of marshmallows. We cussed the superintendent for canceling school again. We no longer wanted to sleep in the same house together, much less the same room.

The kids declared war on each other. Hide and seek became search and destroy. Several times I had to remind my wife of the downside of letting the kids kill each other. By the fourth night of darkness all she could see was upside. “Let the herd thin itself out,” she kept muttering to herself.

We turned off the fireplace. We didn’t need it. Our seething anger towards each other kept the house plenty warm.

And the neighbors, they stopped being neighborly, and so did we. The guy next door demanded that I come and get my tree off of his house. I was actually going to do that very thing, but his rudeness turned me off of it and instead I told him that as soon has he started picking up his dog’s poop off my yard, I’d come over and get my tree.

Communal support grew into creeping suspicion, which eventually gave way to criminal behavior.

I got caught sneaking around another neighbor’s backyard trying to plug 200 ft of extension cord into his generator. I just wanted enough power to run a few small appliances, that’s all.

We were amazed at how much we’d taken electricity for granted. One night I decided I wanted some popcorn. I already had the bag in the microwave and was pushing numbers before I caught myself.

My wife kept telling me to shave. I kept telling her that my razor needed a charge.
I needed my coffee every morning, but I couldn’t figure out a way to grind the beans. I finally tried chewing them up and spitting them into the filter, only to have my wife wonder when I had converted our coffee maker to solar power.

It turns out it’s not a good idea to feast on beans and marshmallows when there’s not a working exhaust fan anywhere in the house. The only difference between that experience and carbon monoxide poisoning is that with carbon monoxide you can’t smell death coming for you.

It was rough.

We did have a little battery powered radio and every night we’d listen to it and every night we heard promises about how help was on the way.

“Hang in there,” that disembodied voice would say, “The darkness won’t last much longer.”

The next day we’d hear the same message. “Please be patient, better days are coming, power will be restored, your house will be warm, your lights will shine once again.”

Every morning we’d wake up thinking that this would be the day when the lights would come back on. Later that night, we’d blow out the candles and wonder how much more we could take.

What made it even worse is that folks in nearby neighborhoods started getting their power back before us. We could see the glow of their lights from our house.

“How did they get their power back so soon?” we asked each other, “Who do they know? Who did they bribe?”

Then–I kid you not–some of those people in those freshly lit houses actually had the nerve to fire up their Christmas lights! We’re sitting over here in the dark and they’ve got Santa and his reindeer landing on their house in shades of red, green, blue and white.

One family had a well-lit sign on their roof that said “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to all men.” We felt like they were rubbing our noses in holiday cheer. So we called down curses on their household. We wanted the righteous hammer of God to fall on them and take away their electricity. They didn’t deserve it. We wanted them to be just as miserable as we were.

I even thought about helping God’s hammer hit its mark by sneaking over there and busting up their transformer all over again. Be the answer to your own prayer. That’s what the preacher is always saying.

The worst part of this whole deal was that getting our power restored was taken out of my hands completely. I’m a do-it-yourself kind of guy. I like being in control of my own destiny. I like to take charge of a situation. I was powerless to do anything about our lack of power.

During the day, I’d walk around the outside of the house looking for something to fix. I wanted to be the solution to a problem. I wanted there to be something I could do to move things along. I couldn’t stand waiting for someone else to us out of trouble. I wanted to do it myself.

But there was nothing I could do. It had to be done for us. We were totally dependent on someone else for our “salvation.” I know salvation is a heavy word, especially for you preachers, but that’s exactly what it felt like we were waiting for.

We were tired, angry, and scared. The darkness was starting to mess with our heads. We heard strange sounds in the middle of the night and woke up seeing things that weren’t really there. We were treating each other terribly. We didn’t trust our neighbors. God no longer seemed real to us.

So yeah, after awhile we understood that we were waiting for more than just power, for more than just our lights to be turned on again.

We were waiting for something we’d lost and couldn’t get back by ourselves. We were waiting for something that we’’d taken for granted, that we didn’t even know we’d miss until it was gone.

We were waiting for something valuable to be restored. We recognized its value because its absence had brought about a change in us, and not for the better.

It its absence, we became a different kind of people, a different kind of family. We forgot how to be neighbors. We could no longer see what was so plainly in front of us.

We did not like who we had become while living in the dark. We needed to be saved.

So we waited for power, for light, for warmth. And we waited for a second chance, a fresh start, a new day.

Yesterday the power was restored to our home. Our lights came back on just as suddenly as they went out. Our home is warm and bright once again. Life is returning to normal.

Yet this darkness remains. And it still feels like we’re still waiting on something or maybe someone. I guess we’re waiting for a different kind of power to cut through the dark and light up the world once and for all.

Know what I mean?

Your friend,

Adam

*******

Once upon a time three kids found a bag of walnuts and took it to the wisest man in their village.

They asked him to divide the nuts among them as God would.

So the sage gave the first kid one walnut.

To the second he gave five walnuts.

Then he gave the rest, well over fifty walnuts, to the third.

The first two protested, “That’s not fair!”

The sage said, “You didn’t ask me to be fair. You asked me to distribute them as God would.”

The third kid, the one who was holding the bag of walnuts, asked the sage, “Why did you give me so much more than the others?”

“Wrong question,” said the sage.

Burdened by the responsibility he was holding in his hands, the third kid said, “I agree with the the others. This isn’t fair.”

The sage said, “Why are you complaining to me about what is unfair, when you’re the one with all the walnuts?”

The sage turned and walked away.

The third kid called after him, “What am I going to do with all these walnuts?”

The sage smiled and said over his shoulder, “Now that is the right question.”

Out of nowhere he declared, “I believe you can so much that God will not let you into heaven.”

“Can you sin so much that God will stop loving you?” I asked.

“No. God will never stop loving you, but you can definitely sin enough that he’ll say you can’t come into heaven.” The matter-of-fact, God doesn’t make exceptions tone in which he said this was alarming.

“How much do you have to sin in order to kept out of heaven?” I asked.

“It depends,” he said. “Different sins have different point values.”

He went on to describe how some sins aren’t very bad and only worth one point. Other sins are really bad and worth up to 15 points. He had obviously given this some thought. Too much thought.

“How many points do you have to score on the sin-0-meter for God to decide you can’t come into heaven?” I asked.

He said, “That’s totally up to God. He gets to decide the point total.”

“So you live your whole life wondering if you’ve crossed the line and sinned too much?” I asked.

“That’s the way it works,” he said.

I recognized this as both a teachable moment and heartbreaking evidence he had paying about as much attention in church as I did growing up.

“What if because God loves us, he wants us to be in heaven with him, even though we’ve scored too many sin points?” I asked. “How can God overcome our sin so we can live with him forever?”

He thought for a moment, genuinely puzzled, and then gasped, “I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT JESUS AND WHY HE DIED ON THE CROSS!”

Isn’t this what happens when we become preoccupied with defining, counting, ranking and comparing different sins?

When sin dominates the conversation, we tend to forget about Jesus.

This is tragic because we don’t overcome sin by focusing on sin–mine, yours, ours or theirs.

We overcome sin by following Jesus.

I travelled there from Abilene with a small group of students who would go to small town churches on the weekends and lead the worship service. They needed a preacher and I volunteered.

Afterward, an older man who had preached his share of sermons told me something about preaching I have never forgotten.

He said, “After I preach, there are always three sermons on my mind. There’s the sermon I tried to preach, there’s the sermon I should have preached, and there’s the sermon I actually preached.”

He didn’t offer any more explanation than that.

At the time, I didn’t understand what he was saying.

I think I get it now.

Watching Happy Days made me want to wear a black leather jacket.

Watching The Andy Griffith Show made me want to be a small town sheriff.

Watching Magnum PI made me want to be a private investigator in Hawaii.

Watching The Dukes of Hazzard made we want to climb into a car through through the windows.

Watching Night Court made me want to be a judge.

Watching Seinfeld made me want to be a stand-up comedian.

Watching Cheers made me want to be a bartender.

Watching Friends made me want to hang out on a couch in a coffee house.

Watching the X-Files made me want to FBI agent.

Watching MASH made me want to be a wise-cracking Army doctor.

Watching ER made me want to be a sleep deprived doctor.

Watching House made me want to be a sarcastic doctor.

Watching CSI made me want to be a Crime Scene Investigator.

Watching Burn Notice made me want to be a spy.

Watching Firefly made me want to be a space cowboy.

Watching Law and Order made me want to be a lawyer (as much as anything can).

Watching The West Wing made me want to be a White House Staffer.

Watching Friday Night Lights made me want to be a High School football coach

Watching Justified made me want to be a U. S. Marshal (but not in the backwoods of Kentucky).

Watching Mad Men made me want to work in advertising.

Watching Deadliest Catch made me want to be a captain on a crab boat. (Only a fool would want to be a deckhand.)

So lately I’ve been binge-watching Breaking Bad on Netflix . . .

Here’s an early version of the prayer I wrote for the occasion. (If you’re not from Texas some of the references below may not make much sense. Others may be offensive. My apologies either way.)

After several rewrites, the prayer I prayed today was a bit different from what you’re about to read. It’s posted in a comment below.

Our Father in Heaven,
And speaking of heaven, we thank you for the great state of Texas.
You gave shape to our state when you dug the paths of the Rio Grande and the Red and Sabine Rivers with the tip of your mighty finger.
We shudder to think how without these rivers, we might have turned out as square as Wyoming or heaven forbid, Colorado.
(Although we are thankful for the mighty river of the same name and the many lakes, reservoirs, and rice paddies it sustains.)

Forgive us of our many sins.
Forgive us when we foolishly move from our homeland to live among a people who believe a state income tax is fair and just.
Forgive us when we mow down bluebonnets in our backyard because we think no one is watching.
Forgive us when we “accidentally” shoot a mockingbird with the BB gun our dad gave us for our tenth birthday.

Help us to remember the Alamo, because shamefully, unless one lives in San Antonio, it’s easier to forget than one might think.
Eradicate from within our borders anyone who believes pulled pork is authentic Texas BBQ.
Lead us not into Oklahoma or Arkansas, and only briefly into Louisiana for cajun food.

And deliver us from Jerry Jones.

Clear eyes, full heart, can’t lose.
Texas forever.
Amen

Here are nine observations I shared about the life changing environment at a typical CrossFit gym. Let the reader discern applications for creating life changing environments in churches.

1. CrossFit creates compelling “before” and “after” photos. Physical transformation is a normal occurrence in a CrossFit gym. CrossFit trainers are confident the program works and assume something is wrong when it doesn’t.

2. CrossFit provides a clear, practical definition of physical fitness. Crossfit trainers know what kind of athletes they are hoping to produce and they program accordingly. Exercises that do not contribute to functional fitness are ruthlessly eliminated.

3. CrossFit motivates by measuring progress. How do you know if you’re getting more fit? The numbers don’t lie. CrossFitter’s track progress, pursue milestones, and celebrate their improvement.

4. CrossFit offers a personalized training program. Trainers help athletes identify their strengths and weaknesses and then provide additional programming for improving weaknesses.

5. CrossFit is never boring. CrossFit programming consists of multiple exercises combined in an endless variety of ways. Crossfitter’s rarely do the same workout twice in a row. This not only keeps the training fresh, it also ensures that athletes can’t hide from their weaknesses. (See #4)

6. Crossfit makes it possible for anyone to participate. Workouts are scaled according to each athlete’s level of fitness. This creates an accepting environment in which everyone is welcome.

7. CrossFit uses the power of community to nudge us out of our comfort zones. CrossFit is too hard to do alone. CrossFitters are surprised at how much suffering they can endure when surrounded by others who are also suffering.

8. CrossFit embraces the “suck” factor. CrossFit is hard. So what? CrossFittters don’t try to make CrossFit sound easier than it really is in order to entice their friends to join them.

9. CrossFit emphasizes identity over behavior. CrossFit awakens the athlete within. When people see themselves as athletes, they start thinking, eating, sleeping, and training like athletes. A new identity leads to changed behavior.

Which of these strikes you as being the most applicable to your church environment?

To read more, check out  Train For Something Greater: An Athlete’s Guide to Spiritual Fitness available at Amazon.com.