How to Present Your Message Quickly and Concisely with Message Maps

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Jul 20, 2012 in Featured, Ministry, Preaching, Sermons, Video | 0 comments

Message Maps helps communicators effectively share a single idea in a moment. Use Message Maps to organize your ideas, express them simply and quickly, and effectively offer a convincing message to hearers.

The video below shows communicators how to do this. It’s focused on business communications, but I want to adapt it to Biblical communications.

Thanks to Lifehacker for the post and video.

As the video states, use three steps to help you communicate your truth with Message Maps.

Message Maps Start With a Twitter Friendly Headline

First, boil the message down to a single idea that you can share succinctly enough to post on a service like Twitter that limits the author to 140 characters or less. For preachers this means express the main idea or Big Idea of your message in this same concise statement.

For example, the simple message of the Gospel could be posted on Twitter like this:

Jesus knows you make a lot of mistakes, but he took the consequences for your sin and wants to forgive you.

That’s pretty simple and seems to encompass the whole thing. If I worked harder, I could word it better, but for demo purposes it suffices.

Share the Main Ideas

In the video the speaker shows how to pull the three main ideas from the Headline and state them in a map. You can use something like a mind mapping app or just a piece of paper or whiteboard. Draw a circle with the title in the center. Now draw a line coming from the center to these three other ideas. State them in as simple a fashion as you can. That will help you quickly present the idea to someone.

Using our above idea, we could give the following three lines:

• Jesus knows you sin
• Jesus suffered in your place
• Jesus wants to forgive you and work with you

The man in the video wants us to use three main ideas, but not all ideas include three. You could present two or four. In fact I might prefer to split the third statement above into two:

“Jesus wants to forgive you. Jesus wants to work with you sharing His forgiveness to others.”

Support Your Sub-points

Now that you have the gist of your message, support each of the main ideas. You only do this if your main idea and sub ideas get a hearing. For example, in a witnessing situation you could state the above and ask if its okay to talk with the person more about this. Or you might ask, “Can I tell you how this changed my life?”

In a sermon, you assume they want to hear more. Preaching teachers tell us that each idea must get treatment with the following:

• Explanation – appeal to the mind and answer the question, “What does that mean?”
• Illustration – appeal to the imagination and answer the question, “What does that look like?”
• Argumentation – appeal to the will and answer the question, “Is that true?”
• Application – appeal to the commitment of the person and answer the question, “How do I use that in my life?”

Use the following to do the previous four things:

• Stories: tell your story AKA your testimony of how you were saved
• Facts: share the facts of the Gospel AKA the Roman Road
• Examples: tell about what Jesus did for others you know, if your audience already knows your story

The above could serve as a good presentation. It’s not really a sermon since it’s not based on a text of scripture. It’s a presentation. Use it for a witnessing situation with a friend or as a short message to a civic group.

Other Uses in Ministry

I could see this being useful when you’re presenting ideas to your church board for a potential new ministry or a change in something the church already does. You might use it to communicate your church’s vision to the congregation. Share facts about how your vision will help your church minister. Give stories about ways people have served or how Jesus changed people’s lives.

What do you think? How could you use this ministry to effectively communicate the Gospel? How could an expository preacher use it to get across the idea of a text?

Sermon Illustration: Intensity Hard to Maintain When We’re Comfortable

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Mar 30, 2012 in Preaching, Sermon Illustration | 0 comments

Consider the following – a sermon illustration on the struggle to keep up intensity in the face of complacency.

My indoor soccer team, or futsal team as it is actually called, played the first game of the tournament last night. My son Daniel is the star player and scores most of the goals for out team. When he isn’t scoring goals he’s defending them as one of the two goalies we have.

Last night we played the last place team because we won the regular seasons with only 1 loss and 1 tie to go along with 7 wins. We beat this team by an average of 4 or 5 goals during the regular seasons. It was hard to get my team fired up and intense. It was hard to get myself fired up and intense.

As we played, the first ten minutes of the 20 minute half resulted in a tie – zero to zero. The kids played without any intensity. I kept cheering them on with positive encouragement. There were flourishes of excitement, but they came few and far between.

It reminded me that it’s really hard to keep up an intensity about any cause when you’re comfortable.

As believers, we often struggle with this. Life is good. If you don’t have any health problems, money concerns, or fear about a lost job, then you just coast along enjoying life.

Yet, the enemy is still trying to defeat us. In our game, the other team was pushing hard. They hadn’t won a single game. They’d love to knock of the best team to advance to the championship game after losing every regular season game. They played hard and fought hard. They scored more goals last night than they did in any other game we played against them.

Fortunately, we still won. But we were luck to eek out that victory.

As believers, we have more to play for than a futsal championship. This is life and eternal life. We compete not against flesh and blood, but against spirits and powers beyond our strength. We must remain vigilant to remain faithful and keep up the intensity in our fight against evil!

 

How Had Bible Study Software Improved Your Preaching?

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Sep 1, 2010 in Bible Software, Digital Bible Study, Editorial, Preaching, Sermons, Technology | 0 comments

Read a tweet last night that was actually a link to a forum post at the Accordance Bible Software forums. The question in the tweet and forum post was how has Bible study software helped to improve your preaching.

Portability

The first response is one I wholeheartedly agree with. The key word was “Portability” by which he meant that using a laptop and software enabled him to port his entire library around. I would add things like the iPad or iPhone (or any other mobile device) which lets me use that fifteen minutes as I am waiting for a meal or for someone to meet me somewhere. When previously that fifteen minutes might just let me read my bible or one book, now I can search my whole library for a word, find a sermon illustration, or get some information about a passage I am preaching.

Connection

The second post makes another great point that I agree with. We’ve always been able to connect one passage to another via things like concordances, margin notes in our study Bibles, or just our memory. But with Bible software these connections are more accessible and therefore more likely to be found. The person posting gave an example of the word “ridicule” in Luke 14:28-30, the passage counting the cost and not wanting to be ridiculed for not doing so when building a tower. He said that the same word is used to describe Jesus’ treatment in passages about the crucifixion (the soldiers, the religious leaders while on the cross). The connection brings up the idea of ridicule and counting the cost. Did Jesus fail to count the cost when he came to earth and did things that led to his crucifixion? The answer of course is yes he did but felt it worth the cost to redeem our souls. GREAT POINT!

Time and Efficiency

A third way cited was the speed of Bible study software. It saves a lot of time in all three stages of preparation. It saves time in study as I don’t have to search a stack of books manually. They are there ready to go at my finger tips. The time saved allows me to go deeper. In the sermon writing phase, it saves me time in finding good illustrations, in copying and pasting texts or notes into the sermon, and if you use your Bible software to actually write your sermons you don’t have to switch between two applications.

Enjoyment

The final point is my own. I am a tech geek and I love technology. For that reason I am more likely to play around with something if it has to do with technology. Put Bible study software on my computer or mobile device and I am more likely to do things like read my Bible more regularly and longer.

Visual Tool to Test for Practical Application

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Aug 26, 2010 in Editorial, Ministry, Preaching, Sermon Illustration, Sermons | 1 comment

I was reading the July & August edition of Bible Study Magazine today and had a thought. The article that inspired me was by John Saddington entitled “When All Else Fails.”

He was writing about how we can take a passage that may not really be specifically about some area of personal need, like how to raise your teens, and apply the principals of that passage in that area. His example was about using the principals learned in the opening verses of Nehemiah to help parents navigate the troubled waters of raising a human who looks like an adult and acts like a child, otherwise known as a teenager.

As I read about it I was thinking, we need something that will help us as preachers to make sure we are being practical and at the same time biblical in our application.

I am a graduate of the Haddon Robinson school of Big Idea preaching. He says that to be biblical in our preaching we must study to find what is the primary Big Idea of a passage. And then present that in a way that remains faithful to the tone and meaning of the text. I try to do that, but where I often fail is in the area of practical application. I commit one of three errors.

1. I am too general so that most people won’t really take the time to think hard about what I am saying (hopefully really what God is saying).
2. I am fallacious in my application – I say it applies thusly while God is saying “Really? I never saw that in that text.” That’s not a good thing.
3. I don’t bother – to lazy, busy or uncreative/unthinking to get that far with the text. Thus says the Lord is all I present afterwards thinking, “Wow, that was lofty but people live on earth.”

So how can we take our passage and present both biblical and practical application?

I am a visual person so it helps to have a visual illustration with which to frame this. So we are talking about real lives and most people spend lots of their hours of real living in a house. So lets use a house. Trite but everyone’s seen one.

Taking each room of the house to remind us of the various parts of our lives, go through your text and check off to see if you are being biblical and practical. If you have to use a picture, print it out and write down some notes. If I were a decent artist I’d draw you one, but let me sketch with words.

Every house has a foundation. The Big Idea of the text is your foundation. Write it down in a present tense, active voice sentence. Just one sentence. If you need help in learning how to discover the Big Idea read Scott Gibson’s salute to Haddon Robinson entitled The Big Idea of Biblical Preaching.

Now that you know your Big Idea, re-read the text to make sure you are right. Ask God to correct you if you are not. Then think about the text from the standpoint of the average person and their hurts, needs, victories, and worries. And take a tour of their house entering the front door into the living room. There you see them entertaining guests. What would the passage say about this family and their relationships with other friends or fellow church members. Think of who might be visiting.

An example from a passage I just preached, Matthew 6, talks about false piety v. inner spiritually that comes from a relationships with Christ. It is the passage in which we find Jesus instruction about prayer. He also talks about alms giving and fasting. He says don’t do it for public show but out of a sincere desire to glorify God personally and often privately. The Big Idea might be something like this: Are you more pious than a preacher? That is how I stated it in a fun way. But the more accurate description is this: how can our spiritually surpass the hypocritical church people who only do what they do for show and self aggrandizement? The answer is to do what you do with humble sincerity with only God as your audience and interest.

As the family sits with their friends, they might be tempted, if these are fellow believers or even better their pastor and his wife, to tell all about their spiritual works in order to impress them. “My, it’s difficult to make ends meet now that we are tithing 20 percent, pastor! By the way did you see that little Johnny over there has been the only member of the children’s choir to attend every one of the Christmas program rehearsals this month?”

That may be a bad example. But you get the idea. Maybe the person visiting is a salesman who go their name from a friend. As he shows off his wares he accidentally lets a cuss word slip. The mother is shocked and the father looks disapprovingly. Like the Pharisee he looks down his nose at this “publican”.

As you walk through the house you see the hallway to the bedrooms. The first door is little Johnny’s. Imagine how your text might apply to little Johnny himself. That’s right! We are preaching to kids too. Or maybe you find the need to deal with how the parents are relating to their child. Next to little Johnny’s is the Master Bedroom. There you get ideas about marriage. There is also the door to the bathroom. That room might represent to you the deepest darkest secrets of a person’s life. Off this hallway is the kitchen where families often eat and talk about their day. That along with the dining room might deal with our feeding on the Word or our interactions as a family. It might be about how we provide for our kids. And finally there is likely a study and a family room. Talk about work and entertainment.

Now you see how this can be helpful. The foundational principal may not seem like it is talking about what kinds of movies we watch. But when it relates to being overtly and falsely pious, I might give an illustration about how some men outwardly claim that they never indulge in sinful entertainment but secretly are addicted to pornography. At work they are participating in discussions about very ungodly things, but at church acting like they are the epitome of holiness.

Let me know what you think. How could we improve this analogy for application to make it more useful to those of us who preach? Comment below but remember that I moderate them to keep the spam out.

PreachingToday.com Gets a Makeover

Posted by Kevin Purcell on Aug 25, 2010 in Ministry, Preaching, Sermon Illustration, Sermons, Technology, The Blogroll | 1 comment

PreachingToday is Christianity Today’s Preaching web site with sermon illustrations, sermon outlines and full manuscript sermons available to help preachers in their preparation. I use them to find good illustrations and ideas for how to handle a difficult passage. While it would be possible to just download and preach their sermons, no one seriously recommends that except in very special circumstances and then giving credit for the sermon is a must to stay ethical.

I like PT for its sermon illustration database primarily. But I also enjoy reading the sermons devotionally.

The site is starting to allow access to their beta site redesign. From the screen shot above you will see that they have five basic areas, represented by the five tabs across the top. The search box is prominent at the very top center. Search for a topic and it finds content in the various areas of the site covering that topic. It also has the capability to search via passages too.

After entering your search each tab populates with a list of the results with the number of each kind of content shown below the tab title.

One of the new areas is Videos. If they have a video about the topic it will show there.

The site has some great content and nice features. Go check it out yourself.