Add a little 'spice' to your sermons

There comes a time in every pastor's ministry when they happen to 'spice' up their sermons, either intentionally or unintentionally. Click here to view a short little video clip of a certain 'Blake' fellow who unintentionally spiced up his talk a number of years ago. A couple weeks ago, I showed this video to the pastors at our church so we could all share a good Christian laugh together. A little more than a week passed by when one of the pastors (Dave) mentioned the video to a student I was talking to, just before the weekend church service started. So, I explained what happened in the video to this student, we had a good laugh, and then went and sat down in our seats for the service. That weekend the other pastor (Larry) was delivering the sermon. Part way through his sermon, poor Larry attempted to ask everyone to take out their schedules to have a look at them, but by complete accident, he said, "Please take out your sexual..." and then he stopped and proceeded somewhat like old Blake did in the aforementioned video. At that point I not only realized what a hilarious conincidence all this was, but I also saw how stupid little things like that can make the sermon a whole lot more memorable... if they're tied in properly.

Well, yesterday it was my turn to speak at our middle school church service thingy. Rather than deliver a boring sermon that was just talking and talking, I decided to try out a few intentional 'spices' that would hopefully make the talk more memorable. Now, I didn't bring out any naughty words like those pastors in the last paragraph did. No, that would probalby scar these poor kids. Instead, I worked a few demonstrations into my talk. The first demonstration was washing the feet of one of the students. I was talking about love and how it is more than just a word... it's an act. Wait, that's not right. I put it in better words than that. haha. It's an action. It involves DOING, not just SAYING. There we go. So, I demonstrated serving others by washing the dirty feet of one of the students up on stage. It was pretty gross, I'm not gonna lie. But I think it was also pretty memorable for the students cause it was so wierd and different.

Well, that was the least interesting illustration I did last night. For the next demonstration, I was making the point that love involves tolerating people. To make this point, I had a volunteer come up on stage and get as much saliva in their mouth as they could. Then I told them to spit in my face. The first person that volunteered was a sweet little girl. She couldn't bring herself to do it, so I had to find someone else. It's surprisingly hard to find someone to spit in your face these days. Eventually one of the boys came up and did it. Suddenly washing someone's dirty feet seemed a lot less nasty than it felt a few minutes earlier. I guess there's just something about the feeling of spit dripping down your forehead that makes the thought of dirty feet a lot more appealing. Anyways, the point of that was to give the students a visual representation of what happens to many of us each and every day. People spit in our faces with their unholy words and actions. Love is tolerating those people. Something like that, anyways.

And for my final demonstration, I invited each of the students that wanted to take a 'step of faith' to come up on stage for one last thing. Props to Mean Girls for this idea. I had the students face the back wall, and then fall backwards off the stage, without looking. Don't worry, we had a group of leaders catching them. heh heh. It was a neat little demonstration, though. Remember that girl that didn't want to spit in my face? She was the first person to come up for this, and she volunteered even before she knew what she was going to have to do. She was at the edge of the stage, ready to fall backwards, but just before she did, she turned to me and said, "I can't do it!" We all encouraged her to have faith (ok, that sounds kinda cheesy, but hey, it seemed cool at the time), and eventually she did it. While everyone else was taking their 'step of faith,' she came up to me and excitedly asked, "Can I do it again?!" That was neat. I thought to myself, "Sure! Devote your life to full time ministry and you'll be taking that 'step of faith' every single day for the rest of your life!!"