Preaching Tools

Extravagantly powerful and noisy engines helped make Ferrari the ultimate sports car brand. Now the company wants to persuade the superrich to buy a model with no engine at all.

The Italian carmaker this week started lifting the hood on its first fully electric vehicle, a yearlong project that has cost the brand hundreds of millions of dollars and promises to set a benchmark for how battery-powered sports cars should look, sound and drive.

…EVs pose a particular challenge for luxury sports-car brand, which say roar and rumble are central to their identities and appeal. Ferrari, perhaps more than any other automaker, has built its brand on internal combustion engines.

Ferrari said its EV wouldn’t mimic engine sounds, as some competitors have. Instead, it will pick up the sound of what it calls the “electric engine” and amplify it into the cabin to give the driver feedback when required.”

Maybe Ferrari is onto something but for many who adore their cars a Ferrari without a roar seems like a love sung played on a kazoo or a passionate love that goes unspoken, or a marriage without warmth and fire, or a honeymoon without a dessert, or a love poem written by autocorrect, or finally a romantic dinner on paper plates. It may all be there but it’s missing something essential.

Exploration of the open sea grew and flourished rapidly after Columbus’s discovery of America in the late fifteenth century. There were so many new regions of the world waiting to be explored and discovered. Innate curiosity along with the opportunity for adventure and economic gain were the principle driving forces behind these bold pioneers of the sea, However, their voyages were taken at great cost and with great risk. Many men died in these quests and explorations.

The adventurers and explorers who had set sail and discovered new routes, returning safely, possessed knowledge that was of great value. These men had learned the secrets of safe passages to new worlds. They kept detailed records in a small book called a “rutter,” which held all the secrets of a particular route to a specific destination and was of great importance to those who might make future voyages.

Obviously, a rutter held such great value because it recounted someone’s long journey, someone who had braved an unknown distance and returned as a witness to others. The rutter offered greater certainty for those who would travel in the future. With rutter in hand a sailor had confidence the same voyage could be retraced with a measure of safety.

The idea of a rutter is important when we consider the journey we will take at death. In one sense, when we depart this life, we too will be traveling to a distant, mysterious place. We too need a rutter, we need a guide who has experienced this journey and returned to share knowledge with us.

Jesus has revealed all that we need to know about death and the afterlife. It is so important to know that God became a man, and, most significantly, suffered a human life and death in its fulness, just as each of us will, and He came back to share with us what to expect and what awaits us.

A New York Times article explored how our world has changed in the aftermath of the pandemic.

At first, the solidarity was breathtaking. Out of concern for ourselves and one another, we suspended nearly all interpersonal activity for months, wiping our lives almost entirely clean of the very people we were trying to protect. But, perversely, that solidarity destroyed our social fabric… For several months the daily lives of many Americans were reduced to the boundaries of their nuclear unit and their phones and televisions and computers. Isolated, we saw one another first as threats and then as something less than real… Politics started to look more like a zone of virtual reality, too, and many Americans came to see their fellow humans as mindless drones.

It was deeply unsettling to realize that our modern, wealthy world was no fortress against contagion, mass death and pandemic hysteria of various kinds. The end of the end of history has been declared countless times since 2001, but no event punctuated the point as clearly as Covid-19.

The emergency began at a time of geopolitical uncertainty, but it ended in an unmistakable polycrisis: beyond Covid, its supply shocks and inflation surge, there was a debt crisis and an ongoing climate emergency, wars in Europe and soon the Middle East and renewed great-power conflict with China…

It looks like we finally got those Roaring Twenties we were promised. In 2020, the phrase was used to suggest an age of parties and sex and social recklessness was on the way, as 330 million cooped-up Americans let off some steam. [But] in 2025 … the world does not seem now more buoyant or full of hope, but abrasive and rapacious and shaped nearly everywhere by a barely suppressed rage. We have still not reckoned with all we have lost.

A New York Times article was titled, “The Meaning of the Boston Marathon Finish Line, Then and Now.” This was the opening line: “For many runners, the marathon finish line feels holy, and reaching it divine.” Then it said, “The Boston Marathon is arguably the most elusive finish line of all, and not just anyone can cross it.”

We are in a race like that! And the finish line is everything to us! Paul wrote, "I have finished the race."

The church father, Jerome, around 400 AD, recorded a story that had been handed down to him, about John the apostle who recorded the words we’ve studied here, and whose three epistles emphasized this love we’re to have for one another.

"The blessed John the Evangelist lived in Ephesus until extreme old age. His disciples could barely carry him to church and he could not muster the voice to speak many words. During individual gatherings he usually said nothing but, 'Little children, love one another.' The disciples and brothers in attendance, annoyed because they always heard the same words, finally said, 'Teacher, why do you always say this?' He replied with a line worthy of John: 'Because it is the Lord's commandment and if it alone is kept, it is sufficient.'"

It might be the most precarious race in sports. To win the 60-meter hurdles, a runner has to start strong, clear five barriers taller than a kitchen counter and then outsprint everyone else—all in less than eight seconds.

It’s the sort of unforgiving endeavor where even the smallest mistake or tiniest hesitation can prove fatal. Unless you’re Grant Holloway.

He’s won it 75 times in a row.

What makes Holloway so good? For starters, he’s tall—standing at 6-foot-2 and with long legs. But he also embraces routine, stays humble, and keeps improving. Holloway lives two doors down from his coach. Even with his pile of titles, he is working on tiny improvements to his form, like lifting his trailing knee higher over the hurdle and keeping his foot tucked closer to his body.

“He doesn’t take anything for granted,” said his coach, Mike Holloway—no relation. “He challenges me to challenge him daily.”

During a gathering of entrepreneurs in Las Vegas one of the speakers was a brand architect at Lego. During his presentation, he handed each attendee six Lego bricks. Then he asked them to estimate the number of unique combina¬tions that could be created with those six bricks. This sounded like a trick question, so one attendee aimed high and guessed several hundred combina¬tions. That left him several hundred million short of the actual answer!

Are you ready for this? The total number of possible permutations—six bricks with eight studs each—is 915,403,765. Nearly a billion possible permutations with six Lego bricks!

While the number of possible Lego combinations is mind-boggling, it pales in comparison to the sheer complexity and potential combinations found within DNA. Here's why:

Legos have a limited number of ways they can connect. DNA, on the other hand, uses four different "bases" (adenine, guanine, cytosine, and thymine) that can pair in specific ways. However, the sequence of these base pairs is what carries the genetic information, and this sequence can vary enormously.

A single strand of DNA can contain millions or even billions of these base pairs. A gene, which is a specific segment of DNA, might be hundreds or thousands of base pairs long. The number of possible sequences for a gene, let alone an entire DNA molecule, is astronomically huge.

To give you a sense of the scale, the human genome contains roughly 3 billion base pairs.
Even a relatively short gene of 1,000 base pairs has 4^1000 possible sequences (4 because there are 4 bases). That's a 4 followed by 1,000 zeros, a number far exceeding the number of atoms in the known universe!

Possible Preaching Angle:
The information encoded in DNA is incredibly vast and precisely organized, making the Lego analogy seem in comparison. It serves as a powerful reminder of the awe-inspiring power and intelligence behind creation and is a testimony to the purposeful Creator behind life.

The scientist Ali Binazir wrote a paper explaining the probability that you exist. It turns out that when taking into account the astonishing number of possibilities of parents meeting, grandparents meeting before them, and so on going back generations, and then adding the vast number of sperm and ova in possible combinations over decades of the marital act in all those generations, the odds of me existing just as I do are about 1 in 102,685,000. That’s a number so huge it hurts to think about it.

For example, the probability of your father meeting your mother is 1 in 20,000. The chances of them talking to one another is 1 in 10. The chances of that turning into another meeting is about 1 in 10. The chances of that turning into a long-term relationship is about 1 in 10. The chances of that lasting long enough to result in offspring is 1 in 2. So, the combined probability is already only about 1 in 40 million.

Now let’s get down to some of the biological details: each sperm and each egg is genetically unique because of the process of meiosis; you are the result of the fusion of one particular egg with one particular sperm. So, the probability of that one sperm with half your name on it fertilizing that one egg with the other half of your name on it is 1 in (100,000) (4 x 1012) = 1 in 4 x 1017, or 1 in 400 quadrillion.

Getting complicated! You bet! But the probability just keeps getting more unlikely. You are highly improbable!

But, according to the Bible, you are not here by chance. God created and knit you together in your mother’s womb (Ps. 139:13-16). You’re not just one in a million, you’re one in a 102,685,000.

When you drive north toward Ordos City in China’s Inner Mongolia province, you can’t miss the Mausoleum of Genghis Khan. The massive complex, rebuilt in the 1950s in the traditional Mongol style, houses genuine relics and is an important sanctuary for the shamanic worship of the legendary Mongol leader. But the Khan’s tomb is properly called a cenotaph—a monument to someone buried elsewhere—because it is empty.

While we can be certain his mortal remains are not there, we’re completely uncertain as to where they might be. And that’s odd. In life, he was the most powerful person on Earth. He was the Universal Ruler (“Genghis Khan”) of an empire that would eventually stretch from the Pacific Ocean into Eastern Europe, encompassing large swaths of present-day China, Russia, and the Middle East. Yet his grave is unmarked and remains undiscovered.

This is by design. Despite his exalted status, Genghis Khan retained the frugal, itinerant lifestyle of his youth, and indeed of most Mongols. So, it makes sense that he would want a humble, anonymous burial in his homeland. “Let my body die, but let my nation live,” he is supposed to have said.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1. Christ, Lordship of; King Jesus; Lordship of Christ – Many powerful kings have ruled over large parts of the earth. Many came from humble backgrounds and rose to greatness. Jesus, the true “universal ruler” also had a humble childhood and became the most powerful person on earth. He was also buried in a grave whose exact location is debated today. But the defining difference is that the King of Kings and Lord of Lords rose from the dead and reigns forever seated at the right hand of God.
2. Moses – The burial place of Moses is also unknown, but he was buried by God himself. (Deut. 34:5-6; Jude 1:9)
3. Final Judgment; Resurrection – Although the grave of Genghis Khan is unknown, hidden in the mists of history, God will still raise him up to stand at the final judgment. (Rev. 20:13)

Don’t die. That’s the simple mission statement of Bryan Johnson, tech entrepreneur, who is on a mission to extend his life as long as possible. He is not alone in this quest. In fact, the preoccupation with longevity is everywhere. Entrepreneurs are using AI to crack the longevity code. Cities are vying to be the new “longevity hubs.”

Most of the longevity movement is not really about immortality but rather about extending life and limiting the damaging effects of aging. Of course, we all want longevity. The danger of Johnson’s obsessive approach is spending so much time trying to extend your life that you never quite get around to living it.

Indeed, keeping death close—even while pushing it as far into the future as we can—has many lessons to teach us about life…. Death can help us focus our attention on living our best life, because there’s nothing that can teach us more about how to live life than death. Death is the most universal experience, yet we will do anything and everything we can to curtain it off, to avoid dealing with the only plot twist that we know for sure will be in our story’s last act.

Here lies the crux of the error of those that see human beings solely as material beings, they have confused an immortal soul with an immortal body. As the philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin put it, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

When we don’t allow death into our lives, we lose the clarity, perspective, and wisdom that only death can bring. That’s why psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross called death the key to the door of life: “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you’ll live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know that you must do.”

Imagine the awful inconvenience of being declared dead by the United States Government. Consider this true story:

Susan and Darby Nye of Arlington, Virginia, have been married for 30 years and were looking forward to many more in retirement when Susan started receiving condolences from various federal agencies regarding the death of her husband. But there was one big problem: Darby was alive and well.

It started when Darby’s purchase at a pharmacy was declined. He called to find out why. “Well, they said the Social Security Administration has informed us that you are dead,” he said.

When someone dies, they’re supposed to be put on the Death Master File. The Social Security Administration uses the death data to terminate benefit payments and report deaths to other agencies. But one typo can mistakenly declare someone dead, digging a grave that buries them along with their finances.

Darby’s plight as a categorized deceased person is not singular: it is estimated that every year, some 12,200 U.S. citizens are declared dead by the Social Security Administration due to "keystroke errors." Those affected become like the walking dead, unable to secure a job, make financial transactions, file taxes, or visit the doctor, and for months on end, must endure the nightmare of convincing a large bureaucracy that they haven't yet bit the dust.

Possible Preaching Angle:
Being declared legally dead is a terrible inconvenience for people in our society. But being declared legally dead to sin is a tremendous blessing for believers that promises incredible freedom and hope.

In a New York Times interview, Lady Gaga discussed the pain and brokenness she’s experienced in her life as a star:

On being treated as “a commodity” she said: “I also can say with a lot of honesty that, being in the music industry since I was a teenager, some of it is how much you are willing to give away. Things like eating at the dinner table with your family, it never happens. Being in a room by yourself never happens.”

On losing touch with reality, she said: “At a certain point, I just completely lost touch with reality. I was falling so deeply into the fantasy of my artwork and my stage persona that I lost touch… I had psychosis. I was not deeply in touch with reality for a while. It took me out of life in a big way, and after a lot of years of hard work I got myself back.”

The singer-actress says she’s doing better, largely through a relationship with her current fiancé, but she still claims that she’s “kind of at war with myself sometimes as I get ready to, hopefully, become a mom soon. Like, today is wonderful, but the whole day has revolved around me. There’s an incredible amount of narcissism in this. How do I live a life where I’m passionate about my art while also making more space for other things?”

That old cell phone? Dead laptop? Gaming console from 14 years back? Britain’s Royal Mint is turning tech trash into treasure. A cellphone's motherboard, for example, contains gold, because it needs to conduct electricity well. Seventeen and a half cell phones yield enough gold to produce a wedding band.

Eshe Nelson writes in a NewYork Times article: "The mint expects to process about 4,500 tons of e-waste, which includes circuit boards from televisions, computers and medical equipment, each year." The process is arduous: "the gold is leached from the circuit boards in a patented solution, which oxidizes the gold to make it soluble. The solution, saturated with gold, goes through another chemical process to make the gold solid again. It looks surprisingly like ground coffee, but 100 grams is worth about $8,405. That powder is refined till it is 99.9 percent pure, formed into long rods, then heated and cooled to make it malleable. The result in the hands of an artist: a pair of 9-karat gold hoop earrings worth $1,000.

Possible Preaching Angle:
The intense work to refine gold is nothing compared to the refining process that God uses to refine the faith of believers.

The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed in March 2024 after being struck by a container ship. Six people were killed.

n 1991, Maryland was among the states that helped develop a test to evaluate bridges for the likelihood of collapse if they were to be struck by a ship. The risks varied according to a number of factors, including the speed of the vessels passing underneath, the depth of the water, the geometry of the bridge and what systems were in place to protect a bridge’s support structures.

Even as the vessel traffic crossing under the Key Bridge grew over the years in size and volume, increasing the bridge’s vulnerability, Maryland transportation officials never conducted such a risk assessment. An assessment by federal officials after the collapse revealed that the bridge’s risk level was almost 30 times the recommended threshold. Given that Maryland officials helped developed the test, one official said, “there’s no excuse.”

But many other states have not conducted risk or vulnerability assessments on their bridges. Investigators found that dozens of bridges in 19 states had not been assessed for risk of collapse in recent years, even though the volume of vessel traffic passing underneath these bridges suggested a strike by a ship was a distinct possibility. The National Transportation Safety Board has contacted the operators of these bridges — in most cases, state transportation departments and regional port authorities — to urge them to conduct assessments and, if needed, come up with measures to reduce the risk of collapse.

Jordan Tkacsik was perusing his friend Paul Bartlett’s sports memorabilia and trading card shop last year when he noticed something unusual in a section full of Pokémon collectibles.

It was a Cheetos cheese puff, but not just any Cheeto. Rather, it was a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto that bore an uncanny resemblance to Charizard, an orange dragon-like creature that is one of the Pokémon universe’s original and most beloved characters. The Cheeto itself was housed in a small plastic container, and the three-inch cheesy treat even had a name: Cheetozard.

Mr. Tkacsik was not exactly a Pokémon aficionado, but he knew it was an unusual item. So he made it his mission to build a case for the puff and get it ready for sale.

Still, Mr. Tkacsik had no way of knowing that Cheetozard was bound for global celebrity. In March 2025, the dragon-shaped snack sold at auction for $72,000 (plus fees that pushed the price to nearly $90,000) amid a bidding frenzy. Yep, that’s right, a “Flamin’ Hot” snack with an uncanny resemblance to a fire-breathing Pokémon was a hit on the auction block.

Every December, churches across the United States prepare for an influx of visitors, but fewer Americans than ever are including church in this year’s Christmas plans. According to a Lifeway Research study, only 47% of U.S. adults say they typically attend church during the holiday season, while 48% admit it’s not on their agenda, and 5% remain undecided. While 9 in 10 Americans do something to celebrate Christmas, less than half typically attend church at Christmastime today.

The study reveals a sharp divide in Christmas church attendance, particularly among the religiously unaffiliated—a group growing fastest among younger demographics. While 71% of this group say they’re unlikely to attend church at Christmas, 40% admit they might consider it if personally invited by someone they trust.

Among those who do attend, the motivations are surprisingly diverse. Sixty percent of Christmas churchgoers say their attendance stems from faith, but others are only doing it to keep up with tradition (16%), appease family and friends (15%), or simply embrace the festive ambiance (8%).

As churches prepare for Christmas Eve services — often the highest-attended service of the year — the message is clear: intentional outreach matters.