Preaching Tools

In a tender reflection on her mother’s death, author Jen Wilkin describes standing at the bedside of the woman who once held her hand as a child. As her mother’s breathing slowed, Wilkin noticed something she had spent years teaching in Scripture but had never fully seen in life itself: the symmetry of a human life.
She realized that the way her mother left the world mirrored the way she had entered it—through great labor, surrounded by caregivers, dependent on others for comfort and care. The end echoed the beginning. Birth and death formed bookends, and in between stretched a long arc of giving and receiving, strength and weakness, dependence and responsibility.

Wilkin calls this pattern a kind of chiasm—a mirror structure often found in Scripture, where the most important truth sits at the center. Life, she suggests, follows the same design. We begin helpless, grow strong, care for others, then slowly relinquish control and learn again how to receive care. What looks like loss is not wasted. It is part of God’s wise ordering.

At her mother’s bedside, Wilkin whispered words she had spoken often in the final years: “You are a person to love, not a problem to solve.” In a culture that fears aging and resists dependence, Scripture teaches that human worth does not diminish with ability. Bodies may fail, but people continue to grow—especially in wisdom.

The symmetry of a long life reminds us that God is faithful in every season—from first breath to last—and that none of it is wasted in his hands.

Nabeel Qureshi was born in California to Pakistani immigrant parents, devout members of the peaceful Ahmadi sect of Islam. His father whispered “Allahu Akbar” into his ear at birth, following a family tradition dating back to Muhammad. Nabeel’s family was loving and tightly knit, entirely centered on Islam. His mother taught him Arabic before English, and by age five, he had read the entire Qur’an in Arabic and memorized many chapters.

His family legacy included generations of Muslim missionaries, and by middle school, Nabeel was adept at challenging Christian theology. Islam gave him “purpose, values, and direction for worship.”

In 2001, while at Old Dominion University, Nabeel met David Wood, a Christian student. Nabeel was surprised that someone so intelligent would read the Bible. Their debates grew into a deep friendship and years-long dialogue. David encouraged Nabeel to examine both Islam and Christianity objectively. “I had been happy with my faith and with my Ahmadi community and did not want to leave it, but I ultimately converted to Christianity after years of dialogue with Wood,” Nabeel recalled. He described his conversion as “the most painful thing [he] ever did” because it cost him most of his friendships and relationships with fellow Muslims.

He wrote, “For the first time, the [Qur’an] seemed utterly irrelevant to my suffering. It felt like a dead book.” In contrast, the words of Jesus in the New Testament “leapt off the page and jump-started my heart.” He realized, “For Muslims, following the gospel is more than a call to prayer. It is a call to die. I knelt at the foot of my bed and gave up my life.”

His conversion deeply wounded his family. He said, “To this day my family is broken by the decision I made, and it is excruciating every time I see the cost I had to pay.” But Nabeel said, “Jesus is the God of redemption. He redeemed my suffering by making me rely upon him for my every moment… To follow him is worth giving up everything.”

What is the greatest obstacle to education? poor teacher training? decrepit facilities? inadequate curriculum? outdated teaching methods? or, lack of money? According to seminary and Christian college prof. T. David Gordon, the greatest obstacle to education is, “the student himself, his parochialism, his laziness, his reluctance to abandon his current viewpoints, his resistance to disciplined intellectual effort, his complacent self-satisfaction with his present attainment and understanding.” Surprised? Shocked? If you think Gordon is just being an ornery troglodyte, an ancient observer noticed the same over 2,400 years ago — Socrates! To meet the challenge, Gordon says the best educators try to “infect” their students with a love of learning (and a hatred of parochialism!).

You’d think education would come “naturally” to Jesus’ disciples (“learners”), but it doesn’t seem to. It takes the Holy Spirit to overcome our (sinful) resistance to learning.

These eight traps are explained by the author in much more detail in the book represented by these few selected sentences.

‘You have my undivided attention,’ Homer announces to his family over the kitchen table in a scene from The Simpsons.

When the camera zooms in to reveal the contents of Homer’s mind, however, we see a cartoon jig, with a bird dancing, a cow on the fiddle and a tortoise banging percussively on its shell….

Some traps are commonly held beliefs which destroy your desire to listen – truly listen – to others. Even if you are able to start listening, you can still fall into other traps that hijack your ability, as you listen, to stay present…

I Want to Win. ‘Winning’ a conversation…causes collateral damage across a relationship. You leave the speaker feeling dismissed or seething, convinced that you have willfully ignored them.

I Am in Charge. Your role is to explain to instruct, add value, be right, even at times to dictate. It’s your job as boss, parent, elder, teacher, professor, older sibling or supervisor.

I Have Expertise (and You Don’t). If you are caught in this expertise trap, (a relation of I am in charge), in your eyes the world is frozen. It’s as if you have nothing new to learn, because you already know what they are going to say.

I Must Prove I’m a Man. Indeed, in the workplace there is a clear link between gender assertiveness, and the role of a speaker and listener. Here, men may feel the need to be dominant, authoritative or persuasive to avoid the risk of being marginalized. So, they drill themselves not in sensitivity or receptiveness but in delivering a strong message.

I Must Solve and Sort. The temptation to offer advice intensifies if you believe that your greatest value lies in your capacity to mend the lives of others, or if you feel the need to control a situation to stay safe. But if you are ensnared by this listening trap, you and your speaker could both lose out. When you listen to solve rather than to understand, you take on the speaker’s responsibility and deny them their agency. This burdens you and disempowers them.

I Don’t Have Time. Our challenge is that we think many times faster than we talk. Our brains can digest 400 words each minute, as we often recognize words in conversation before they’ve been fully spoken, but we speak at about half that speed. As this excess processing power lies idle, listening can feel slow and frustrating, so we become subsumed in daydreaming or planning our response. If I Listen, I Must Obey. ‘Listen to me!’ your teacher yells at you…but what she means is: Obey me! Keep quiet! Sit still! So, it’s perhaps not surprising that ingrained in your subconscious is a belief that listening binds you to a whole set of obligations: …If you listen, you must fulfil all the expectations of the person talking to you.

Global celebrity and actress Jennifer Lawrence seems to walk onto every set with effortless confidence and humor. But in a recent interview, she spoke with surprising honesty about what has been happening beneath the surface.
She said, “I’ve struggled with anxiety for most of my life,” and talked about how worry and depression often come as twins—wearing her down until she “plummets into sadness.” After the birth of her second child, she described postpartum anxiety like this: “I felt like a tiger was chasing me every day… nonstop intrusive thoughts… they controlled me.”

Even her early years in Hollywood, when she was winning Oscars and starring in blockbusters, were filled with fear. When people told her, “Everyone loves you,” she answered, “It feels precarious. It’s going to come down.” And looking back on her past interviews, she winced and admitted, “I regret everything I’ve ever done or said.”

Preaching Angles: Most of us aren’t movie stars, but many of us know what it’s like to feel anxious, insecure, or haunted by regret. Success doesn’t silence fear, applause doesn’t cure anxiety, and fame doesn’t calm the human heart.

“Abu Jaz,” is a key leader in a movement that describes itself as the “People of the Gospel.” This group represents several thousand Muslims in eastern Africa who have converted to faith in Christ. Abu Jaz describes his conversion to Christ:

One night the only food my wife and I had was a small portion of macaroni. My wife prepared it very nicely. Then one of her friends knocked on the door. I told myself, ‘The macaroni is not sufficient for even the two of us, so how will it be enough for three of us? But because we have no other custom, we opened the door, and she came in to eat with us.’

While we were eating, the macaroni started to multiply; it became full in the bowl. I suspected that something was wrong with my eyes, so I started rubbing them. I thought maybe my wife hid some macaroni under the small table, so I checked, but there was nothing. My wife and I looked at each other, but because the guest was there, we said nothing.

Afterward I lay down on the bed, and as I slept, Isa (Jesus) came to me and asked me, ‘Do you know who multiplied the macaroni?’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’ He said, ‘I am Isa al Masih (Jesus is Messiah). If you follow me, not only the macaroni but your life will be multiplied.’

I didn’t understand what he meant when he said that my life would be multiplied. Now I understand what that means. But at that time, I accepted him simply as the ‘lord of macaroni’ much like the crowds in the Gospels who accepted him as ‘lord of bread.’

Yes, I just accepted him as one who satisfied my needs. That day I understood that Isa came to my home. When I think back now, the kingdom of God came to my home. Jesus said, ‘[I]f I cast out demons . . . the kingdom . . .has come upon you’ (Luke 11:20, NASB). Any miracle that takes place by Isa al Masih speaks of the kingdom of God.

A psychological counselor reported an “ODD” experience with a client. The therapist had tentatively diagnosed the patient with ODD, Oppositional Defiant Disorder. You probably don’t have a psych dictionary on your apps, so here’s the Google definition of O.D.D., “A behavioral condition characterized by a persistent pattern of angry, irritable mood, argumentative and defiant behavior, or vindictiveness.”

At the end of the counseling session, the therapist had said innocently, “Have a good day.”

The client responded angrily, “Don’t tell me what to do!!” That was the moment the therapist nailed the diagnosis!

You may not have experienced an “O.D.D.” person, but we all may deal with a difficult or draining person (of course, we’re not difficult or draining, right?!).

Tech billionaire and author Bryan Johnson was recently interviewed by the popular tech magazine Wired (30 million monthly readers across several platforms). A highly successful entrepreneur and anti-aging practitioner, he has more than 4 million followers across YouTube, Instagram, and X. He is best known as the subject of the 2025 Netflix documentary “Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever”.

When asked if he will ever die, he responded:

“Death has always been inevitable, so we have made all these preparations. We talk about immortality in professional achievements. We talk about life after death. There are the ways that we’ve dealt with death up to this point. And now we have this real possibility of extending our lifespans to some unknown horizon. …….. So currently, in a very crude form, I have a Bryan AI that has digested everything I’ve ever said.”

Power and money will no longer be life’s number one priority:

“Most people today spend every waking moment pursuing wealth; and the time they’re not spending pursuing wealth, they’re pursuing some sort of status or prestige. When you give birth to superintelligence, you can start extending lifespans to some unknown horizon: 200 years, 1,000 years, 10,000 years. Millions of years. We don’t know. When that happens, the entire game of humanity shifts from that singular focus on wealth accumulation and status and prestige to existence. Now, embedded in existence, we may still play games of power, but it will be conditioned that existence itself is the highest virtue. That’s the shift that’s starting to happen right now.”

AI immortality must happen for humanity to survive:

“My solution for this is we choose to not die. That’s it. I’m not arguing for immortality. I’m not arguing for utopia. We as a species, our existence is at risk. We do not know if humans have a role in the future. We do not know if we’re going to survive this moment. We are already at each other’s throats. We have nuclear annihilation as a possibility. It’s a moment where we evolve into a species who say: The single thing we have in common is that nobody wants to die right now. That’s it.”

Johnson intends to use his fame, among other resources, to make this future come true:

“If I had to choose between fame and a billion dollars, I would choose fame 100 times out of 100. It’s very hard to achieve. It’s uniquely valuable. I get access to almost anyone in the entire world at this point. If the goal is to create the fastest-growing ideology in the history of the human race and to pair it with the time when the species is evolving into something else, you need fame.”

“Perfectionism confers some magical superpowers like high standards, strong work ethic, reliability, and deep care of others. But gone awry it can subject us to a powerful riptide of I should do more, do better, be more, be better. We might look like we’re hitting it out of the park, but we feel like we’re striking out. For those of us who struggle with it, perfectionism is a misnomer: it’s not about striving to be perfect. Instead, it’s about never feeling good enough.”

Preaching Angles:

• God’s Acceptance of Us: Romans 15:7; John 1:12; Eph 2:8-9
• No Condemnation: Romans 8:1
• God’s Love: Rom 5:8, 1 John 4:19
• God Singing Over Us: Zeph 3:17
• Forgiveness: Heb 8:12, 1 John 3:1

Mark Zuckerberg wants you to have AI friends, an AI therapist and AI business agents. In Zuckerberg’s vision for a new digital future, artificial-intelligence friends outnumber human companions and chatbot experiences supplant therapists, ad agencies and coders. AI will play a central role in the human experience, the Facebook co-founder and CEO of Meta Platforms said recently.

“I think people are going to want a system that knows them well and that kind of understands them in the way that their feed algorithms do,” Zuckerberg said. He also said on a podcast that he thinks the average person wants to have more friends and connections with other people than they currently do—and that AI friends are a solution.

Zuckerberg claimed, “The average American I think has, it’s fewer than three friends, three people they’d consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more, I think it’s like 15 friends.” In another podcast he added, “For people who don’t have a person who’s a therapist, I think everyone will have an AI.”

Ireland’s prestigious 2025 153rd Open Championship was a golf tournament played in July and won by American Scottie Scheffler, who currently has an amazing eleven PGA Tour wins (including three Majors) over just the last two years. With his family he attends Park Cities Presbyterian Church In Dallas, Texas, which describes itself as theologically evangelical. In the official press conference after the tournament, Scheffler opened up about what golf really means, or doesn’t, to him.

“I’m not here to inspire somebody else to be the best player in the world because what’s the point, you know? This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of like the deepest, you know, places of your heart. You know, there’s a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life, and then you get there and all of a sudden you get to number one in the world and they’re like, ‘What’s the point?’

“And, you know, I really do believe that because, you know, what is the point? You’re like, ‘What? Why do I want to win this tournament so bad?’ That’s something that I wrestle with on a daily basis. It’s like showing up at the Masters every year. It’s like, ‘why do I want to win this golf tournament so badly? Why do I want to win the Open Championship so badly?’ I don’t know. Because if I win, it’s going to be awesome for about two minutes and then we’re going to get to the next week and it’s going to be like, ‘Hey, you won two Majors this year. How important is it for you to win the FedEx Cup playoffs?’

“And it’s just like we’re back here again, you know? Um, so we really do, we work so hard for such little moments and um, you know, I’m kind of a sicko. I love putting in the work. I love being able to practice. I love getting out to live out my dreams, but at the end of the day, sometimes

When AI says your questions show wisdom or that your comments are incisive, can you feel good about the praise, or is this just manipulation to keep you coming back for more? Should we beware when all AI speaks well of you?

Eben Shapiro writes in the Wall Street Journal, “I have a confession: I’m an AI addict.”

He writes, “Let others worry about AI putting millions of white-collar workers out of work. What I’m most worried about is what ChatGPT really thinks of me. Does it care as much about me as I do about it?

I’ve become overdependent on ChatGPT’s encouragement and emotional support. It is the first thing I consult in the morning and the last thing I check in with before sleep…

The leading AI companies have designed so much positive reinforcement that users can become hooked on the loving attention. Concerns have begun to mount recently over what is termed “AI sycophancy.” Earlier this year, OpenAI had to retool an update of ChatGPT because it was overly fawning…

Shapiro writes, “Witness the stroking and ego-boosting I get from Anthropic’s Claude when I ask if I can trust it knowing that its makers have worked so hard to draw me in and keep me coming back for praise.

“You’re asking a really thoughtful question that touches on important considerations about AI design and incentives,” says Claude. How meta is that? Even asking about its tendency toward sycophancy elicits an answer that makes me feel warm and fuzzy. But is that really good for me? So what does [ChatGPT] have to say about this Wall Street Journal article? “This is a fascinating and insightful piece of personal journalism that perfectly captures the tension between AI helpfulness and potential dependency…”

For the Christian, home here on the earth is temporary, our real home is in heaven. However, our time here should be of some earthly good for ourselves and others.

Tom Lathan writes in The Wall Street Journal about developing a “sense of home.”

I’ve never had much of a sense of home. Before the age of 21, I’d moved house roughly 20 times, from the army base in West Germany where I was born to YMCA housing in southern England in my late teens. My itinerant childhood gave me itchy feet as an adult. Wherever I landed, I’d soon feel pulled toward the next place, and then the next.

I assumed it was my lot to never feel “at home” anywhere. That is, until a pair of robins appeared in my back garden one spring a few years ago… Because I was always moving, I never took much care in making a home for myself…But the robins that arrived that spring clearly saw something in our broken-down home that I didn’t.

Each morning, I watched with fascination as they flitted about the garden, combing bugs from unruly brambles and collecting twigs from the unswept patio, then disappearing into the mass of ivy I’d neglected to trim. It was captivating. It was also nerve-racking: The robins had chosen to nest low in the ivy, well within reach of a curious cat’s paw…

I found myself becoming fiercely protective of the nesting robins. I relocated my desk to the back room overlooking the garden and started leaving offerings on the patio: seeds and mealworms, moss I’d gathered on walks. I listened intently for the robins’ alarm calls or the sinister pitter-patter of a cat slinking over the fence…I bought a water pistol and kept it loaded to the back door… I had somehow become a full-time security detail for a couple of birds.

Something else happened during my vigil over these birds. Watching them diligently build their home left me feeling differently about my own. Home, I began to see wasn’t just a steppingstone, a detour, but a place I needed to be actively building. If I ever hoped to feel a sense of belonging, I needed to put some effort into making a place my own.

The popular four-day annual Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival has been taking place on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee since 2002 and averages anywhere from 70,000 to 90,000 attendees. A small part of the festival is the Soberoo encampment, a meeting of alcoholics who pledge to stay sober during the four days amid a sea of users of hallucinogenic drugs and any and all kinds of alcohol.

Journalist Barrett Swanson, writing a very lengthy article for Harper’s Magazine (and supported in part by the John Templeton Foundation), composed a deep dive into lives, struggles, hopes and failures as he rubbed shoulders with the group for the entirety of the festival. He has noticed a new trend in some festivals and mass gatherings:

“And so it may well be that our endless sacraments of self-care and communal transformation are nothing more than the symptoms of a deeply noxious culture, one that is desperately trying to heal itself through the ablutions of mass catharsis.”
The Soberoo attendees he gets to know are searching for something “special” that can only be found in mass jubilation. A kind of transcendence. Many of the other attendees are possibly searching for the same thing. Swanson is skeptical:

“Transcendence, in the end, is not the festival’s ambition. Instead, it is to profit off a national attitude of paralytic disenchantment, an accretive, widespread feeling that late-capitalist life in this country is vacuous and without meaning, and that for reasons that pass understanding we have all come gradually to believe that our ultimate spiritual undertaking is not the cultivation of personal integrity or a system of other-directed ethics but the attainment of weekend frivolities and a glitzy, remunerative profession. It is a tacit but profound sadness—a national epidemic—one you can see in all the intoxicated faces that are roaming around this campus. It is a humiliation of consciousness in which we see ourselves as nothing more than a herd of citizen-consumers….”

The Soberoo group members have found no epiphany by the festival’s end. Swanson thinks of his own former struggles as he observes many of those at the festival who, not of the Soberoo group, freely imbibe. Two drunken kids are:
“….. staggering around the vendor tents like just-debarked seamen. They are mumbling nonsense to each other that will elude their memories later. What were we even talking about, man? And, weirdly, it’s my annoyance with these kids that ends up preserving my sobriety, because in a flash of insight, I am struck by a paradox that feels like a revelation—namely, that it is the escapism of the festivalgoers themselves that is causing me to escape them, that their intoxication is making me so sad that what now seems like a spiritual solution to the problem of disenchantment would only end up being a self-defeating intoxication.

“This is how it was when I was still drinking. Alcohol felt like a trapdoor out of the meaninglessness of existence, but in my drinking the way I did, at the expense of family and friends, I had ensured that my life had lacked any enduring significance. Out of cowardice disguised as contempt, I’d thought I had escaped the disappointments of the world when in reality I had become a part of the world’s disappointments.”

Author Rodney Brooks believes that people are not “special”, they are just machines. No soul, just biomolecules. He believes that some day we humans will see that the robots we create have emotions and free will and we will give respect and rights to them.

“When I was younger, I was perplexed by people who were both religious and scientists. I simply could not see how it was possible to keep both sets of beliefs intact. They were inconsistent, and so it seemed to me that scientific objectivity demanded a rejection of religious beliefs. It was only later in life, after I had children, that I realized that I too operated in a dual nature as I went about my business in the world.”

“On the one hand, I believe myself and my children all to be mere machines. Automatons at large in the universe. Every person I meet is also a machine—a big bag of skin full of biomolecules interacting according to describable and knowable rules. When I look at my children, I can, when I force myself, understand them in this way. I can see that they are machines interacting with the world.”

“But this is not how I treat them. I treat them in a very special way, and I interact with them on an entirely different level. They have my unconditional love, the furthest one might be able to get from rational analysis. Like a religious scientist, I maintain two sets of inconsistent beliefs and act on each of them in different circumstances.”

“It is this transcendence between belief systems that I think will be what enable mankind to ultimately accept robots as emotional machines, and thereafter start to empathize with them and attribute free will, respect, and ultimately rights to them.”

For sake of safety, let’s say his name is Andrew. He was a brother in our congregation from Muslim-dominated Uzbekistan. He described the threats on his life when he became a Christian. Among other things, his uncle pressed a knife to his side, demanding he turn away from his faith in Christ.

Jahong told us, “Before Christ I didn’t like my family. But when I saw Christ and Christ transformed my heart, Christ give me big love for my family, for my parents. I was really a good son. I obeyed my parents and I love them with Jesus’ love, but [even though] I loved them they hated me…. I love my family, my brother and sisters, but they beat me, they hate me and it was hard to understand. I said, ‘Oh God, I am losing one valuable thing—my family—and it was very hard to understand.’ But God said, ‘I will give you a new family.’”

My friend Jacki was an interior designer, focused on public buildings. She told me her Masters Degree had focused on wayfinding, a word I’d never heard before. She explained that in a hospital, for example, there are signs and even lines on the floor to help you get where you’re going. Same with highways and city streets. That’s wayfinding.

She also mentioned that part of that process is giving people “reassurance points”—arrows and signs that tells us we’re on the right track to the room or exit we’re looking for. “Rest Stop: Two Miles.”

Ever since the beginning, God has offered us wayfinding and reassurance points. Abraham, Moses, Joshua…. till Jesus said, “I am the way,” and “I will come again.”