Disciples

Add-on fees are driving consumers crazy. From restaurants and hotels to concerts and food delivery, we are increasingly shown a low price online, only to click through and find a range of fees that yield a much higher price at checkout.

The term drip pricing was popularized by a 2012 Federal Trade Commission conference. Its spread is associated with the proliferation of airline fees after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Yet an example of the phenomenon that long predates 2001 is stores’ practice of listing goods without the sales tax, which gets added at checkout.

Why not include the sales tax with the sticker price? One study from 2019 showed consumers punish that sort of transparency. A grocery store let the authors tag some products with the familiar pretax price and some with the total price including tax. For example, a hair brush’s price tag showed $5.79 before tax, and beneath that $6.22 with the tax. Sales volume dropped for products with price tags that included the tax than a control group without the tax.

This isn’t because shoppers didn’t know the tax rate or which items were taxable. In fact, 75% of shoppers surveyed knew the sales tax within 0.5 percentage point, and most knew what goods were taxable. So, the tax-inclusive price tag didn’t give them new information; it was just that transparent reminders turned some people off.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Jesus never practiced “drip pricing.” He never hid the total costs for following him. It may turn some people off, but he always put the full cost upfront.

In August 2019, Marnus Labuschagne was drafted into the Australian Cricket Team unexpectedly as the first-ever concussion substitute in the history of international test cricket, replacing the injured Steve Smith. Labuschagne soon showed that he was no stop-gap sportsman as he quickly established his batting skills in international cricket. To date, he has scored 3767 test runs from 42 matches at the exceptional average of 54.59, placing him at number 20 on the all-time test average rankings. At present, he is the number five batsman in test cricket.

In spite of the unprecedented success, Labuschagne has earned a reputation for being a man who takes faith in Christ and prayer seriously. He has a sticker of an eagle on his bat, to highlight his favorite Bible verse, Isaiah 40:31.

In an interview for Season 2 of the documentary “The Test,” Marnus said, "Everyone knows cricket is a major part of my life, but the value of me as a person isn't in cricket - it's in my faith. I grew up with Christianity going back to when I was a kid, laying in my bed, praying every night."

He is also quoted as saying, "When I pray, I don't pray to win, just that I could perform at my best, and that all the glory will go to God, for whatever happens … win or lose." He further adds, "In the big scheme of things, what you're worth ... isn't out there on the pitch; It's internal and in Christ … Cricket is always going to be up and down. If you have (Jesus Christ as) a constant in your life, it makes life a lot easier."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Testimony; Witness - Marnus Labuschagne has clearly built his life and career on the words of Jesus - "But seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well (Matt. 6:33).

In 1908 James Fraser gave up a promising career in order to be a missionary to China. He worked hard to learn the language and culture in order to share Jesus.

James was working in Lisuland, in the foothills of the Himalayas. He would regularly travel village to village evangelizing and leading services with converts in each village. During the winter months, the snow made travel to the villages in the highlands impossible. James was often frustrated, even blaming God for hindering his work. Then he sensed a challenge from God. He knew that it would take him three to five days to travel to the highlander villages, lead services, and travel home. Unable to travel, he took those days to pray for these new Christians who were alone in their faith.

When spring arrived and the snow melted, Fraser was eager to visit the highlander villages and check on his disciples. What he found amazed him. Through the winter they had been reading their Bibles and praying. He discovered that they had grown far more in their faith than did his disciples in the lowlands. He later wrote,

If I were to think after the manner of men, I would be anxious about my Lisu converts - afraid for their falling back into demon worship. But God is enabling me to cast all my care upon Him. I am not anxious, not nervous. If I hugged my care to myself instead of casting it upon Him, I should never have persevered in the work so long - perhaps never even have started it. But if it has been begun in Him, it must be continued in Him.

Possible Preaching Angle:

We often wonder about the power of prayer. And while prayer is not to be used an excuse for inaction, the simple prayer experiment of James Fraser reminds us that God is powerfully at work and for some reason responds powerfully when we pray.

Donelan Andrews was rewarded with $10,000 by his travel insurance company, all for doing something he teaches students to do every day: read carefully. Squaremouth intentionally added language in its policy documentation offering a reward for anyone who was still reading the details. Their intent was to promote the idea of reading the details carefully, because failure to understand the details of what their policies cover is the number one reason why travel insurance claims are denied.

Of course, a denied claim is only one example of the kind of loss lurking in the fine print. In the United Kingdom, Manchester-based firm Purple provided free Wi-Fi access in 2017 for over 22,000 people. Buried in their terms of service was a commitment to a thousand hours of community service, which could include “cleaning toilets and relieving sewer blockages.” In a story with The Guardian, representatives from Purple explained that they inserted the clause “to illustrate the lack of consumer awareness of what they are signing up to when they access free Wi-Fi.”

But even a thousand hours of service is a mere pittance compared to what Londoners gave up when they consented to the “Herod clause” of security firm F-Secure’s Wi-Fi experiment. That clause provided service only if “the recipient agreed to assign their firstborn child to us for the duration of eternity.”

Not to be outdone, British retailer GameStation once changed its license agreement to a pre-checked box. Unless users unchecked the box, they granted the company “a nontransferable option to claim, for now and forever more, your immortal soul."

Potential Preaching Angles: (1) God wants disciples who will willingly count the cost of discipleship, not be suckered into it because they weren't paying attention. (2) The details of Scripture matter to God. It is a matter of obedience or disobedience. Of course God cares about the details because he loves us, not because he’s trying to trick us.

Law professor and technology expert Tim Lu claims that there's an underestimated force that drives our daily lives—convenience. We want nearly everything about our lives to be convenient, efficient, and easy. Wu calls convenience "the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our economies." He writes:

As Evan Williams, a co-founder of Twitter, recently put it, "Convenience decides everything." Convenience seems to make our decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so convenient I hardly ever do what I "prefer.") Easy is better, easiest is best.

Of course there are benefits to some of life's conveniences, but he also warns that there can be a dark side. Wu argues:

With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us … When we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.

Possible Preaching Angles: Discipleship; Disciples—Jesus did not offer convenience in following him. He warned us to count the cost and at times to do what is inconvenient in order to follow him.

In an article in Forbes, business consultant Liz Ryan argues that companies shouldn't be obsessed with having "happy employees." Instead, she argues that employers should focus on helping employees connect to a greater mission. She goes on to give the following example of a mission-driven person:

Let's imagine a person completely immersed in his or her work. We'll use the greatest violin maker in the world as our example. I don't know who makes the greatest violins in the world, but we'll imagine that it's an Italian violin maker named Franco and that Franco has a studio where 15 or 20 apprentice and journeyman violin makers work alongside Franco making the most exquisite violins in the world.

Is Franco happy? He is alternately ecstatic, frustrated, transported, confused, exhausted and lost in the zone. He and his work are inextricable from one another. No one would say about Franco or his employees "They're happy." Instead, people in Franco's town would say "Those guys live and breathe violins, and people around the world rejoice."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Disciples; Discipleship; Mission; Missions—When Jesus called us to follow him he did not promise us happiness. Instead, he promised us a deep and rich and satisfying sense of mission. (2) Work—we all long for the kind of passion in our work that these violinists had (although in our fallen world at times that is not possible).

Writer Ralph B. Smith once made an observation that children ask roughly 125 questions per day and adults ask about six questions per day, so somewhere between childhood and adulthood, we lose 119 questions per day. A child's innate curiosity about life is instilled in them at birth by the One who longs to be discovered. The more questions they ask, the more they discover about the world around them. The more they discover about the world around them, the more they discover about the One who made them.

Possible Preaching Angle: Disciple; Discipleship; Sanctification—Disciples are called to be lifelong learners about the way of following and knowing Jesus, being conformed to his image.

One of the most unique sporting events in the world did not begin as a sporting event. Each year riders and their dogs race more than 1,000 miles for several days through the Alaskan snow from Anchorage to Nome for Iditarod, the famous dogsled race. But the genesis of Iditarod was something very serious. In 1925, hundreds of children in Nome had been exposed to diphtheria. At this point in history, children around the world died from the highly contagious disease because widespread vaccinations had not yet been introduced. The only serum to combat the disease was far away in Anchorage. To get the serum to Nome quickly, it was first carried by train to Nenana. Then teams of riders (known as mushers) and their dogs, strategically placed along the path, carried the serum to Nome via a relay. More than 150 dogs and 20 mushers were involved in the heroic efforts, which became called "The Great Race of Mercy." With passion and intensity, the mushers hurtled the 300,000 units of life-saving serum across the Alaskan countryside, arriving in Nome in only 127 hours— a record that has yet to be broken. By combining the right medicine with radical effort, hundreds of lives were saved.

While the Iditarod had an amazing origin, it is now just another sporting event. The teams race a similar path, but the motivation is different. They still tie sleds behind dogs, but they are not racing to save lives anymore. The same is often true of our churches. If we are not intentional, what was once a life-saving mission can become much less. As a church we can gather people and go through the motions of Christian discipleship without a sense of the life-giving message and mission we have been given. The race is on, and the stakes are high.

Retired minister and author Bob Russell told the following account to illustrate how Christians today often go along with the moral pace of those around us, and that by comparison we feel safe since "Everyone is doing it," therefore, we're okay. Russell writes:

Two months ago my wife and I were visiting our son Rusty and his family. One day Rusty was test-driving a foreign-made car and was frustrated because he couldn't figure out how to change the speedometer reading from kilometers to miles.

That evening he suggested we take the kids and all go out for ice cream. "We'll need to take two cars," he insisted, "so you and mom just follow me." I followed him … and was surprised when a policeman whizzed up behind us with his lights flashing. I couldn't imagine he was after me because it didn't feel like I was speeding. And besides, I was going the exact same speed as the guy in front of me.

The officer came up to my window and said, "Sir, you were going 58 miles per hour in a 45 miles per hour zone. But wait right here, I'm going to deal with the car in front of you, and I'll be right back." When he went to my son's car, Rusty quivered, "Officer, I know this is going to sound like a line, but this is the first day I've driven this car, and I can't figure out how to change it from kilometers to miles, so I had no idea how fast I was going. The guy behind me is my dad, and he doesn't know what he's doing either!"

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Conformity; Disobedience; (2) Discipleship; Lordship of Christ—We're all following someone or something, even if we aren't thinking about it. Who are you following?

According to recent statistics, the median number of years a U.S. worker has been in his or her current job is just 4.1, down sharply since the 1970s. The average U.S. worker will have an average of ten to twelve jobs in a lifetime. This decline in average job tenure is bigger than any economic cycle, bigger than any particular industry, bigger than differences in education levels, and bigger than differences in gender.

Possible Preaching Angles: This not only applies to how we approach work and jobs; it also reflects how many of us treat our relationship to Christ, friends, a church community, a spouse, and so forth.

Editor’s Note: This illustration was updated to the latest statistics on 11/04/24

You might assume that extreme activities—like traveling through space or climbing Mount Everest—provide constant excitement. Not exactly. A book by two researchers, Extreme: Why Some People Thrive at the Limits, shows that many thrill-seeking activities involve a lot of ordinary and even tedious moments. For instance, here's how the NASA astronaut Gene Cernan summed up his overall experience of space travel: "Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much."

Space travelers aren't the only ones killing time and battling boredom. During their free climb of the Dawn Wall in Yosemite National Park in California, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson spend a large part of many days waiting for shade to hit the wall so they could begin to climb. One study of explorers scaling a Himalayan peak found that they spent a mere four percent of their time actually climbing. The book concluded that although a yearning for novelty and excitement may draw people into extreme activities, these pursuits inevitably require long periods of patience, discipline, and perseverance.

Possible Preaching Angles: Disciples; Discipleship; Sanctification; Patience; Waiting on God—In the same way, the Christian journey may start with a burst of excitement and adventure, but over the long haul following Jesus, growing in maturity, and serving him often requires many seasons of patience, discipline, and waiting on God.

Kendall Schler of Columbia, Mo. was the first to cross the finish line at the GO! St. Louis Marathon. Schler had her photo taken with Jackie Joyner-Kersee and was expected to receive $1,500 in prize money along with a spot in the 2015 Boston Marathon.

However, Schler was disqualified after official discovered that she didn't actually run the race. Officials said it's believed that Schler somehow slipped onto the course after the final checkpoint without being discovered in an attempt to fool officials into thinking she ran the entire course. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported Schler never registered times along the route, and she never showed up in any of the photographs taken along the route.

KSDK, a local television station, has a video of Schler crossing the finish line, but in the video she sure doesn't look like someone who has just won or even just completed a major race.

In a New York Times article titled "Faking Cultural Literacy," Karl Greenfield argues that today's social media lets us pretend to know something about almost everything—even if that "knowledge" is deplorably shallow. Greenfield writes:

We pick topical, relevant bits from Facebook, Twitter or emailed news alerts, and then regurgitate them. Instead of watching "Mad Men" or the Super Bowl or the Oscars or a presidential debate, you can simply scroll through someone else's live-tweeting of it, or read the recaps the next day. [What's really important] is becoming determined by whatever gets the most clicks.

As an example of our superficiality, Greenfield mentions a survey by the American Press Institute that revealed nearly six in 10 Americans acknowledge that they do nothing more than read news headlines. Greenfield adds:

[We all feel] the constant pressure to know enough, at all times, lest we be revealed as culturally illiterate. So that we can survive an elevator pitch, a business meeting, a visit to the office kitchenette … so that we can post, tweet, chat, comment, text as if we have seen, read, watched, listened. What matters to us, awash in [information], is not necessarily having actually consumed this content firsthand but simply knowing that it exists—and having a position on it, being able to engage in the chatter about it.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Bible Reading; Scripture; Meditation—Do we approach Scripture the same way? Do we feel that what matters is not having actually consumed the content first hand but simply knowing it exists? (2) Discipleship; Spiritual formation—In the same way, do we try to know just enough about Jesus so that we can chatter about him without really encountering him first-hand?

Dr. John Stott's last bit of advice to his assistant before he died in 2011 was simply this: "Do the hard thing." Stott believed that choosing the easy trail, the road most taken, and the path of least resistance can only end in mediocrity—even if it comes with praise.

Commencement speakers are always telling young people to follow their passions. Be true to yourself. This is a vision of life that begins with self and ends with self. But people on the road to [character growth] do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world's deep needs?

—David Brooks, author and columnist for The New York Times

Six-time Oscar nominated film Captain Phillips received widespread acclaim, but surprisingly the film's powerful final scene was improvised on set and (other than lead man Tom Hanks) without professional actors. In this high stakes thriller, Hanks plays Captain Richard Phillips, a real-life Merchant Marine taken hostage during a 2009 Somali pirate hijacking of his cargo ship. After a dramatic rescue operation by Navy SEALs, in the film Hanks (Phillips) is brought safely aboard the real USS Truxtun missile destroyer, where he's taken down to the ship's infirmary and checked out by the ship's real hospital medic—Navy Hospital Corpsman Danielle Albert.

Hanks described how they decided to run the unscripted final scene in the ship's infirmary:

It wasn't in the schedule. It hadn't been scouted. It wasn't lit. But we went down [to the ship's actual infirmary]—and we had the actual crew of the ship that we were shooting on—and said, "What would you do to someone that came in here?" And they said, "Well, we'd lay them down here, and we'd do this and this and this." So [we] said, "'Well, shall we give a try?"

We had, literally, the crew of the infirmary. They didn't know they were going to be in a movie that day. They thought they might be dress extras walking around in the background, and here they are—boom—with cameras that are going to be on them.

The first take I remember completely falling apart because these people had never been in a movie before, and they could not get past the horrible self-consciousness of everything that was going on around them. But we just stopped, and Paul said, "Don't worry about it … If it doesn't work, we won't use it. So let's just try it again and see what happens." At that point, those people were really quite amazing. The freedom in order to give it a shot was so liberating. And everybody was up for it. So it really made itself.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Faith; Risk; Adventure; Easter; Resurrection of Christ—Like many of us, the producers of this film had a script for how things should go. But like Abraham, Moses, Ruth, the disciples (think of Christ's resurrection), sometimes we're forced to go "off script" in life so we can follow Christ. (2) Discipline; Practice; Spiritual Disciplines—Although the scene was "unplanned," both Tom Hanks and the medic, Danielle Albert, were doing what they had been trained to do. Their practice and discipline made this final scene feel utterly natural and real.

In May 1845, two Royal Navy ships, HMS Terror and Erebus, embarked from London on a voyage with ambitious aims. The mission would forge a passage through the partially mapped channels of northern Canada and pioneer the Northwest Passage. In the process, the mission would also open new trading routes and allow vessels to forgo the dangerous and lengthy passage around Cape Horn. Led by Arctic veteran Sir John Franklin, the ship was equipped with new technology pioneered in Britain—coal-fired engines powering propeller screws for locomotion, and tinned food.

It was a risky trip. Hostile conditions, the use of new technology, and operating beyond the reach of immediate rescue parties meant the expedition was the equivalent of a Victorian-era moon landing. If men, supplies, technology, knowhow, or leadership failed, then deaths could be expected. But if the ship had been properly equipped with the right resources and decisive leadership it would succeed.

In July 1845, the ships sailed out of Baffin Bay and were never heard from again. After two years of silence, the alarm was raised in Britain and rescue ships dispatched. The rescue mission brought back the tragic news—129 men had died in the greatest single disaster in Arctic exploration.

A rough outline became clear. All had started well but the ships had been poorly equipped from the start. The engines were underpowered and much of the tinned food—produced by a contractor who was the lowest bidder—turned out to be rotten. Franklin's ill-equipped ships became prey to tidal movements in ice, leaving men dangerously short of supplies. Someone on the ship had left a terse note stating that Franklin was dead and survivors were abandoning the ships to head south with rowing boats. Eventually one of those rowing boats was discovered—with the skeletons still on it.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) The importance of building the right foundation in our spiritual lives with Christ; (2) Planning; Equipping the saints.

Phillip Yancey toured the Yanghwajin Foreign Missionary Cemetery, built to honor 145 missionaries in South Korea. All of the missionaries died in their adopted country. Yancey writes:

Some of the gravestones date back more than a hundred years, and the caretakers have added stainless steel plaques to recount the stories of the missionaries buried there. Some faced persecution for leading protests against the brutal Japanese colonial rule. A couple with the Salvation Army began the long tradition of caring for Korean orphans. A scholarly Presbyterian contributed greatly to the Korean translation of the Bible. Two women pioneered education for girls by founding schools and ultimately a women's university. Another American woman, who came to Korea as a medical missionary, developed Braille suitable for the Korean language and established a school for the blind.

My favorite story was of S. F. Moore, who gave medical treatment to a butcher deathly ill with typhoid fever. The butcher survived and became a Christian, only to find that no church would admit him. (Korea's rigid class system scorned butchers, who dealt with "dead things" such as meat and leather, as the lowest social class.) Moore supported a freedom movement to fight such discrimination and organized a Butchers Church for outcasts and social underdogs. He died of typhoid fever at the age of 46.

Each plaque spelled out hardships of the men and women buried there. Many of the missionaries also lost children, buried in small graves beside them. Yet the fruit of their work lives on, in schools, libraries, hospitals, and church buildings dotting the landscape of modern South Korea …

To a nation steeped in hierarchy and dominated by its powerful neighbors China and Japan, the men and women buried here brought a gospel message of justice, compassion, and transformation. In comparison with much of Asia, South Korea has been unusually receptive to the Christian message; 30 percent of South Koreans identify as Christian. I spoke at one impressive church with 65,000 members—yet it is less than one-tenth the size of Seoul's largest church.