Righteousness

Twenty years ago, at the moment of its IPO announcement, the most powerful company in the world declared that “Don’t be evil” would be the orchestrating principle of its executive strategy. How did Google intend not to be evil? By doing “good things” for the world, its IPO document explained, “even if we forgo some short-term gains.”

Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO at the time, had some private doubts: as he would later explain in an interview to NPR, “There’s no book about evil except maybe, you know, the Bible or something.” But Schmidt came to believe that the absence of an authoritative definition was in fact a virtue, since any employee could exercise a veto over any decision that was felt not to involve “doing good things.” It took 10 years for the company’s executives to realize that the motto was a recipe for total, corporate paralysis, and quietly retired it.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The Bible offers a more nuanced and comprehensive approach to business ethics than Google's original motto, providing guidance on positive actions rather than just avoiding a vague negative motto (Micah 6:8).

In his book Start with Why, Simon Sinek discusses the importance of motivation in a very interesting section titled “It’s What You Can’t See That Matters.”

Detergent advertisers once promoted their product with statements like “Gets your whites whiter and your brights brighter.” That’s what the market research revealed customers wanted. But was it really? Sinek explains:

The data was true, but the truth of what people wanted was different. The makers of laundry detergent asked consumers WHAT they wanted from detergent, and consumers said whiter whites and brighter brights…. So brands attempted to differentiate HOW they got your whites whiter and brights brighter by trying to convince consumers that one additive was more effective than another. No one asked customers WHY they wanted their clothes clean.

Later a group of anthropologists discovered that this approach wasn’t really driving buying decisions. They observed that when people took their laundry out of the dryer, no one held it up to the light to see how white and bright it was. The first thing people did was to smell it. Sinek concludes, “This was an amazing discovery. Feeling clean was more important to people than being clean.”

Possible Preaching Angle: This same attitude extends out of the laundry room deep into the recesses of our hearts. We are much more interested in the illusion of clean than the reality of clean.

An investigative report alleges that the New York Police Department routinely abused facial recognition software by submitting photos of celebrity lookalikes. The report from the Georgetown Center on Privacy and Technology noted that celebrity photos are just a portion of the so-called “probe photos” used to generate database hits, which also include stills from surveillance footage, or photos from social media profiles of potential suspects.

The report garnered widespread criticism from various community groups and privacy advocates.

"It doesn’t matter how accurate facial recognition algorithms are if police are putting very subjective, highly edited or just wrong information into their systems," says Clare Garvie, a senior associate at the Center on Privacy and Technology who wrote the report. "They're not going to get good information out. They're not going to get valuable leads. There's a high risk of misidentification. And it violates due process if they're using it and not sharing it with defense attorneys."

The report didn’t focus exclusively on policing in New York City, but also examined similar practices in Maricopa County, Arizona; Washington County, Oregon; and Pinellas County, Florida. Other routine practices included altering existing photos of suspects to make them look more like traditional mugshots, including one case where they pasted a closed mouth from a model photograph.

"These techniques amount to the fabrication of facial identity points: at best an attempt to create information that isn’t there in the first place and at worst introducing evidence that matches someone other than the person being searched for," the report says.

Potential preaching angles: God delights in both right practices and right outcomes, so going about the wrong way to do the right thing is doing the wrong thing. When we take shortcuts, we demonstrate our lack of trust in God’s timing.

Conventional wisdom surrounding the function of taste buds focuses on five essential types of flavor sensations: sweet, salty, savory, sour and bitter. To that list, scientists have added a sixth taste—starchy.

Professor Joyun Lim from Oregon State University, explains the justification for the recent addition. Lim's team of researchers found volunteers who could identify starch-like tastes in various carb solutions, even after being administered a solution that blocked the taste of sweetness. Lim said, "Asians would say it was rice-like, while Caucasians described it as bread-like or pasta-like. It's like eating flour."

Of course, starch has yet to be completely enshrined in the proverbial Hall of Taste. Food scientists insist that primary tastes be recognizable, have identifiable taste receptors on the tongue, and trigger a useful physiological response.

Lim and other scientists are working on finding those taste receptors, but for useful physiology, one need look no further than elite athletes. There's a reason why bodybuilders, distance runners, and basketball players all use terms like "carbing up" or "carb loading" to describe their culinary habits. The cliché is true—the body knows what it wants.

Potential preaching angles: To hunger and thirst after righteousness, we must recognize its taste, God's wisdom is evident in creation through cravings that track our bodily needs

The island of Manhattan consists almost entirely of bare granite, a very hard and strong type of rock. To carry the weight of a 75- or 100-story skyscraper, builders use foundation anchors called "piles." Piles are concrete or steel columns hammered into the ground until they penetrate solid rock.

For especially tall buildings, some piles are driven 25 stories below ground. The heavy weight of the skyscraper is then distributed through each of the piles. Together they support the structure's enormous weight. If foundation piles are drilled and driven in poorly, cracks will eventually appear in the structure. Entire buildings may lean. Then they must be torn down or lifted completely so the piles can be reset—a costly and time-consuming process.

In the same way, unless the structural supports were deeply drilled into the granite of our soul, the above-the-surface levels of your life and your leadership will remain vulnerable. We all need a deep foundation.

In 2007, the I-35 bridge that crosses the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota, collapsed suddenly during rush hour, killing 13 people and injuring 145. The investigation revealed that the gusset plates that connect girders together in the truss system were undersized, resulting in a structural flaw leading to its collapse. A year after the tragedy, The New York Times summarized what went wrong:

The designers had specified a metal plate that was too thin to serve as a junction of several girders, investigators say. The bridge was designed in the 1960s and lasted 40 years. But like most other bridges, it gradually gained weight during that period, as workers installed concrete structures to separate eastbound and westbound lanes and made other changes, adding strain to the weak spot.

To say it another way, the bridge lacked integrity. A bridge has integrity when it does what it was designed to do. Cars, trains, or people can travel across the bridge without it collapsing. In this sense, integrity isn't about morality, but about the ability to function according to the intended design.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Character; Integrity. (2) Faith—The Bible says that humans are designed to live by faith. We are not meant to be in full control of every situation, to be all-knowing, or to live merely by what we can perceive. This is what we were designed for.

Words change meaning over time in ways that might surprise you. Here are just a few examples of words (so, preacher, take your choice) you may not have realized didn't always mean what they mean today.

1. Nice: This word used to mean "silly, foolish, simple." Far from the compliment it is today!
2. Silly: Meanwhile, silly went in the opposite direction: in its earliest uses, it referred to things worthy or blessed; from there it came to refer to the weak and vulnerable, and more recently to those who are foolish.
3. Awful: Awful things used to be "worthy of awe" for a variety of reasons, which is how we get expressions like "the awful majesty of God."
4. Fizzle: The verb fizzle once referred to the act of producing quiet flatulence (think "SBD"); American college slang flipped the word's meaning to refer to failing at things.
5. Clue: Centuries ago, a clue (or clew) was a ball of yarn. Think about threading your way through a maze and you'll see how we got from yarn to key bits of evidence that help us solve things.
6. Naughty: Long ago, if you were naughty, you had naught or nothing. Then it came to mean evil or immoral, and now you are just badly behaved.
7. Guy: It comes from the name of Guy Fawkes, who was part of a failed attempt to blow up Parliament in 1605. Folks used to burn his effigy, a "Guy Fawkes" or a "guy," and from there it came to refer to a frightful figure. In the U.S., it has come to refer to men in general.

Possible Preaching Angles: Doctrine; Word of God; Theology; Love; Repentance; Marriage, and so forth—You can pick many words in the Christian vocabulary, words about biblical doctrine or a biblical lifestyle, and examine how these words have changed meanings from Scripture to today. Unfortunately, many of these changes in definitions of biblical words aren't just interesting or innocent; they damage our faith and weaken our understanding of Christ.

Here's one way to look at Jesus' earthly life of obedience to God the Father. Jesus lived approximately 33½ years, or 1,057,157,021 seconds. In every second the average human being's brain has 100 billion neurons all firing around 200 times per second, giving a capacity of 20 million billion firings per second. If we want to know how many conscious decisions Jesus made to obey his Father's will, multiply 20 million billion by the number of seconds he lived: 1,057,157,021. The equation would look like this:

20,000,000,000 x 1,057,157,021 = a very large number!

Jesus Christ never made one decision, consciously or unconsciously, in all those innumerable split seconds that wasn't completely consistent with loving his Father and his neighbor. And his obedience wasn't merely an outward performance. He always did the right thing, and he always did it for the right reason. During his lifetime of constant, unwavering obedience, from infancy all the way to death, he wove a robe righteousness sufficient to cover millions and millions of us. Yes, even you.