Teachability

The late pastor and preacher Tim Keller truly lived out the teachings in his popular book, The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness: The Path to True Christian Joy. In other words, he demonstrated true humility and teachability.

For instance, in 2011, Pastor Tim Cox had accompanied Keller on a trip to South Korea. Cox reflected on the trip later and wrote:

I traveled with Tim to Seoul. Tim was speaking at a conference for pastors, and Tim kept saying ‘Look at what Jesus has done for you! If you see that, you will be changed!’ At one point I asked Tim if even that could be a legalistic thing. That I’m not looking hard enough at Jesus, so I just need to pull up my socks and try harder. When in reality, the Holy Spirit does that for me.

Tim told me, ‘Yes, of course, only the Holy Spirit can do that!’

That was the end of our conversation. The next day, Tim got to the part of his talk where he said ‘if you look at what Jesus did for you . . .’ and he looks straight at me, ‘then by the power of the Holy Spirit, you’ll change!’

In a review of Timothy Keller’s book, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God, Jen Michel writes:

One summer, my husband and I wanted to teach one of our youngest sons, age 6, to ride his bike. His twin brother, Colin, had already mastered the skill and was nearly keeping up with his older brother. But despite our cajoling—“It’s fun to ride a bike!” Andrew could not see the merit of potentially skinning his knees, and our attempts ended in his vain tears.

Then suddenly, in early August our little boy outgrew his fears. Nearly instantaneously, the mechanics of balancing, steering, and simultaneously pedaling became almost easy. The fears and tears dissolved, and Andrew forgot that riding a bike had ever been hard.

When it comes to prayer, most of us feel clumsy. We don’t recall someone running alongside us, shouting instructions as we learned. Instead, most of us found our balance by a hodge-podge of imitation and experimentation. Once we’ve learned to ride a bike, we can be sure we’re doing it right. Can anything remotely similar be said about prayer?

In his book, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God, Timothy Keller invites readers to systematically learn to pray. Keller asserts that prayer depends on both grace and effort. He gently reminds us, there are no perfect prayers or perfect pray-ers. He says, “All prayer is impure, corrupted by our ignorance and willful sin.” We should try and yet can fail at prayer—an encouraging piece of news, when we remember that grace is there to sustain us.

As Keller concedes, “[Sometimes] you won’t feel that you’re making any progress at all, [and fellowship with God] maybe episodic.” But when your prayers are lifted toward a God of grace, at just the unexpected moment, you find that you know how to pedal, and that you are headed toward home.

New York Times columnist Kashana Cauley knows a little something about regrets. She wrote, “My friends and I got tattoos so we could feel dangerous. Not very dangerous, because very dangerous people went to jail, but slightly dangerous, like a thrilling drop of botulism in a jar of jelly.”

She explains in the piece that when it came time to select her first tattoo, she picked a design of Chinese characters that she was told meant “fame and fortune.” But then she had chat with an older Chinese-speaking woman in a university locker room when they were changing clothes.

“She asked me what I thought the Chinese characters on my shoulder meant, and I told her. Then she asked me what I was at school to study, and I said law. She frowned and told me the tattoo was better suited for someone in the arts — that I should hurry up and get into the arts. We both laughed.”

But Cauley thought it would be different when she got a tattoo of her own name. As an African American descended from slavery, her knowledge of family history doesn’t extend very far. But a friend told her once that her name meant something beautiful and significant in Arabic. As a result, she looked up an online Arabic translation of her name, and got that design as another tattoo.

And she was satisfied with her choice … until she wasn’t. “For a few years I walked around confident that I had finally restored some meaning to my name, until an Arabic-speaking friend spotted my tattoo at lunch. ‘What do you think it means?’ she asked.”

Her friend’s response surprised her. “Instead of complimenting me on the beautiful, permanent version of my name needled onto my arm, my Arabic-speaking friend paused. Apparently, tattoo No. 2 was actually one of those 404 error messages, when an online search comes up blank. So my arm said, more or less: ‘Result not found.’”

“As a reluctant pioneer in the field of bad tattooing, I spent years afterward stubbornly telling people it meant ‘the eternal search.’ It sounded more elegant than ‘I didn’t find a correct translation of my name on the internet.’”

Possible Preaching Angle:

We can avoid embarrassing mishaps by asking for the counsel of others to help guide us through the major decisions we make.

In a recent issue of GQ, The Weeknd (real name Abel Tesfaye), recently sat down to discuss his music and of course his recent snub by the Grammys. The superstar, with downloads numbering in the billions, was not nominated in a single category for 2021.

A lot of artists claim they do not read reviews of their work. They want to avoid negative critique of their art and performance. But when asked how he handles reviews, The Weeknd had this to say:

I read every single review. I read every comment. Everything. And I like reviews, man. I like critics. Even the biased ones that are against me, I like reading it. I think it's interesting.

Why would he feel this way?

I think it's humbling, which is always great. I can now understand, when you're reading stuff . . . I can see through the lines now. Between the lines . . . Heartbreak isn't a good experience, but it still inspires great music.

Possible Preaching Angle:

1) Examination; Scripture; Word of God - Scripture is a review of our life. It gives an honest and thorough assessment of our thoughts and actions. Its review of our performance will result in humbling and heartbreak. It doesn't feel good, but it still inspires great worship. 2) Criticism; Growth – Listening to and accepting helpful criticism brings about maturity and personal growth.

Victoria Price was working as a reporter for her local NBC affiliate station when she received an urgent suggestion to seek her doctor. But the idea didn’t come from a coworker or a supervisor; rather, it came from a viewer.

"Hi, I just saw your news report,” began the email in her inbox. “What concerned me is the lump on your neck. Please have your thyroid checked.” By itself, those words might be generally concerning, but it was the next bit that propelled Price into action. "Reminds me of my neck. Mine turned out to be cancer. Take care of yourself."

Price did consult her doctor, and it turned out--that eagle-eyed viewer was right. The lump was cancerous, and she eventually scheduled a surgery to get it removed.

Price expressed her gratitude on a subsequent Instagram post. Price said, "Had I never received that email, I never would have called my doctor. The cancer would have continued to spread. It's a scary and humbling thought. I will forever be grateful to the woman who went out of her way to email me, a total stranger. She had zero obligation to, but she did anyway."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Life is full of surprises, so it behooves us as Christians to be humble enough to listen to prudent counsel.

When Paul McCartney was a boy he auditioned for a place in the Liverpool cathedral choir. He was turned down because the choirmaster reckoned he didn’t have much of a voice. John Lennon was raised by his aunt Mimi. He spent most of his spare time in his bedroom playing guitar. Mimi looked at him one day and said, “John, it’s all very well playing your guitar, but you’ll never make a living out of it.” When Lennon made his first million, he gave her a silver plaque with her words inscribed on it. Two boys that changed our culture but no one saw their potential.

When Samuel anointed David as king of Israel, Jesse paraded his seven strong sons before him, but God rejected them. Then Jesse said, “There is still the youngest, He is tending the sheep.” When Samuel saw him, God said “he is the one.”

How many young people in your family, church, or community are the leaders of tomorrow? Are they future pastors, artists, politicians, teachers, or social workers who, with God’s help might be used to shape your community for the kingdom of God? How can you help them? How will you invest in their lives?

John McArthur shares the following important lesson he learned:

I learned a vital spiritual lesson while participating in a track meet during my college years. I was running in the 4x400-meter relay at the Orange County Invitational. Our strategy was simple. The first runner, a speedy sprinter, would get as big a lead as possible right out of the starting blocks. My job was merely to run a clean lap without dropping the baton. Our third man and fourth man could make up whatever ground I might lose.

Our first man ran a great leg and made a perfect baton pass. I managed to finish my lap in a tight battle for first place. The third man went around the curve, came halfway down the back stretch, stopped, walked off, and sat down in the grass. The race kept going.

We thought he had pulled a hamstring or twisted an ankle. We all ran across the infield, expecting to find him writhing on the grass or at least wincing in pain. He wasn’t. He was sitting passively. We anxiously asked, “What happened? Are you hurt?” He said, “No, I’m OK. I just didn’t feel like running.”

My teammates and I responded with the same thing: “You can’t do that! Do you realize the effort we have all put into training for this? You’re not in this by yourself!”

I’ve thought often about that moment in relation to our duty as believers. We are supposed to take the truth that was handed to us by our ancestors in the Christian faith and run with it—not aimlessly (1 Cor. 9:26), but always pressing on toward the goal (Phil. 3:14)—so we can hand off the faith, intact and uncorrupted, to the next generation.

Pastor Scott Sauls spent five years working with Pastor Tim Keller at New York City’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church. Sauls writes that there are many ways that he saw Keller model the gospel, but there is one thing that really stood out for him. Sauls writes:

Tim could receive criticism, even criticism that was unfair, and it wouldn’t wreck him. In his words and example, he taught me that getting defensive when criticized rarely, if ever, leads to healthy outcomes.

He also taught me that our critics, including the ones who understand us the least, can be God’s instruments to teach and humble us: First, you should look to see if there is a kernel of truth in even the most exaggerated and unfair broadsides. . . . So even if the censure is partly or even largely mistaken, look for what you may indeed have done wrong.

Maybe the critic is partly right for the wrong reasons. Nevertheless, identify your own shortcomings, repent in your own heart before the Lord for what you can, and let that humble you. It will then be possible to learn from the criticism and stay gracious to the critic even if you have to disagree with what he or she has said.

If the criticism comes from someone who doesn’t know you at all (and often this is the case on the Internet) it is possible that the criticism is completely unwarranted and profoundly mistaken. When that happens it is even easier to fall into smugness and perhaps be tempted to laugh at how mistaken your critics are. Don’t do it. Even if there is not the slightest kernel of truth in what the critic says, you should not mock them in your thoughts. First, remind yourself of examples of your own mistakes, foolishness, and cluelessness in the past, times in which you really got something wrong. Second, pray for the critic, that he or she grows in grace.

For decades, the informal consensus surrounding high school football has been that the top qualification for coaching is toughness. The image of a hard-nosed football who yells, snarls and cusses in practices and on the sideline is so common as to be cliché. But slowly, that's changing.

Fictional coaches are part of the trend. Iconic roles like Denzel Washington's Coach Boone in Remember the Titans and Kyle Chandler's Coach Taylor in NBC's Friday Night Lights series have shown audiences that successful football coaching, especially at the high school level, requires emotional intelligence as well as toughness. But that lesson is also sinking in for actual coaches.

Lou Racioppe, a 20-year veteran head football coach for Merona High in Merona, New Jersey, was relieved of his duties after an internal investigation into his coaching practices. Parents said Merona players were asked a series of questions regarding Racioppe's coaching style, including questions about running as a form of punishment, whether players received adequate hydration, and if or how often the coach used profanity or grabbed their face masks. The investigation prompted an outpouring of support during a subsequent school board meeting from parents, boosters and players.

John Fiore, is the head football coach for Montclair High School in Montclair, New Jersey. His Montclair Mounties are four-time state champions, and in 2013 Fiore was named New York Jets High School Coach of the Year.

Fiore, a contemporary of Racioppe, at one point considered himself similarly "old-school" in his approach to coaching. But gradually, he changed his approach. His practices as an 18-year-coaching veteran looking nothing like his rookie coaching days at Spotswood High. "My kids from Spotswood watch me coach. They'll tell every one of these guys I've turned soft," Fiore says.

In a class called "Coaching Principles and Problems," John McCarthy, adjunct professor at Montclair State University, encourages his coaches-in-training to think of themselves as teachers. "Would you curse at a kid in your Spanish class?" he asks. "Would you hit a [student] in your Spanish class or your math class? Of course you wouldn't."

While Fiore admits that he doesn't feel as supported as he used to, he and Professor McCarthy both recognize that coaches must adapt to the standards of the communities they serve. "Here's what I tell my kids," McCarthy says. "Everything in life is subject to change, so why should coaching be any different?"

Preaching angles: Leaders must learn from each other, repentance is the natural outgrowth of continual introspection and accountability, kindness is just as powerful a motivator as fear.

Do Christians just have faith in God because we need a source of comfort? In an interview for Los Angeles Review of Books, Hollywood screenwriter Dorothy Fortenberry addressed those questions:

The single most annoying thing [I hear about faith] … is the kind, patronizing way that nonreligious people have of saying, "You know, sometimes I wish I were religious. I wish I could have that certainty. It just seems so comforting never to doubt things."

Well, sometimes I wish I had the certainty of an atheist … I do not find religion to be comforting in the way that I think nonreligious people mean it …

It is not comforting to know quite as much as I do about how weaselly and weak-willed I am when it comes to being as generous as Jesus demands. Thanks to church, I have a much stronger sense of the sort of person I would like to be, and I am forced to confront all the ways in which I fail, daily. Nothing promotes self-awareness like turning down an opportunity to bring children to visit their incarcerated parents. Or avoiding shifts at the food bank. Or calculating just how much I will put in the collection basket. Thanks to church, I have looked deeply into my own heart and found it to be of merely small-to-medium size. None of this is particularly comforting.

NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers is one of the best pro football players of all-time, but he still listens to his coaches. "I love being coached," Rodgers said. "I love talking football with smart coaches. I love the input, the dialogue, the conversation." His team's head coach, Mike McCarthy, added, "Aaron is a really good student. He wants to be coached, and he likes to be coached hard."

Steph Curry, one of the best basketball players in the NBA, has the same attitude. One of his coaches said, "He's the most educable player I've ever known—both in terms of his willingness to listen and in his ability to absorb and execute."

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Wisdom; Teachability—The essence of wisdom is the ability to listen and learn from others; (2) Father's Day—These two men provide a good example for all people, especially men, about the need to listen and learn from others.

Tim Keller writes:

Some years ago, I had a relative who never would wear a seat belt. Every time I talked to him, he would get in the car, but wouldn't wear his seat belt. We all nagged him to no avail. Then one day he got in the car and put his seat belt on right away. We said, "What happened to you?" He said, "A couple weeks ago, I went to see a friend of mine in the hospital. He was in a car crash, and he went through the windshield. He had like 200 stitches in his face. For some strange reason, ever since then, I've been having no problem buckling up."

I asked him, "Well, did you get new information? What changed you? Did you not know that people go through the windshield?" Of course I knew the answer to those questions: What happened was that an abstract proposition became connected to an actual sensory experience that is something he saw. As Jonathan Edwards used to basically say over and over again, it's only when you attach to some truth—that's when real life change occurs. Something has to become real to your heart. Then you will be changed.

Tony Liciardello was baseball's greatest scout, having signed fifty-two youngsters (including two Hall of Famers) who would rise through the minor league ranks and eventually play Major League Baseball. This number of signees making it to "the big leagues" ranks higher than any other scout. Amazingly, Lucadello's success came despite the fact that he covered the territory of Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, not exactly the haven of California, Florida, or Texas where the weather allows for year-round play—with better players and more opportunities to observe them.

Lucadello's scouting exploits have been chronicled by Mark Winegardner in Prophet of the Sandlots. Winegardner spent several summers observing Lucadello, a loveable curmudgeon who not only spurned the typical tools of his trade, the radar gun and stopwatch, but also roamed the perimeter of baseball fields instead of sitting behind home plate like most other scouts.

So how did he do it? According to Lucadello, there are four kinds of scouts: Five percent are poor scouts (who seldom plan), five percent are pickers (who just spot weaknesses), eighty-five percent are performance scouts (who look solely based on how players do—against amateur competition), but Lucadello was that rare breed of projector scout. He looked for how coachable a kid was, how a hitch in a swing or a throwing quirk might be corrected. He saw years "down the road" to envision, under the tutelage of better coaching and against stiffer competition, how a player would play. He used rose-colored-glasses looking to see the potential in talent, rather than just the current-state talent.

Possible Preaching Angles: In the same way, Jesus, the ultimate "scout," can see his redeemed children years down the road.

In June of 1938, J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings author) wrote a letter to his editor Stanley Unwin explaining why he was behind schedule finishing the final draft for The Hobbit. Tolkien told Unwin that instead of drafting more material, he decided to start over and rewrite the first three chapters. What motivated Tolkien to go back and start the whole thing over again? He had received "excellent criticism" from his readers. C. S. Lewis was one of those readers. Apparently Lewis read chapters, liked the story, and encouraged Tolkien, but he also took the time to critique it and make specific suggestions for its improvement.

For instance, Lewis told Tolkien that there was too much dialogue, too much chatter, too much silly "hobbit talk." According to Lewis, all this dialogue was dragging down the story line. Tolkien grumbled in response to Lewis, "The trouble is that 'hobbit talk' amuses me … more than adventures; but I must curb this severely." But he still accepted the advice anyway.

Also, in the first draft, the story centers on a hobbit named Bingo, who sets out with two companions (Odo Took and Frodo Took). As Tolkien revises, Bingo becomes Frodo, and he is joined by his friends Sam and Pippin. (I wonder—would The Lord of the Rings have been nearly so popular if the main character had been called Bingo all along?)

But more than just names have been transformed. Tolkien's revised version is shorter and much clearer, too. When Tolkien rewrote this material, he cut nearly half of the dialogue. Page after page, he cuts out long conversations, and he picks up the action. Even though he personally prefers a story with much more "hobbit talk," he bows to his critics and creates a tale with much less. He also makes small but elegant refinements throughout the pages.

In 1964 Nelson Mandela began his prison sentence at Rodden Island, the former site of a leper colony and the insane. For the next 27 years, Mandela would only be known as prisoner number 46664. Day after day for 27 years he labored in a limestone quarry, chipping away at white rock under a bright and merciless sun. Without the benefit of protective eyewear, Mandela virtually destroyed his tear ducts, which for years robbed his ability to cry. Then on February 11, 1990 something surprising happened: Mandela was released from prison.

The world wondered how he would respond. Would he rage at the world and the oppressive system that had him imprisoned? Would he express regret for the suffering his convictions had caused him? Instead, Mandela quietly spoke of the nobility of being able to suffer for what we believe.

"To go to prison because of your convictions," he said, "and be prepared to suffer for what you believe in, is something worthwhile. It is an achievement for a man to do his duty on earth irrespective of the consequences."

After a cancer diagnosis and enduring 17-months of chemo and radiation, Robin Quivers, co-host for shock-jock radio show host Howard Stern, claims to have discovered the meaning of life. In an issue of Rolling Stone magazine she said,

What I learned is very simple: that your life belongs to you. And it really doesn't matter what you do with it, but it should be what you want to do with it. Not what your mother or father or friends or society want. It should be "I" directed. And that's the only purpose for being here.

Possible Preaching Angles: Ms. Quivers has done us a favor by perfectly describing the exact opposite of the biblical message of servanthood and stewardship.

Sally Smith, the president and former CEO of the wildly popular Buffalo Wild Wings restaurant chain, was asked, "What are some things you've learned about leading and managing people?" She replied:

I'm always seeking feedback. My leadership team does a performance review on me each year for the board. It's anonymous. They can talk about my management style or things I need to work on. If you want to continue growing, you have to be willing to say, "What do I need to get better at?"

That's how I learn. That's how I get better. Getting feedback [as a leader] is really tough. You may be able to find a couple of people in the company who will give you honest feedback. Before we even did performance reviews, I used to go to [one of our key leaders] and say, "I want you to write down four things that I need to work on next year."

What could a team of medical doctors possibly learn about practicing medicine from a Formula One racing team? If the doctors remain teachable, maybe they could learn a lot. That's what happened at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. After completing a twelve-hour emergency transplant, the head doctor watched a Formula One race. As a car pulled into the pit, he noted that the crew changed the tires, filled it with fuel, cleared the air intakes, and sent it off in seven seconds.

It struck him that it often took thirty minutes for his team of doctors and nurses to untangle and unplug all the wires and tubes and transfer a patient from surgery to ICU. He wondered if a racing team could teach a hospital how to run an emergency room.

Imagine the pushback from the trained medical staff when the McLaren and Ferrari racing teams showed up to advise them on how to improve their emergency services. After all, what did they know about surgery or patient care? Nothing. But what did they know about speeding up complex processes? Everything.

As a result, after visiting with the Formula One racing team, the hospital staff initiated major changes, including better training, new procedures, a step-by-step checklist covering each stage of the handover, and a diagram so that everyone knew their exact physical position as well as their precise task. It almost halved handover errors.

The hospital team's problems were solved by a group of people who knew nothing about the practice of emergency room medicine. But the Formula One team's expertise allowed them to easily spot what the hospital tribe had missed. And the medical team had the humility and teachability to learn from the outsiders.

In many parts of the developing world, aid workers have often struggled to get people clean, disease-free drinking water. Surprisingly, it hasn't always been easy. For a while, aid workers helped people get clean water by digging wells. But by the time people got the water into their homes it was often still contaminated. The next step involved adding a tiny bit of chlorine, which keeps water free of germs for days. So aid workers started trying to get people to use chlorine. In Kenya today, you can buy little bottles of chlorine, made just for purifying water, for pennies. Problem solved? Unfortunately, surveys show that only a small percentage of people buy the chlorine, even though it's cheap and widely available.

So the next step to help rural areas get clean water involved putting chlorine right next to the spring or well. It's basically an upside-down bottle with a dispenser that releases chlorine into the containers people use to carry water. A tiny bit is enough for 20 liters of water. It's simple and it's free.

But it turns out that only 40 percent of people who have access to the dispensers actually use them. Some people don't like the taste; some people don't believe in it. The American aid workers sometimes don't use the dispensers either. One aid worker said, "Sometimes you're in a rush, or you're thinking about something else and you just don't do it. I've had malaria five times now. I have a bed net hanging above my bed, and I don't use it."

What's the real problem? The article zeroed in on one issue—human nature. In other words, people from Nairobi, Kenya to New York City often know what's right but we don't do it. Interestingly, the NPR blog that reported this story was titled "A Surprising Barrier to Clean Water: Human Nature."