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Showing posts from October, 2015

Integrity In Sermon Illustrations

There are many temptations to distraction in sermons today. You know how it is - you opened the Bible app to read the passage being preached on, and before you know it, you've added a Facebook update, checked some tweets, and seen how many emails are waiting for your attention. But there's a new reason for having access to the church wi-fi - checking sermon illustrations. The preacher has just told a story about how Alexander Fleming's father saved Winston Churchill from drowning as a boy. Not true*. Or how Shackleton placed an advert in The Times asking for men to join him on a hazardous journey. Never happened^. In fact, even Nicky Gumbel, creator of the Alpha Course, has slipped up in just this way. In his online bible study, Bible In One Year , he tells how Voltaire denied the truth of the Bible, but his house was later turned into the HQ of the European (or Geneva, or French) Bible Society. The only trouble is, that isn't true either. And it took a Christian we