Sermon Illustrations on planning

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Background

Leaving the Right Words Behind

I am not a mountain climber, but a few years ago I had the idea that I might want to climb seriously, so I started to read and to train. I’ve climbed a few glacier-covered mountains in the northwestern United States with professionals. One of the things that you learn from professional climbers is the discipline of packing well.

Tools are helpful when you climb. Your sleeping bag provides warmth, your lantern provides light, and your gloves provide protection. Lose your footing and your ax can save your life. Every tool has a purpose, and almost any tool can be helpful. Every tool also has weight. Standing at sea level, an ax in your hand feels like a feather.

At twelve thousand feet, hours from the summit, an extra pound in your pack feels like an anvil. In the same way, words have value. The right words can right your balance. The right words can light your way. But words also have weight. In our life and work, we have to carry what is essential, and leave much of the rest behind.

Eric Greitens, Resilience: Hard-Won Wisdom for Living a Better Life, HMH Books, 2015, pp. 12-13.

Stories

Doing the Work Before the Work

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job, Stephen W. Smith provides an important analogy about the importance of spiritually preparing ourselves for the adversity and challenges that come with success in the world:

Long ago a Chinese man began his career making bell stands for the huge bronze bells that hung in Buddhist temples. This man became prized and celebrated for making the best, most elaborate and enduring bell stands in the entire region. No other person could make the bell stands with such strength and beauty.

His reputation grew vast and his skill was in high demand. One day the celebrated woodcarver was asked, “Please tell us the secret of your success!” He replied: Long before I start making and carving the bell stand, I go into the forest to do the work before the work.

I look at all of the hundreds of trees to find the ideal tree—already formed by God to become a bell stand. I look for the boughs of the tree to be massive, strong and already shaped. It takes a long time to find the right tree. But without doing the work before the work, I could not do what I have accomplished.

Packing for Passage on the Mayflower

Many of us struggle to know exactly what to pack when we go on our various travels. The Pilgrims in their voyage to the new world were no different. As Bill Bryson describes in his book Made in America:

It would be difficult to imagine a group of people more ill-suited to a life in the wilderness. They packed as if they had misunderstood the purpose of the trip, They found room for sundials and candle snuffers, a drum, a trumpet, and a complete history of Turkey. One William Mullins packed 126 pairs of shoes and thirteen pairs of boots. Yet they failed to bring a single cow or horse, plow or fishing line.

Among the professions represented on the Mayflower’s manifest were two tailors, a printer, several merchants, a silk worker, a shopkeeper, and a hatter—occupations whose indispensability is not immediately evident when one thinks of surviving in a hostile environment.

Their military commander, Miles Standish, was so diminutive of stature that he was known to all as “Captain Shrimpe”—hardly a figure to inspire awe in the savage natives, whom they confidently expected to encounter. With the uncertain exception of the little captain, probably none in the party had ever tried to bring down a wild animal. Hunting in seventeenth-century Europe was a sport reserved for the aristocracy.

Even those who labeled themselves farmers generally had scant practical knowledge of husbandry, since farmer in the 1600s, and for some time afterward, signified an owner of land rather than one who worked it.

They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic possible way: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, seventeen more in February, a further thirteen in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England, just fifty-four people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self-sustaining colony.

They were, in short, dangerously unprepared for the rigors ahead, and they demonstrated their incompetence in the most dramatic way possible: by dying in droves. Six expired in the first two weeks, eight the next month, 17 more in February, a further 13 in March. By April, when the Mayflower set sail back to England, just 54 people, nearly half of them children, were left to begin the long work of turning this tenuous toehold into a self-sustaining colony.

Bill Bryson, Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States, William Morrow Paperbacks, 2001

Analogies

Doing the Work Before the Work

In his highly insightful work, Inside Job, Stephen W. Smith provides an important analogy about the importance of spiritually preparing ourselves for the adversity and challenges that come with success in the world:

Long ago a Chinese man began his career making bell stands for the huge bronze bells that hung in Buddhist temples. This man became prized and celebrated for making the best, most elaborate and enduring bell stands in the entire region. No other person could make the bell stands with such strength and beauty.

His reputation grew vast and his skill was in high demand. One day the celebrated woodcarver was asked, “Please tell us the secret of your success!” He replied: Long before I start making and carving the bell stand, I go into the forest to do the work before the work.

I look at all of the hundreds of trees to find the ideal tree—already formed by God to become a bell stand. I look for the boughs of the tree to be massive, strong and already shaped. It takes a long time to find the right tree. But without doing the work before the work, I could not do what I have accomplished.

Humor

Putting Life on Autopilot

There’s a true story about a couple who dreamed of one day driving across America during their “golden years.” They sold their home and bought a top-of-the-line RV. They took the trip seriously, investing time in lessons on how to drive, park, and navigate their massive vehicle as they prepared for their great journey. The husband began the drive but eventually became tired. He asked his wife to take the wheel while he rested.

The wife got behind the wheel, turned on the vehicle, put on the cruise control, and began down the road. At first, everything was going fine-the wife stared out the window enjoying the scenery. Eventually, however, she decided she needed to go to the bathroom.

She didn’t want to disturb her husband, so she got up, and walked to the back of the RV…Now…if you were listening carefully, you may be asking yourself, “Wait a second…her husband is still sleeping…who’s driving the motor home?” This is a good question. Because after the RV crashed and was completely totaled (thankfully, the couple was unharmed) and the police showed up, the wife told them she placed the vehicle on auto-pilot. There’s only one problem with that decision, their RV did not have “auto-pilot.” Sometimes we do the same thing with our spiritual life-turn on the auto-pilot.

Stuart Strachan Jr.