Sermon Illustrations on decisive moments

Listen to your life. All moments are key moments. I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it…Taking your children to school and ki...

The things we say yes to and the things we say no to determine the terrain of our future. My convoluted journey is posted with invitations, and my RSVPs account for the twists and turns. Sometimes, ha...

Invitations are powerful. Like tides, they ebb and flow, shaping the contours of our existence. Some invitations we desperately want but never get—“Will you marry me?” or “Would you consider a promoti...

* This story is debated among Galileo scholars, though most would agree that the story conveys Galileo’s unique approach to learning. Galileo Galilei was a man who dared to look beyond what othe...

There’s a well-shared (though probably apocryphal) story that took place about the morning, the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther was having a theological discussion with a few of his friends. One...

A life-threatening crisis came to my home when I was only 25. My wife suffered a near-fatal stroke and was rushed to the hospital, where doctors scrambled to keep her alive. Within hours, we were maki...

It doesn’t matter what the specific decision is. Unmade decisions hold power. They pull, they push, they interrupt where they aren’t wanted and poke us awake at night. They can turn us into strange ve...

To decide requires a death, a dying to a thousand options, the putting aside of a legion of possibilities in order to choose just one. De- cide . Homo- cide . Sui- cide . Patri- cide . The root word d...

In her book, The Next Right Thing, Emily Freeman describes the difficulty in making decisions, including the decision that would eventually lead to her enrollment in Graduate school. After a prolonged...

Billy Graham had a weekly radio show titled The Hour of Decision. Normally it was a tape recording of the service and message he’d given at a recent evangelistic rally. And at the conclusion of every ...

The pioneering work of Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky has been popularized in recent years by the gamut of notable thinkers, including Malcolm Gladwell (Blink) and, in this cas...

What I’ve found through research is that trust is built in very small moments, which I call “sliding door” moments, after the movie Sliding Doors. In any interaction, there is a possibility of connect...

Many, many great things have begun with a single act of courage, throughout history and today. A person steps out and makes one courageous decision and that one domino starts many other dominoes falli...

When every option is available to us, we don’t actually have freedom; we tend to shut down. I experienced what sociologists call choice overload (or paralysis) and decision fatigue. If you’ve ever tri...

In one of his letters, the philosopher and psychologist William James shares a conviction regarding his focus not on big, grand things, but with the small “almost invisible” decisions: I am done wit...

The famous poem The Charge of the Light Brigade includes these haunting lines: Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred… Someone had blundered. Theirs not to reason why, ...

The Yalta Conference, helmed by Allied leadership (Most notably Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin) came at the conclusion of hostilities in Europe during WWII. It dealt with a...

I read of a young man who had just been appointed to the presidency of a bank at the tender age of thirty-two. The promotion was far beyond his wildest dreams and very frightening to him, so he went t...

Angela Merkel breaks almost every stereotype we have about world leaders. Her appearances and actions are plain and modest.  She's humble. She couldn't care less about showmanship or fancy dis...

History records the Battle of Cannae as perhaps Rome's most devastating military defeat, orchestrated by the tactical genius of Hannibal of Carthage. In the aftermath of this crushing victory, the...

The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices. This is especially tr...

Crises, and pressures for change, confront individuals and their groups at all levels, ranging from single people, to teams, to businesses, to nations, to the whole world. Crises may arise from extern...

Sociologist Ann Swidler has written persuasively about the difference between “settled” and “unsettled” times. Settled times consist of “traditions and common sense; [within which we] refine and reinf...

Columbia researcher Sheena Iyengar has found that the average person makes about seventy conscious decisions every day. That’s 25,550 decisions a year. Over seventy years, that’s 1,788,500 decisions. ...

Many years ago a senior executive of the then Standard Oil Company made a wrong decision that cost the company more than $2 million. John D. Rockefeller was then running the firm. On the day the news ...

I’ll never forget one Sunday in 1964 when a bunch of kids met up together and decided they were going to integrate the movie theater in Mendenhall. This was fairly early on in the integration efforts,...

I have been pondering the nature of presence and encounter since first reading Martin Buber’s I and Thou as a university student. His assertion that “All real living is meeting” struck a deeply resona...

One of the most controversial decisions in Super Bowl history took place in the closing seconds of Super Bowl XLIX in 2015. The Seattle Seahawks, with twenty-six seconds remaining and trailing by four...

The Messy Middle In his classic work Transitions, author and professor William Bridges shares an excellent anecdote about life in crisis: it can happen at any time and in a myriad of ways. It also de...

When every option is available to us, we don’t actually have freedom; we tend to shut down. I experienced what sociologists call choice overload (or paralysis) and decision fatigue. If you’ve ever tri...