Video Transcript: Different Types of Messages

Welcome back to this short course. So you've been asked to speak somewhere. Last time we were looking at, you know what makes an effective introduction?  And we saw that there are these aspects to the introduction, one that you you  know you want to gain credibility for yourself, or you want people to grab on to  the theme. You want to hook them into their attention, so they want more. There  are these purposes of an introduction that will make your speech effective, and  so you spend time crafting an effective introduction. Well, last time we looked at  the first two of these on the screen, a story will do that very well. You can use a  variety of stories. Now, somebody asked me, when I was recently teaching this  at the CLI convention, where do you get this stuff from? Where do you get  stories? You can get them from online, from illustrations from like  sermoncentral.com, other places. You can put in a story about the will of God.  You can find it there. You can find it in books that you would study about the will  of God or whatever subject you are looking at. You gain them from your own  experience a time when you were struggling with the will of God or whatever  variety of ways to get a story An intriguing question is one that maybe will come  to mind as you are preparing your message and so you, you know, you  approach a passage of scripture in such a way. Because, you see, I got these  questions for God. I've got these questions for God. Recently, someone asked,  Is God angry with me because things are going wrong in their life? That's an  intriguing question to share. You know, look at all these things that went wrong  with losing a job and an eye disease and Dot, that you start wondering what  went wrong well. So those two are powerful. You can get them from a variety of  sources, but they're powerful now to go on to the next one, a shocking truth.  Sometimes when you shock people, they're grabbed. They want to know more.  And this can happen in a variety of ways. I was preaching on leaving a legacy,  and we were in a building program in the last church that I served, and one of  the areas where we especially need a room was that our middle school ministry  had grown from two or three students to over 50 over a period of time. We had a dynamic teacher in that group, and so she was in a room that was designed for  12 students, and so she had a little range. Oh, that one group would sit on the  floor, next group would sit on bean bags, and this group would sit on low stools,  the next group would sit on high stools, and the next group would stand up. And  so that's how she was trying to organize her class and keep the ministry going.  And so we were in a building program, and one of the things we were going to  do was try to supply more room for middle school ministry. Well, we asked her to do the introduction to the message, to share some of her vision for ministry, and  she what she did was she got all of her students in. So there's about 50  students, and they're sitting in one part of our sanctuary. At that point, our  worship center that we were in held about 500 people. And so you bring 50, and  you've got 10% of the church occupied by the middle school kids, and she  began talking about the percentages. Now the percentages change, but in our 

country, there is definitely a post Christian field of what's going on here. And one of the things that people have noted is that if kids grow up in the church, when  they go off to college, they often lose their faith. In fact, a huge percentage of  them are doing that. And so she just sharing those statistics, shocking truth. And then to emphasize how shocking it was, she asked that percentage of the kids,  and they'd already been identified, to leave. And so you get this huge group,  which was more than half the group, standing up and walking out of the  sanctuary. Oh, I didn't have to do much to introduce my shocking truth that day,  because people caught on and we talked about leaving a legacy, and what does the church have to do to prevent that from happening? And people were ready  to listen, and they responded. They responded by we did two different building  expansions during the next several years that I served there. That kind of  shocking truth, another shocking truth I've shared in messages in this area  where I live, is the fact that 47% of the people in this in this community, 47%  have no meaningful connection to any religion. I shared that with a group where  I was preaching as a guest preacher, and a church says 47% just imagine  almost one out of every two people if you walk down the main street of the.  Major town in this area you walk one of every two people is headed toward hell.  Now, what do we have to do as a church? What ministries do we have to begin? How do we have to look at ministry in a more positive way that will reach those  people? What's effective in turning this around? What's effective in engaging  revival. But it was the shocking truth that began that of 47% not connected with  any meaningful meaningfully with any religion, not just Christianity. So that kind  of shocking truth. Now one word about a shocking truth, and that is, you better  make sure it's accurate. I'm recording this in 2001 or 2021 in the United States.  And you know, if you're any, any familiar with the politics here, we've had all  kinds of Shocking Truths being claimed as fact, but when you start exploring  them, you find out it's not true. So when you are going to use a shocking truth,  make sure you do the study, because there's a lot of fake news out there, and  when you get enough fake news out there, people stop believing it, and they'll,  they will, they'll start tuning you out. And if you overuse this method. If you  overuse the whole idea of shocking truth, people will start to tune you out,  because people get tired of being shocked. So shocking truth can do this well.  The next category is humor. You can use humor very well in introducing a  message. Now a couple words about humor. One is, again, you can't overuse it.  And two, you've got to make sure that it is focused on your message. There's  one famous preacher whom I won't name, but his approach every week is that  he begins his message with a joke. And it's a joke. He's heard his joke. He  looked, I don't know where he gets his joke, but it's just a joke. That's all it is. It  has no relation to the message he's about to bring. And he said, he just says,  you know, I like to start my I like to start my messages with a joke. Well, that is  not fulfilling the purpose of the introduction here. Remember those purposes to 

get people's attention, to make them want more, to gain credibility, for you to  introduce the theme those that's not doing it. There is a way you can use humor  to do that, and it's a worthwhile thing to do. Recently, I was preaching on the  Prayer of Jabez. It's a little known passage in the Old Testament, but it's a  prayer, and it says at the end, God granted his request. So this is a prayer that  we should learn something from. But I introduced it, but with a story of fanciful  story. But it's two little boys who are staying with their grandparents, and it's  nearing Christmas and they're having a sleepover. And according to the tradition in that family, when these two little boys went to bed, they would kneel by the  side of their bed and they would pray. And so that was what they did. And the  one boy started praying really loudly, dear God for Christmas. I want a new bike, and I want a Nintendo Switch, and I want and he started making this list in a real loud voice. And his brother looked at him said, What? What are you doing?  Says, God isn't deaf. And other boy replied, No, God isn't deaf, but grandma is  people laughed, but then I could jump into, you know, how does God answer  prayers to God answer intriguing question, right? And I had people hooked and  hooked into the message. It's one of my favorite messages. So, yes, you can  use humor very, very effectively. Now, where do you find humor type things?  Where do you find those bits of humor that can effectively get people hooked  into your message again? It comes to reading through, listening through, making connections through places like sermoncentral.com, or pro preacher or  whatever. You can just find them a variety of places, but make sure, if you're  going to use humor, that it is connected to your message. It's not just out there  on your own. So there's a variety of ways that you can introduce your message,  and these are ways that will accomplish those purposes of gaining credibility for  you, but introducing the theme of hooking people into your message so that they want more and use them well. Now sometimes. You don't do the introduction  first. Sometimes you'll do the message first, at least I found that often. And then  I'm into the body of the message, and then I'll say, okay, how can I introduce this more effectively? Next time we're going to start talking about how you organize,  let's say you either do the introduction first or you're doing it later, either way. But how do you when you have a body of information that you want to present, how  do you present that in an organized way that people can follow and people can  experience just the joy of being with you along the way? So we'll see you next  time.