Video Transcript: Session 28 Make it memorable, use visuals
Welcome back to preaching. Preacher presentation, presentation a class on making and preaching sermons. We've been talking in these past sessions about how do you present your message in a memorable way, acknowledging the fact that people remember only 20% of what they hear. So how do we increase that percentage and so we've been talking about that a little bit. Well, today, I want to continue that theme. You'll notice the title on here is use visuals. Now, the sermon I remember best in my life happened because of the visual that a person use, it was a friend of mine. And we invited him we had an evening service, and he was a missionary that we supported. Now, this was when I lived in Southern California. And so this was a man who was a friend of mine who was a missionary, as an Anglo living in South Central LA, which is almost all at that time, African American. And so he worked in a church there in a very difficult setting where he often had guns pointed at him, that sort of thing as they tried to close crack houses and, and things like that. But we invited him to come and preach and one of our evening service services, and he brought with him two visuals that were rather powerful. That one is one we talked about earlier, as we showed you that video of the guy creating a visual by cracking one of these cheap clay pots, you can buy them for a couple of bucks somewhere. And sometimes you can get them a whole lot cheaper for that as a garage sale here in the United States. Well, he had one that was dirty, and it was yucky, and it was just kind of sat there. So he had that one. And then he had this absolutely beautiful vase. This isn't a picture of the vase he brought but it's it's similar to what we were talking about. And, and he used those as a visual at one point in his message now what the point he was making in the message at the beginning with this simple clay pot was that God takes us as clay pots, right? We're clay pots. But sometimes we get dirty. We sin, we we fail to live the way he wants us to live. We don't just sin by not obeying God, we sin by disobeying and we sin by not living up the way he wants us to live as far as the goodness that we should be doing in the world. And sometimes he said, the stench of our dirt and our filth go to God and He gave the example of Sodom and Gomorrah, how the stench of Sodom and Gomorrah, we read, reached into heaven, so much so that God had determined to destroy those cities. And then there's a whole story in the book of Genesis, about the angels coming to Abraham and Abraham kind of bargaining with God about saving the city. If there's just five righteous people, would you destroy it, there are five righteous people in the city. And anyway, he says, so Lot gets rescued from the city. But God's judgment pours down and destroyed that city. And he put a towel over the gray pot, had a towel under it, took a hammer out and smashed it to smithereens, and then opened it in there it was. That's what it's like to be under God's judgment. And then he took this beautiful vase. And he just told a story about this vase. He said this was a very valuable vase vase to him, said, one it's beautifully made, but it was given to him by a friend. And this was a friend that he had met when he was
in Vietnam as a as a servicemen in Vietnam of the United States fighting there. And he said, this friend that he just kind of clicked when they were first got in the same platoon together. But over a period of time, you know, this friend had saved his life and at least one maybe more occasions. And so they have this bond that lasted even after they got home. Back to the United States, there was this bond that lasted and one time when they were going to meet once again and talk to this friend gave him this beautiful vase. He said, It looks similar to what they used to see in the marketplace, when they were in Saigon and Vietnam, said, I give this to you, just because I want you to think of me every time you see this beautiful vase. And then he talked about God's relationship within himself, about God's love of the son, where he could say up Jesus baptism, This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. So this is my son. Listen to him at the Transfiguration, that mystery of the Trinity of God we talked about being one God but in three different persons, three different persons, and and that love that existed there. And then he said, but what did God choose to do with his beloved son? And he wrapped this beautiful vase in a towel just as he had the clay pot? And he said, he chose because he loves you and He loves me to send his judgment on his beloved son. They raised the hammer and there was something into that just wanted to cry out no Don't break it. And other people reported the same reaction. I said, I'm sure everybody who was in that service that night, experienced that same kind of feeling as he raised the hammer, and then smashed this beloved, valuable vase. I will never forget that message. Now today, we're going to talk about using visuals in your messages. And the question, always an argument, should you use visuals or not? Now, there are a variety of arguments about why not to use visuals. Here's some of the better known ones. One, people will remember the visual, not the point. Yes, that can happen. It can happen that some people would think oh, yeah, I remember the visual. But what was that point? Again? That can happen but you know, I'd rather have people remember the visual, remember something and maybe get the truth out of it, then not remember anything I'm going to tell you later about the pastor, my teen years. Another one is as change of senses, you know, going from the auditory sense, to the visual sense, might be distracting for people. It might be I don't, I don't know. And there are no studies that say so. And some people argue against using visuals like PowerPoint saying, you know, PowerPoint, and bullet points creates kind of a simple message, it simplifies things. To a point of the ridiculous like, you know, you always end up with sermons that have three points, you know, three ways to save your marriage. Five things you can do to grow more spiritually are are 10 ways to do this or that that reduces the wonderfully complex and Yet, beautiful message of the Scripture, to bullet points, and so we shouldn't use them. That's, those are the main arguments that I'm aware of. As far as the not don't use visuals. But there are some big arguments for using visuals as well for once. For instance, God
does it. God uses visuals. The fact you can't read the Scripture very far, where you become aware that visuals are important to him. He uses visuals to communicate to his people. You see this throughout Scripture, but when you get to the prophets, it becomes almost an every page occurrence. recently completed the book of Jeremiah and my devotions, and you know how does Jeremiah start? Well, it starts with a call to being a prophet on the part of Jeremiah, when you read Jeremiah 1, you read that God calls him saying, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you before you are born, I set you apart. I appointed you as a prophet to the nations. And that's how he lives out his word, but verse 11 of chapter 1, you get a picture of this call of his message. It's a visual. We read here, verse 11, the word of the Lord came to me. What do you see Jeremiah? In other words, there was a visual. I see the branch of an almond tree, I replied, The Lord said to me, you have seen correctly for I'm watching to see that my word is fulfilled, to understand how the people would interpret that how Jeremiah would interpret that here's a theologian, Bible commentator, reflecting on that passage, said in the first vision, Jeremiah saw an almond branch, the almond Bush was the first to come to life in the spring, the blossoming of the pink flowers of the almond tree was a sure sign that spring was coming, the flowers come before the leaves. So the almond branch was a symbol of the coming fulfillment of the Lord's word, the Lord will carry out his word without delay. The period of waiting and warning was almost over the time of judgment for Judah and Jerusalem had come. So that message came with a picture. And the picture affirmed the message and so every time Jeremiah thought of the urgency of his message to God's people, he could think of that almond tree, or the another marvelous picture later in Jeremiah, where we have him getting direction from the Lord verses chapter 18. This is the word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord. Go down to the potter's house. Excuse me there's the almond branch, here's the potter's house. And there's a message there. So I went down to the potter's house and I saw him working at the wheel but the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hand so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as he seemed best to him. Here's a visual right, a potter at work. Then the word of the Lord came to me said can I not do with you Israel as this potter does, declares the Lord like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand Israel, if at any time I announced that a nation or Kingdom is to be uprooted, torn down and destroyed to this nation I weren't repents of its evil I will relent and not inflict on it's a disaster I plan. And if at another time I announced that a nation or Kingdom has to be built up and planted, and if it does, even when my sighted does not obey me, then I reconsider the good I had intended to do for it. Now say this to the people in Jerusalem. It came with a visual aid. And so one of the arguments for it is this is the way God communicates to us. He communicates to us in pictures, he communicates us to in, in these object lessons that are visual that have to do in life. And certainly,
God in the Old Testament does it Jesus in the New Testament certainly uses visuals, you can't read the parables, you can't read some of the stories about Jesus without seeing him use the visual. One of my favorites is when Jesus takes this little child and puts them among them, that the disciples are talking about, you know, who's the greatest among them, and it takes a little child, here's a visual lesson, an object lesson, different than illustration in some ways, but a visual illustration. And he said, unless you become like this little child, you will in no way enter the kingdom of heaven. Now, what did Jesus intend with that? Well, there are probably many things that could be interpreted that way to be interpreted that he meant that they should become trusting like this child, or are joyful, like most time, children are, you know, there have been studies done about how often little children giggle, and how we lose that as we move into adulthood. Maybe he was just saying, approach the joy of life. But I suspect in the context, it was the trusting character of children, that says, I'm going to be a child, but I'm going to trust you. And I'm going to recognize that I'm not an adult. And so they would be able to turn more and more over to God. And so Jesus does this all the time. He said, Look at the birds of the air, visual birds of the air, said, see how they don't so they don't reap and yet, they don't have barns to store up their stuff in in yet. Your father takes care of them, how much more important to you than the birds now that comes in a context and Luke 12, where Jesus is talking to a man who called out as he was teaching, Lord, bid, my brother divided the inheritance with me and Jesus response is, who made me a judge among you in that sense? And he says, first of all, beware of greed. And you recognize the greed in this man's heart. And so it becomes an object lesson to say, I trust God, I can't just try to get ahead financially, the seed and the sower, how does the word get spread about grass in the field, all of these kinds of things he uses. So we have arguments for God does it. Church history shows that we've been doing this for a long, long time. For many, many years in churches, they would have stained glass windows in the stained glass, where there were visual lessons in people where they were mostly illiterate. They use these pictures to teach people. And we still do that with children yet today, only now we do that in more sophisticated ways. So we do this, because God does it the church's history shows that and today we are in a visual world and the United States are two and a half television sets per household. And they watch it 35.6 hours per week. Now, that has created us as people, though, I think we're born that way. And certainly God has done in a long, long time. But we're born with a tendency to take in things more visually, even that we are orally with me speaking to you. So it's important that you see me not just hear me not that you can't learn things from just the audio. We're going to talk about that another time, too. But we need to have visual stuff for our interpretation of things. So how do you do it? Well, movies, television clips, if you've got the capacity to do that, those can be powerful. There's this back. Here's an example. This is from
Indiana Jones. And he has to take, he has to get the chalice that Jesus supposedly drank at the Last Supper. And unless he gives liquid to his father out of that challice, his father is going to die. And so he has to go but he sees between himself in the cave, where the chalice is held that there's this huge chasm, and how will he ever get there? Well, he has to take a step of faith. And as he reads and reflects on the stuff, he's willing to take this step of faith, and all of a sudden, there's a trail that appears before him. Something like that is a wonderful thing to talk about taking a step of faith. You can find all kinds of examples of these, oh, I didn't say anything about copyright laws there you must be aware of using copyright laws. In other words, you can only use certain kinds of material and you can't use it for financial gain. So beware of that. But there are even services like sermonspice.com where you can get visual video declarations of some kind or another or or skits, those kinds of things that can illustrate your sermons. Or you can use common objects. A friend of mine just recently used this one of the lifesaver rings. We talked about what Jesus does for us and he threw it out into the audience and pulled it out with or pulled it back with a rope. to say, it gives us as we're being swept away by life as we're being swept away by our own self and our own desires, we get this life ring, and there's a power that pulls us back to life. You can find it in all kinds of common objects, you can find it like a rope, saw one message where the guy used a rope was encompassing the whole front of the church. And he walked from one end. And so that represents eternity past that represents eternity future. And then he goes to the Middle East says, and here's your life right here. That's it. That's all you get a rope. The gate, powerful sermon on Jesus being the gate, as he claims in the Gospel of John is one of the I am statements, and that this guy had built up small sheep pen onstage, just roughly put together. And then there's a gate where the shepherd sat, so no thief or wild animal could get in without going past him. And so he sat there and gave his message, a large part of it from there. And that became a visual, a gavel about judgment. You may wonder why this is here. This was one of my visual aids that I remember, well, there was a time in my life where I felt a friend of mine had betrayed me. And I could not believe there was it was, it was a tough time in my life. I was going through some really difficult stuff. And then I felt like this man on who I depended was not shared so much, was now cutting off my legs in life. And so I was going to a counselor during this time, I said, What do I do with this anger? He said, well, you've got to somehow externalize your anger. And so he says, find some way. So if you're a runner run, well, I had some knee problems at the time, so I couldn't run. So I determined, I got out my sledge hammer, and I just sat in the backyard just pounding on the ground, pounding on the ground, pounding on the ground. The message that day, was about forgiveness. How do you forgive someone? But for me, the visual was, we get that was several people said, you know, I know what that's like. And then we talked about the importance of
forgiveness. So you can do it in a variety of ways. With very, very common objects. How do you do it? Well, movies, television, clip common objects, get a team of creative people if you can, that's a marvelous thing. use PowerPoint for punch. Now I'm running out of time here for this session. And so I want to show you a video, it's a short video, but it just gives all the problems with PowerPoint, PowerPoint is a wonderful blessing. And if you're able to use that if you have the technical capacity to use it, it can provide a great deal of good visual aid for your messages. But there are problems with it. And there's a rather humorous presentation embedded in this video. And when you watch that, you'll just see that yeah, this is there are some problems with PowerPoint too. So just be aware, and I'll see you next time. So this is a thing I do called Life After Death by PowerPoint basically, don't do these things in PowerPoint. These are the things that people do that drive me nuts and the only way to show them not to do this is to show them what not to do. So the biggest one I see most common how present number one people tend to put every word they're going to say on their PowerPoint slide. Although this eliminates need to memorize your exercise category and boring you lose your eyes or even reach the bottom of your first slide second most common font size is important size matters too small and that's not that's not good for anybody on the other hand too big and he just looks like an idiot don't have your fonts moving keep your text stationary there's nothing more annoying the text does blinking don't have it blinking don't have it spinning don't have stuff flying around the screen. You got people with ADD crazy just like whoa what's happening now since I'm talking about font people are really into fonts I've noticed this. Here's a great isn't that by the way. One of the best joke jokes that I know a Comic Sans and Helvetica, a walk into a bar and the bartender and ask the bartender for a drink and the bartender says, Sorry, we don't serve your type here that kills it upon convection you choose Be very careful. Everybody has their their favorite font. The font you choose sends a message about who you are as a person. There's a long list of fonts, we pick one that reflects your personality, we're sending an unspoken message. So for example, if you choose Courier New it means you're organized and structured and like to pretend you're still using a typewriter. If you choose Comic Sans it means you think you're funny. And if you choose Times New Roman, it means you're lazy, apathetic and unimaginative. And you always use the default If you choose Georgia, it means you speak with a southern accent. You choose the Arial that means you like The Little Mermaid. Arial people you choose Old English it means that you enjoy malt liquor we got a few more helvetica Helvetica. That means you're a mayonnaise lover. That's a stretch. Blackadder that means you're an African American accountant. That one requires some thought. sorry. And if you like Wingdings, it means you're a nerd and you have no life. Now, if you type in all small letters, some people do that all small letters, that means you're quite shy and unassertive, you type in all capital letters. That
means you yell a lot of somebody. If you take a small letter followed by capital letters, that means your caps lock is stuck on. Don't you hate when that happens. You're going along for a while and oh darn. And it finally got a mix of capital letters and small letters. That means this is a ransom note and you are a kidnapper. Very hard to avoid excessive bullet pointing only bullet key points, too many bullet points and your key messages will not stand out. In fact, the term bullet point comes from people firing guns at annoying presenter. This slide but when it has crashed PowerPoint, apparently, there's a max about how many bullet points you can add. The other thing you do is have animations. People love animations. zooming in and out and left and right. You get seasick What does that even turns out if you're a visual learner, your effectiveness as a speaker will go up with the more animations but if they're easily distracted, they're not even paying attention to what you're saying. They're just watching the cool stuff. And there's reasons for this graph. There's a simple but effective reads in the act of a confusing the effective and boring the active and ineffective the Dilbert static region. The busy uses region over there the add only region they're up in the use of amusing the stupid confusing the double triangle, the hyper triangle, the sleepy square, the visiting Pentagon, and then everything else is just grouped into what's called pointless motions. Just one slide by the way, it's been three and a half weeks to make. Now one of the biggest dangers today, and I'm telling you I hear it more and more every time you hear conversation is like how S.A.O.D. or severe acronym overload disorder. Have you heard people talk recently? There are no words going between? Yeah, I am my CFO about our ROI and our CRM and RFP and a printout or EPS is really SOL so we better do something ASAP. Like kind of can I buy a vowel like can't solve your conversation. And it may not resonate, but this could be a real resume in today's world. Look I got an MBA from USC and MSW from MIT a BSc E from IBM HP VLSI. Remember vi Triple E it NCAA NAACP, a RPA AAA, I want to position the CEO CFO CFO, CIO, CTO, cmo CFO, CTO CIO, VP, EPP. I want to be the EIA of a company. Especially my dream home. Yeah. Call me on the top. That's kind of my final point. And this people do all the time. They'll just have graph after graph just to impress you with their with their graph prowess. And I chose that acronym is my real time acronym, it's pretty much goes up and down. I know why you need to graph. But you can see pretty much peak there. I'll use some more acronyms later. And there's just a chart. That doesn't make sense. It doesn't make any sense to you. But I just want to, here's the acronym letter distribution C's ies E's, ns and Ss are the most common letters that I use in my acronyms. Here's a pie chart letter distribution. Here's I have no idea what you use that for. You can generate that automatically in PowerPoint. figure what the heck and here's the line graph. The number line graph throughout my show here is a bar chart or a bar charts pretty much goes up and down here is a real bar chart. Bar Chart I'm into here's the candy bar charts. Here's a salad bar
chart tomato sprouts, spinach and the different calories of each. Here's the sushi bar chart. This is a probability of illness, depending on there's a lot of detail and I actually pay close attention. Here's a bar chart number bars business versus age throughout my life. Most people don't take the time to do this. But you see when I was 17 I had to fake ID so it was confiscated when I was making my bar use has dropped dramatically. I spent way too long making these charts. When I was 21. I went nearly every day of the year if he was about 342 it's kind of gone down through the years I plan to drink a lot when I'm 40 a lot when I'm 50 and then retire a drink constantly. That's my plan here's a spreadsheet a spreadsheet get back to the charts. Here's a free He does spreads butter margarine I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. Mayonnaise Princetonian cheese was in patriots plus five over every possible spread you could imagine. Here's an org chart of org charts in Miami. Org Chart my sales marketing engineering org chart and here's your reward chart every company should have those. And then it was interesting is my actual family work chart make one of these. It's important. Steve our cat runs our family. If you have a cat, you know that is true. Any animal that goes hey, I just pooped in there. Somebody clean that up. Clearly head of the family. My wife Laura reports to Steve I report to my wife and the remote control reports to me. That's my entire region of domain right there. Back to the charts. Again, here's a pie chart of chart types 3d charts, bar charts, pie charts. Here's a pie chart a pie for dessert, lemon, pumpkin, cherry pecan apple. Here's a pizza pie chart. Here's your pot pie chart. There's a better pot pie chart. Here's a pie chart with value to pi but the nerds out there yet. 3.14159 22 Seven 3.14 and a pie itself. Here's we have a pie chart. I'm always thinking why don't we have a tick chart so there's a cake chart. Why don't we leave the cake out there they a birthday cake. There's a wedding cake chart. There's a bundt cake chart chart and then really that's an upside down cake chart. Alright, I think I've covered all the charts any questions at this point?