by Stuart Strachan Jr. | Aug 11, 2020 | Hope, Sermon Illustrations
Major Harold Kushner was a prisoner of the Viet Cong for more than five years. Kushner describes one of his fellow American prisoners, a tough twenty-four-year-old Marine who had made a deal with their captors. The Marine agreed to cooperate with the enemy, and in...
by Stuart Strachan Jr. | Jul 30, 2020 | Death, Life, Sermon Illustrations
An ending can be either good or bad. There are excellent novels that held my attention and moved me for hundreds of pages only to end in a way that made me regret reading the story. Sadly, the same can be said of many “good” lives. It is not enough to live well and...
by Stuart Strachan Jr. | Jul 21, 2020 | Forgiveness, Friendship, Kindness, Sermon Illustrations
Sometimes moments of forgiveness and friendship come from unexpected places. In 2018, the comedian Pete Davidson appeared on the “Weekend Update” segment of Saturday Night Live (SNL). Davidson made a crude joke about a former Navy Seal turned Congressman-elect Dan...
by Stuart Strachan Jr. | Jul 14, 2020 | Jesus, Kindness, Sermon Illustrations
I started reading The Kindness of God by Catholic theologian and philosopher Janet Soskice. In her examination of the etymology of the word kindness, Soskice helped me see it for the first time as a strong virtue rather than a weak one. “In Middle English,” she...
by Stuart Strachan Jr. | Jul 8, 2020 | Church, Community, Ministry, Sermon Illustrations
One of the seductions that continues to bedevil Christian obedience is the construction of utopias, whether in fact or fantasy, ideal places where we can live the good and blessed and righteous life without inhibition or interference. The imagining and attempted...
by Stuart Strachan Jr. | Jun 30, 2020 | Enslaved, Freedom, Satan, Sermon Illustrations
My grandad told me a story once and that story became a light. A light that unlocks the dark and releases you into the land of a thousand suns. Apparently, so the story went, there had been a tropical snake, longer than the length of a man, that wound its way up the...
