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The Commons

A preaching blog with ideas and for interactive story sermon writing and image exegesis by Len Sweet.

Here, you can comment on any post to discuss its meaning and share your thoughts.

Bamboo

What is going on here?  The root system is what grew that first four years. It was growing down and out, not up and up the first four years. The Apostle Paul’s ministry was a Chinese bamboo tree ministry. Because his mission to the Athenians resulted in only a few…

House of Burgesses

One wonders what was the back-story behind this legislation published in 1631 by the Virginia House of Burgesses: “Ministers shall not give themselves to excess in drinking or riot, spending their time idly by day or night, playing at dice, cards or any other unlawful game, but at all times…

Walking With Joy

“Walking now with joy and not with fear, in a clear, steady sight of things eternal, we shall look on pleasure, wealth, praise, all things of earth, as bubbles upon the water, counting nothing important, nothing desirable, nothing worth a deliberate thought, but only what is ‘within the veil’ where…

The Blow of Conscience

“When conscience does hurl its chastening bolt, it strikes through our inmost being and down the length of our days. And after such a blow there is no telling who of us will emerge tempered from the storm.”                 Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “Lightning,” as quoted in Joseph Pearce, Solzhenitsyn: A Soul…

The Meaning of Life

In one of his novels, French poet and novelist Anatole France (1844-1924) retold the old story of an eastern king who, on succeeding to his father’s throne, asked the greatest scholars of his country to compile for his guidance a history of humanity as complete as possible. After years of…

Getting the subject right

Auberon Alexander Waugh (1939-2001) was an English journalist, and eldest son of the famed Evelyn Waugh. He wrote five excellent novels, but gave up writing fiction because he didn’t like being compared to his famous father. Instead he made his living by writing and speaking. One day he received an…

Roosevelt

There is a story told about President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Apparently, sometime after being president for a very long time, he got tired of smiling that trade-mark Roosevelt smile and saying the trade-mark Roosevelt things at all those White House receptions. So, one evening he decided to find out whether…

Too much charity?

A preacher delivering a sermon on the text “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his own soul?” argued that people can lose their souls by being TOO charitable. When some gasped at his statement, he continued: “Many people attend church, hear the…

Einstein for President

In 1952, 3 years before his death, Israel offered Albert Einstein the Presidency. In Einstein’s note declining the invitation, he wrote: “All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions”…

What is your language?

“English-speaking tourists abroad are inclined to believe that if only they speak English loudly and distinctly and slowly enough, the natives will know what’s being said even though they don’t understand a single word of the language. Preachers often make the same mistake. They believe that if only they speak…

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