Alexander Graham Bell’s grandfather developed a strategy to cure stuttering. His father wrote books on speech patterns. Bell himself studied the human ear. When he called his associate from another room by an electric pulse through a wire, creating the phone, he revolutionized verbal communication.
Professional inventors dismissed his efforts. He couldn’t succeed they claimed, because he had no background in electricity. And Western Union refused to buy his invention for $100,000. Life History of the United States, Vol. 7, p. 40 His story has spiritual applications. First, sounds, words, talk and speech remain the means that humans alone have when communicating orders, ideas, impressions and convictions. Sorry only that we spend so much time with idle chatter. Some of us complain of an information overload when writing lessons or preparing messages. Then we remember what a fellow student told this writer. He had worked hard developing a message for a preaching engagement. He preached so well that the people wanted him to speak that night. Terrified at his lack of depth, he spent all Sunday afternoon scraping bits of information gleaned and remembered from classes. He regretted the lack of depth. He had sufficient information for one pump at the well—which then went dry. (Thanks to Don Wortman for this story.) To this day, many preachers needlessly fill the air with what Bro. Charles Mills called “sweet air.” The moral is: complain only if we have to struggle to find ideas to preach. And complain if we preach only from an overflow of information in our minds. God’s people deserve the depths of a preacher’s thoughts, not merely froth from the top. End Part I
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