66 Sermon Illustrations on Excuses

Two of our Christian friends resigned from commitments in their churches last year and left ministry positions vacant. My husband and I tried to encourage them to find a way to continue their service, but they would not reconsider.

Once it was clear they had made their final decision, we had to let it go. But we noticed a common thread in their situations -- they sought and eventually accepted secular positions requiring them to miss church.

Because Sunday is a day set apart for worship, studying the Bible and enjoying Christian fellowship, it is unsettling to see that church attendance is losing value among Christians.

A recent Barna survey found that Christians consider themselves faithful even when they only attend church once or twice a month. According to Barna, 51 percent of Americans do not see the importance of going to church. Further proof of decline is the drop in church attendance from 43 percent in 2004 to 36 percent in 2014. The declining numbers prove Americans, and even Christians, are becoming more and more secular.

It used to be unthinkable for a Christian to miss church on Sunday unless they were homebound or hospitalized. Nowadays, skipping church has become the new normal as believers are indulging in recreation instead of worshipping Christ. They compromise Kingdom duties and replace them with work, sports, travel and other entertainment activities.

When I talk to Christians, I often hear the same responses:

* Sunday is my only day off.

* I rarely get to sleep in.

* We have tickets to the game.

* My job requires me to travel on Sundays.

* Our family is going to the lake this weekend.

* My son has a game.

The decline devastates the small church, and many of our larger churches are scrambling to combat the trend. Churches have added Friday and Saturday evening worship services to draw new, younger crowds. However, the additional services risk burning out pastors and ministry leaders already stretched to their limit. Only time will tell how effective these additional services will be in our changing church culture.

Hebrews 10:25 commands us not to neglect our times of assembly for worship but to be diligent in helping our brothers and sisters commit to regular worship attendance. Knowing that Christ’s return is imminent, we cannot forsake our duty to encourage other believers in the Lord.

We can be sure we are obeying Scripture when we do the following things to help other Christians remain faithful to the Lord:

Pray diligently

Pray for believers in your church to surrender to the Lord. A life fully surrendered can fully serve. In Matthew 16:24, Jesus teaches that we must deny ourselves, take up our own crosses and follow Him. Pray that our church members will see that no other work is as rewarding as serving Christ. Pray for God to give them zeal and passion to place Christ above everything else.

Share truthfully

Be intentional as you talk to fellow church members. If you see a lack of commitment, lovingly point them to Scripture. Offer Romans 12:2 as a warning against apathy and compromise with the world. Use 1 Corinthians 12 to help them to see they are a necessary part of the body of Christ.

Live exemplary

Be an example of humble devotion to Christ. Do not complain or make excuses for not serving when asked. Help others see the value of servanthood in the joy you display. You may be their only example of a faithful servant. Live out Matthew 6:33 in your life and people will see how God blesses you.

Only the Lord can change people’s hearts, but we know our God is faithful to keep His Word when we do what He asks us to do. If even a few believers recommit their time and talents to serving Christ, God gets the glory and the church benefits.

I don't know anyone who would go swimming in the Amazon near a school of piranhas. I mean, some things make no sense at all. Like lighting a match to see if your gas tank is empty. Or stroking a rhino to see if he's tame.

And yet there are Christians running loose today who flirt with risks far greater than any of the above. And they do so with such calm faces you'd swear they had ice water in their veins. You'd never guess they are balancing on the tightwire of disaster without a net.

Who are they? They are the ones who rewrite the Bible to accommodate their lifestyle. We've all met them. Outwardly they appear to be your basic believer, but down inside, operation rationalization transpires daily. They are experts at rephrasing or explaining away the painful truth of texts.

Here is a sampling of accommodating theology:

God wants me happy. I can't be happy married to her. So I'm leaving -- and I know He will understand.

There was a time when this might have been considered immoral. But not today. The Lord gave me this desire and wants me to enjoy it.

Look, nobody's perfect. So I got in deeper than I planned. Sure, it's a little shady, but what's grace all about, anyway?

Whenever they run across Scripture verses or principles that attack their position, they alter them to accommodate their practice. That way, two things occur: (1) all desires (no matter how wrong) are fulfilled, and (2) all guilt (no matter how justified) is erased.

That way everybody can do his own thing and nobody has any reason to question another's actions. If he does, call him a legalist and plow right on...

The consequences of sin may not come immediately -- but they will come eventually. And when they do, there will be no excuses, no rationalization, no accommodation.

The Tale Of The Tardy Oxcart

Charles R. Swindoll, Word, pp. 569-570.

EXCUSES FOR MISSING CHURCH

Why I stopped going to ball games:

1. Whenever I go to a game, they ask for money.

2. The other fans don't care about me.

3. The seats are too hard.

4. Coach never visits me.

5. The referee makes calls I don't agree with.

6. Some of the games go into overtime and make me late for dinner.

7. The band plays songs I don't know.

8. I have other things to do at game time.

9. My parents took me to too many games when I was growing up.

10. I know more than the coaches do anyway.

11. I can be just as good a fan at the lake.

12. I won't take my kids to a game either. They must choose for themselves which teams to follow.

CITATION: Mike and Amy Nappa, A Heart Like His (Barbour, 1999),

pp. 182-183.

KEYWORDS: Attitudes; Church; Church Attendance; Excuses

SCRIPTURE: Romans 12:4-5; Romans 12:10; Hebrews 10:25

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” Ali MacGraw said in the 1970 tearjerker “Love Story,” a line whose iconic status belies its lack of any discernible logic. But that was so last millennium. In 2006, a better line might be: “Apologizing means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Rarely have there been so many prominent public apologies coming so close together, saying at once so much - “That wasn’t really me, it was the booze talking, I have inner rage, I have a dark side, I’m in rehab” - and so little. So little, that is, about the actual transgression that made them necessary.

Entertainers, politicians, media figures, religious leaders. Why have public apologies become such a mainstay of our culture? It seems that the minute a transgression occurs, be it small or large, we wait for penitence. It’s the other shoe that needs to drop before we can move on.

Maybe it’s because as much as we love scandal - and we love it especially now that we can capture it on cellphone video or stream it on YouTube - we love something else even more: “Everybody,” says Ken Sunshine, a veteran publicist in both entertainment and politics, “loves a story of redemption.”

And so, a thematic look back at a year in apologies, if you can call them that:

THE “I AM NOT A (FILL IN THE BLANK)” APOLOGY. The most recent specimen: Michael Richards, aka Kramer from “Seinfeld,” who’s having an unwanted second moment in the sun with his stunning “n-word” rant. In the first of several apologies, Richards made an awkward appearance on David Letterman’s “Late Show” and explained that it was rage at being heckled that sparked his tirade: “I’m not racist - that’s what’s so insane about this.” (His publicist said he also planned a personal apology to the men he targeted.)

Was it effective? “There’s a piece of it that doesn’t fit for me,” says Jerry Deffenbacher, a psychology professor at Colorado State University who studies rage. “It’s not unusual for a comic to be heckled. I would want to know more about his impulse control history.”

Impulse control was clearly a problem for a much bigger star - Mel Gibson - on the July night when he was pulled over for drunken driving and spewed anti-Semitic comments at the arresting officer.

“Please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite,” Gibson said in a statement soon after the incident. “I am not a bigot.” Jewish leaders said the healing would take work. “Anti-Semitism is not born in one day and cannot be cured in one day and certainly not through the issuing of a press release,” noted Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

For cultural critic Roger Rosenblatt, the whole apology business is just that - a business. “It’s basically the way you get on with your career,” says Rosenblatt, an author and essayist at Time magazine. “It wouldn’t be made - or publicly received - if there weren’t some tacit understanding that this is what you do in order to keep earning a living.” Which means that those who accept the apology - the public, in other words - are part of the deal.

IT WAS THE (FILL IN THE SUBSTANCE) TALKING: Gibson fits in here too. Diane Sawyer eventually got the big interview, and the movie star blamed his problems on alcohol: “Once you’re loaded, you know, the balance of how you see things - it comes out the wrong way.” The claim led experts to debate whether booze could actually change one’s social beliefs. In any case, Gibson is hardly the only figure this year to attribute his troubles to alcohol.

Rep. Mark Foley, the Florida congressman forced to resign over his sexually explicit computer messages to congressional pages, never made a public apology himself, but through attorneys announced he had alcohol problems (some colleagues were skeptical), was gay, and had been abused by a priest as a teenager. He recently finished about a month in treatment for alcoholism.

Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio resigned late this year after pleading guilty in the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling investigation. Apologizing in September, he said he’d checked into an alcohol-abuse program.

And Rep. Patrick Kennedy entered rehab for addiction to prescription pain drugs in May after a nighttime car crash that he claimed not to remember. The Rhode Island Democrat was re-elected easily in November.

THE “I HAVE A DARK SIDE” APOLOGY. “There’s a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life,” the Rev. Ted Haggard wrote his congregation in November amid allegations he consorted with a gay prostitute and snorted meth.

The former president of the National Association of Evangelicals is now on a course of rehab - which is a common denominator of virtually all the prominent apologies this year.

“When in doubt, go to rehab or find God,” says Sunshine.

For one analyst of popular culture, it’s a measure of the “therapeutic culture” that we live in. “It’s like a huge moving conveyor belt. Once you declare yourself to be a client of our therapeutic culture, we say, ‘OK great! Welcome aboard,’” says Jerry Herron, professor at Wayne State University. “Somewhere, there will be a sofa waiting for you.” (It could be Oprah’s couch - remember author James Frey? - or Letterman’s, or Don Imus’ studio - remember Sen. John Kerry’s regrettably botched joke involving the Iraq war?)

One of the many problems with that approach, says Herron, is that it becomes all about one individual’s recovery - not the larger problem. Whatever the Michael Richards flap reveals about the actor, he notes, it probably says something important about latent racism in our society decades after the civil rights movement. And yet, he says, we’ll never talk about that bigger issue: “It’s all about him.”

In this very sorry year, even the pope has been called upon to apologize, for comments seen by Muslims as offensive to Islam. While not making a full-scale apology, Benedict XVI has expressed regret for offending Muslims and said the remarks did not reflect his personal views.

Herron, of Wayne State, looks back to the 19th century for a lesson on how to do an apology right in America. Grover Cleveland, running for president in 1884, was faced with accusations that he’d fathered a child out of wedlock; the bachelor acknowledged right away that he’d had a relationship with the woman and said he’d support the child even though he had no idea if it was his (this was pre-DNA testing.) He won the election.

Whoever was doing Cleveland’s PR, Sunshine, the publicist, approves. The important lessons to remember for a successful public redemption, he says, are to come clean and be honest. Don’t spin a lot of baloney. Don’t pretend to be a saint. And don’t go expecting a “quick fix” - that doesn’t work anymore in our crime-and-punishment obsessed world.

Oh, and one more thing, something our mothers told us:

“Don’t ever do it again.”

Two of our Christian friends resigned from commitments in their churches last year and left ministry positions vacant. My husband and I tried to encourage them to find a way to continue their service, but they would not reconsider.

Once it was clear they had made their final decision, we had to let it go. But we noticed a common thread in their situations -- they sought and eventually accepted secular positions requiring them to miss church.

Because Sunday is a day set apart for worship, studying the Bible and enjoying Christian fellowship, it is unsettling to see that church attendance is losing value among Christians.

A recent Barna survey found that Christians consider themselves faithful even when they only attend church once or twice a month. According to Barna, 51 percent of Americans do not see the importance of going to church. Further proof of decline is the drop in church attendance from 43 percent in 2004 to 36 percent in 2014. The declining numbers prove Americans, and even Christians, are becoming more and more secular.

It used to be unthinkable for a Christian to miss church on Sunday unless they were homebound or hospitalized. Nowadays, skipping church has become the new normal as believers are indulging in recreation instead of worshipping Christ. They compromise Kingdom duties and replace them with work, sports, travel and other entertainment activities.

When I talk to Christians, I often hear the same responses:

* Sunday is my only day off.

* I rarely get to sleep in.

* We have tickets to the game.

* My job requires me to travel on Sundays.

* Our family is going to the lake this weekend.

* My son has a game.

The decline devastates the small church, and many of our larger churches are scrambling to combat the trend. Churches have added Friday and Saturday evening worship services to draw new, younger crowds. However, the additional services risk burning out pastors and ministry leaders already stretched to their limit. Only time will tell how effective these additional services will be in our changing church culture.

Hebrews 10:25 commands us not to neglect our times of assembly for worship but to be diligent in helping our brothers and sisters commit to regular worship attendance. Knowing that Christ’s return is imminent, we cannot forsake our duty to encourage other believers in the Lord.

We can be sure we are obeying Scripture when we do the following things to help other Christians remain faithful to the Lord:

Pray diligently

Pray for believers in your church to surrender to the Lord. A life fully surrendered can fully serve. In Matthew 16:24, Jesus teaches that we must deny ourselves, take up our own crosses and follow Him. Pray that our church members will see that no other work is as rewarding as serving Christ. Pray for God to give them zeal and passion to place Christ above everything else.

Share truthfully

Be intentional as you talk to fellow church members. If you see a lack of commitment, lovingly point them to Scripture. Offer Romans 12:2 as a warning against apathy and compromise with the world. Use 1 Corinthians 12 to help them to see they are a necessary part of the body of Christ.

Live exemplary

Be an example of humble devotion to Christ. Do not complain or make excuses for not serving when asked. Help others see the value of servanthood in the joy you display. You may be their only example of a faithful servant. Live out Matthew 6:33 in your life and people will see how God blesses you.

Only the Lord can change people’s hearts, but we know our God is faithful to keep His Word when we do what He asks us to do. If even a few believers recommit their time and talents to serving Christ, God gets the glory and the church benefits.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, in business we often try other strategies with dead horses, including the following:

1. Buying a stronger whip.

2. Changing riders.

3. Saying things like “This is the way we have always ridden this horse.”

4. Appointing a committee to study the horse.

5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.

6. Creating a training session to increase our riding ability.

7. Changing the requirements that we can declare “This horse is not really dead.”

8. Hiring contractors to ride the dead horse.

9. Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed.

10. Declaring that “No horse is too dead to beat.”

11. Providing additional funding to increase the horse’s performance.

12. Purchasing a product to make dead horses run faster.

13. Declaring that the horse is “better, faster and cheaper” dead.

14. Forming a quality circle to find uses for dead horses.

15. Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position.

Small ministries often make the greatest difference. The most important light in my home is not the large chandelier in our dining room, but the little night light that keeps me from stubbing my toe when I get up to use the bathroom at night. It’s small, but it’s more useful to me than the show-off light. (My wife says that my favorite light is the one that comes on when I open the refrigerator!). (Rick Warren, Mission Viejo, CA)

We teach our children to sing “This Little Light of Mine” but are we willing to be a light ourselves? In our ministries we do not have to be a Bill Hybels, Billy Graham, or a Bob Russell. We just have to be a light to the world. (Matthew5:14) It doesn’t matter if you are a chandelier, a porch light, or a night light. What matters is that you GO LIGHT YOUR WORLD!!

________

Submitted by Jeff Condray

Lee Taylor, a white supremacist who belonged to an Aryan Nation gang, was executed in Texas by lethal injection in 2011. While he was in prison he had fatally stabbed a black prisoner multiple times with an 8-inch shank (home-made knife). When given an opportunity to say his last words, he said:

“Mom, I love you. For all of you people, I defended myself when I killed your family member. Prison is a bad place. There was eight against me.

I didn’t set out to kill him. I am sorry that I killed him, but he would not have been in prison if he was a saint...

Texas is carrying out a very inhumane injustice. It’s not right to kill anybody just because I killed your people. Everyone changes, right? Life is about experience and people change... I hope you don’t find satisfaction in this, watching a human being die.”

Mr. Taylor obviously felt his execution was unfair. But was it unjust? He brings up self-defense, lack of premeditation, remorse - plus a dig at the deceased. The gospel of Jesus says change, eternal change, is certainly possible. But what is possible does not always become reality. It is important for us to repent while we still have time. As God revealed to the prophet Ezekiel (18:23):

"Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?"

________

Material drawn from "The last testimony: The final words of Texas death row prisoners," by Clare Dwyer Hogg, October 15, 2001, , and the Texas Execution Information Center, .

“Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” Ali MacGraw said in the 1970 tearjerker “Love Story,” a line whose iconic status belies its lack of any discernible logic. But that was so last millennium. In 2006, a better line might be: “Apologizing means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Rarely have there been so many prominent public apologies coming so close together, saying at once so much - “That wasn’t really me, it was the booze talking, I have inner rage, I have a dark side, I’m in rehab” - and so little. So little, that is, about the actual transgression that made them necessary.

Entertainers, politicians, media figures, religious leaders. Why have public apologies become such a mainstay of our culture? It seems that the minute a transgression occurs, be it small or large, we wait for penitence. It’s the other shoe that needs to drop before we can move on.

Maybe it’s because as much as we love scandal - and we love it especially now that we can capture it on cellphone video or stream it on YouTube - we love something else even more: “Everybody,” says Ken Sunshine, a veteran publicist in both entertainment and politics, “loves a story of redemption.”

And so, a thematic look back at a year in apologies, if you can call them that:

THE “I AM NOT A (FILL IN THE BLANK)” APOLOGY. The most recent specimen: Michael Richards, aka Kramer from “Seinfeld,” who’s having an unwanted second moment in the sun with his stunning “n-word” rant. In the first of several apologies, Richards made an awkward appearance on David Letterman’s “Late Show” and explained that it was rage at being heckled that sparked his tirade: “I’m not racist - that’s what’s so insane about this.” (His publicist said he also planned a personal apology to the men he targeted.)

Was it effective? “There’s a piece of it that doesn’t fit for me,” says Jerry Deffenbacher, a psychology professor at Colorado State University who studies rage. “It’s not unusual for a comic to be heckled. I would want to know more about his impulse control history.”

Impulse control was clearly a problem for a much bigger star - Mel Gibson - on the July night when he was pulled over for drunken driving and spewed anti-Semitic comments at the arresting officer.

“Please know from my heart that I am not an anti-Semite,” Gibson said in a statement soon after the incident. “I am not a bigot.” Jewish leaders said the healing would take work. “Anti-Semitism is not born in one day and cannot be cured in one day and certainly not through the issuing of a press release,” noted Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.

For cultural critic Roger Rosenblatt, the whole apology business is just that - a business. “It’s basically the way you get on with your career,” says Rosenblatt, an author and essayist at Time magazine. “It wouldn’t be made - or publicly received - if there weren’t some tacit understanding that this is what you do in order to keep earning a living.” Which means that those who accept the apology - the public, in other words - are part of the deal.

IT WAS THE (FILL IN THE SUBSTANCE) TALKING: Gibson fits in here too. Diane Sawyer eventually got the big interview, and the movie star blamed his problems on alcohol: “Once you’re loaded, you know, the balance of how you see things - it comes out the wrong way.” The claim led experts to debate whether booze could actually change one’s social beliefs. In any case, Gibson is hardly the only figure this year to attribute his troubles to alcohol.

Rep. Mark Foley, the Florida congressman forced to resign over his sexually explicit computer messages to congressional pages, never made a public apology himself, but through attorneys announced he had alcohol problems (some colleagues were skeptical), was gay, and had been abused by a priest as a teenager. He recently finished about a month in treatment for alcoholism.

Rep. Bob Ney of Ohio resigned late this year after pleading guilty in the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling investigation. Apologizing in September, he said he’d checked into an alcohol-abuse program.

And Rep. Patrick Kennedy entered rehab for addiction to prescription pain drugs in May after a nighttime car crash that he claimed not to remember. The Rhode Island Democrat was re-elected easily in November.

THE “I HAVE A DARK SIDE” APOLOGY. “There’s a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring against it for all of my adult life,” the Rev. Ted Haggard wrote his congregation in November amid allegations he consorted with a gay prostitute and snorted meth.

The former president of the National Association of Evangelicals is now on a course of rehab - which is a common denominator of virtually all the prominent apologies this year.

“When in doubt, go to rehab or find God,” says Sunshine.

For one analyst of popular culture, it’s a measure of the “therapeutic culture” that we live in. “It’s like a huge moving conveyor belt. Once you declare yourself to be a client of our therapeutic culture, we say, ‘OK great! Welcome aboard,’” says Jerry Herron, professor at Wayne State University. “Somewhere, there will be a sofa waiting for you.” (It could be Oprah’s couch - remember author James Frey? - or Letterman’s, or Don Imus’ studio - remember Sen. John Kerry’s regrettably botched joke involving the Iraq war?)

One of the many problems with that approach, says Herron, is that it becomes all about one individual’s recovery - not the larger problem. Whatever the Michael Richards flap reveals about the actor, he notes, it probably says something important about latent racism in our society decades after the civil rights movement. And yet, he says, we’ll never talk about that bigger issue: “It’s all about him.”

In this very sorry year, even the pope has been called upon to apologize, for comments seen by Muslims as offensive to Islam. While not making a full-scale apology, Benedict XVI has expressed regret for offending Muslims and said the remarks did not reflect his personal views.

Herron, of Wayne State, looks back to the 19th century for a lesson on how to do an apology right in America. Grover Cleveland, running for president in 1884, was faced with accusations that he’d fathered a child out of wedlock; the bachelor acknowledged right away that he’d had a relationship with the woman and said he’d support the child even though he had no idea if it was his (this was pre-DNA testing.) He won the election.

Whoever was doing Cleveland’s PR, Sunshine, the publicist, approves. The important lessons to remember for a successful public redemption, he says, are to come clean and be honest. Don’t spin a lot of baloney. Don’t pretend to be a saint. And don’t go expecting a “quick fix” - that doesn’t work anymore in our crime-and-punishment obsessed world.

Oh, and one more thing, something our mothers told us:

“Don’t ever do it again.”