The Sermon Story

  Powerful wisdom stories about experience, compassion, freedom, failure, overconfidence and the scars of life—offering timeless lessons on how to live more wisely. Experience Without Growth Is Just Repetition Two teachers were once applying for the same Vice-Principal position at  a local high school. One had been teaching a total of 8 years and the other a total of 20. Everyone expected the teacher with the greater experience to get the job, but when a decision was made it was the person with 8 years teaching who was chosen.  The teacher overlooked for the job complained bitterly – “I’ve got 20 years teaching to her 8” he cried. “I’m vastly more qualified.” The School Board’s reply went like this: “Yes sir, you do have 20 years teaching to her 8, but where she has 8 years experience you have 1 years experience repeated 20 times.” Simply experiencing the passage of time doesn’t mean we have grown or learned from those things we experience during that time. Source...

  Powerful Christian witness stories about faith, love, forgiveness, courage, evangelism, suffering, and the true mission of the Church—real stories that challenge how Christians live and share the Gospel. When Faith Became a Refuge for the Hunted There are two things, it has often been said, that human beings cannot gaze at directly without going mad – the glory of God and the darkness of human evil. After years of studying human cruelty, Philip Hallie, professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University and a veteran of World War II, must have felt close to madness. Working on a project on Nazi cruelty, he focused on the medical experiments Nazi doctors conducted on Jewish children in the death camps. “Across all these studies,” Hallie wrote later, “the pattern of the strong crushing the weak kept repeating itself and repeating itself, so that when I was not bitterly angry, I was bored at the repetitions of the patterns of persecution…. My study of evil incarnate had become a pr...