Flesh—the principle of connecting through identification.

Having established that what I'm sharing is biblical, the next step builds on that skeleton to flesh and connect these truths with the lives before me. How do I take something from an ancient text and share its significance with someone who just walked in off the street with major life issues? What does the story of King David have to do with Bob in the second row who just found out his family will have no income for the next month? How does the conversion of Saul impact the life of Sue who found out she has a life-threatening illness at such a young age? Or perhaps on a more tangible note, is there something in my own journey with God that will help flesh out a little color and texture on top of the bones of the Scripture?

What I've found is that teaching principles that people write down on paper is one thing, but giving them veracious examples of what it means to live out the treacherous words of God is a completely separate issue. Why do I want someone writing down the outline of my sermon when they can be paying attention to God with their hearts? So I take it a high calling to give whatever illustration I can of biblical truth and context along with more current testimonies and stories of local and foreign Jesus Freaks in action.

Clothes—the principle of connecting through adorning (re)engagement.

Who says I need three points? Can't I just have one? Or 50? Or half of one? Or none? After all, is it my job to give a pointed talk or to point people to Jesus? Isn't He the one who does all the conversion work anyway? Do I really need an introduction and a closing story, or can I just jump into the Scripture and leave them there with God?

When preaching to students, this connecting process is probably even more important than when preaching to adults. So much clamors for their attention, so we should take the time and energy to engage kids creatively with the truths of Scriputre. Why not grab an everyday object and weave your message around it? Or go Seinfeld and have four things happening at once that somehow all get connected in the end. It's not so much about being flashy, but it is important to make the intangible describable.

This needs to come all throughout the message—not just in one place. It may be that we engage with a lot of noise and then reengage the students five minutes later with strategic silence. Perhaps this is a time when we push the envelope at Christmas and bring live animals in to the room to walk free while we teach, all while the smell of actual animal feces lingers in the air (because you put a huge pile of it in a bucket by the door through which everyone has to walk). Or give each person a bag of items and instruct them to wait to open it until the time is right.

In any event, all of this is designed to give people another reason to engage God. Some churches pursue this last stage as their most important one, foregoing any biblical skeleton for the sake of being flashy. Others, however, stop at the skeleton stage and never move on to the latter two, stifling the life contained within God's Word. I believe each one builds on the last in the same sense that you can't have clothes on without flesh, which of course needs a skeleton to encompass. Instead of relying on what we learned in class to preach a sermon the "right way," how about having our talks be the strongest boned, muscular built, dressed up they can be?

That includes Sunday School, too.