Sermon Central
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When I Was In High School, My Thoughts Were; To ...
Contributed by Bruce Ball on Aug 30, 2010 (message contributor)
When I was in high school, my thoughts were; to graduate, get a really good job and make lots of money and then live happily ever after. So, you can imagine what ran through my mind when I saw my ideal job being advertised in the paper. The ad read something like this:
I need one young man who is a self-starter, who has visions of making a lot of money and someone who wants to be his own boss. Call . . . . .
They were talking about me! I went down as fast as I could to secure my job. When I got there, I met a secretary that looked like she just came out of a Roger Rabbit cartoon, and after about a two-minute interview, she called her boss out to meet me. She told him that they had just found their man. Boy! I was so excited. With the snap of a finger, I had just been hired at what they said was a very prestigious company, and I was going to make lots of money because they said I had what it took.
After a one-day training seminar, I went out to sell my first vacuum cleaner door to door. I will never forget the first door I knocked on. This older lady came to the door. She must have been all of 28 to 30 years old. When she answered, I smiled and held a brush up in front of me and said, You don’t want to buy a vacuum cleaner today, do you, ma’am? She said, ""No" and shut the door.
Where did I go wrong? I had the energy and the ambition. I had the smile and just tons of charm. So, why did she shut the door? I had failed to make a sale for several reasons. I did not know my product very well, I did not know how to sell it very well, and my focus was on all the wrong reasons to sell in the first place.
There is an old saying among salespeople: Know what you are selling and be able to tell people why they need it. If I had just had that information before that first door, I might have made some money in that job. But, after selling one vacuum cleaner to my parents, the job soon lost its luster and I quit to become a janitor at a car lot where I made a whopping 52 cents an hour! And, as they say, the rest is history.
That story is true, and it reminds me so much of how we normal everyday Christian are when it comes time to evangelize. All churches tell us that we must evangelize, but how many of them explain anything about it or how to do it?
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Legend Has It That When The Famous Frontiersman ... PRO
Contributed by Bud Brown on Oct 14, 2004
Legend has it that when the famous frontiersman Davy Crockett was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1827, a newspaper reporter asked him if he’d ever been lost. Crockett had grown up in the woods and wilderness of middle and western Tennessee and was often gone out on hunting trips ...read more
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Do You Know That You Already Have The Gift Of A ...
Contributed by Kenneth Squires on Sep 30, 2005
Do you know that you already have the gift of a consuming passion for hungering and thirsting? You activate it when you surrender your life to the Spirit’s working. Billy Graham was asked, “What is the most important ...read more
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Elizabeth Elliot Tells In Her Book "Passion And ... PRO
Contributed by Lou Nicholes on Nov 9, 2004
Elizabeth Elliot tells in her book “Passion and Purity,” how on her first date with Jim Elliot (one of the five martyred missionaries in Ecuador), they went to a missionary meeting at Moody Church in Chicago, late in April. The speaker was one of the daughters of the famous missionary to Africa ...read more
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Have You Ever Noticed That Good Feeling That You ...
Contributed by Michael Trask on Jan 18, 2007
Have you ever noticed that good feeling that you get when you give of yourself? Perhaps you gave time to help someone with a flat tire on the side of the road, or perhaps you helped a lost child be reunited with his mother in a crowd, or maybe when the clerk at the store gave you too much ...read more
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The Picture Series Are Frozen Both In Time And In ... PRO
Contributed by Philip Harrelson on Jan 12, 2005
The picture series are frozen both in time and in memory. The scene unfolds from the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Two runners, one American, the other from South Africa, although of British descent. The starter’s pistol fires and around the track the runners race for the finishing line. ...read more
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