Illustration-a-day: Jesus gives bad advice

"Mr. Hayes was a churchgoer (indeed, a deacon), but he considered his religion a civic duty, a moral discipline, a social obligation, and (he was honest) a business asset. . . . Hayes was a Christian, but if the truth be known, Christ irritated him to death.  With the army in Freiburg, Germany, in 1959, he'd read the Gospels while cooped up in the infirmary, and he'd argued by pencil in the margins against the Savior.  In his personal opinion, Christ's advice sounded like civic sabotage, moral lunacy, social anarchy, and business disaster."

Michael Malone, Handling Sin, as quoted in Frank G. Honeycutt's, Preaching for Adult Conversion

Illustration-a-day: The two reasons people don't believe in the resurrection

Wolfhart Pannenberg, one of the leading theologians of our day, explains, “The evidence for Jesus' resurrection is so strong that nobody would question it except for two things: First, it is a very unusual event. And second, if you believe it happened, you have to change the way you live.”