Still, there should be some way of making our message more easily transferable. “Let go and let God” is easy to remember, but it doesn’t help much when your child’s become a prodigal or the doctor says it’s cancer. We found that platitudes often lose their meaning when faced with real life situations - especially hardships. Many of us have experienced preaching filled with platitudes that were memorable but left us feeling somewhat empty. It’s difficult to be “sticky” without becoming reductionistic and squashing all the mystery out of the gospel. So far, most of our explanations of it are too complex and too nuanced to be sticky. The problem I’ve found is that a bigger gospel is hard to encapsulate in a simple idea that will stick.įor those of us who want to articulate the whole gospel in a fresh way this is a challenge. I’ve preached a bunch of sermons about how big the gospel is and how far ranging are God’s intentions with it. 1 Cross+3 Nails=4 Given.Ī number of people have pointed out to us that the gospel is about much more than getting our sins forgiven so that we can stay out of hell. That’s a sticky idea that is easy to summarize on a bumper sticker. For many Christians, the gospel can be stated in a simple and memorable way: Jesus died on the cross to forgive you of your sins so that you can go to heaven when you die.

Let’s think about this principle with the gospel in mind.

This tendency to gravitate toward complexity is perpetually at war with the need to prioritize.” They see nuance, multiple perspectives–and because they fully appreciate the complexities of a situation, they’re often tempted to linger there. Smart people recognize the value of all the material. “Forced prioritization is really painful. A designer of simple ideas should aspire to the same goal: knowing how much can be wrung out of an idea before it begins to lose its essence.” The hard part is weeding out ideas that may be really important but just aren’t the most important idea. “To get to the core, we’ve got to weed out superfluous and tangential elements. If I say it all, I end up saying nothing. Something inside of me needs to say it all. There is always so much that can be said about any given text or topic and I want to say it all. This is one of the hardest things for me in preaching. They write, “How do we find the essential core of our ideas? To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. In Made to Stick, the Heath brothers unpack six principles that make an idea sticky.

Heath brothers made to stick