Be honest, sometimes you find yourself trying to make a text do something it doesn’t do.  Perhaps you have an illustration you want to use, or a visual aid that would be powerful, or some other motivation.  But when it comes to the text, it doesn’t quite work.  You know the order is backwards, you know you don’t want to admit it, but we’re being honest here.

This happened to me last week.  I’m not one for creative visual aids, but one came to mind.  One that would be perfect and impressive and effective and so on.  But then I went back to the only real text that would work with that visual aid.  It didn’t work.  I was trying to conform the text to the sermon, rather than derive the sermon from the text.  The text wasn’t boss, and I wasn’t happy.

But I felt that the integrity move at that point was to drop the illustration and switch texts.  Let’s be preachers of integrity, people who represent the text well and don’t injure the text trying to fit it into our sermon box.