God made our brains with great wisdom 🧠. They are carefully designed to help us live and make decisions. One way this design shows is through shortcuts in thinking. This is called heuristics.
These shortcuts let us act quickly ⚡ without stopping to think through every single detail.
In the right situation, these shortcuts are a gift ✅. Long ago they helped people decide fast — whether to run from danger, trust a friend, or follow a leader. But when these same shortcuts get used in the wrong place, they turn into biases ⚠️. That’s when our brain starts making mistakes.
Take confirmation bias for example. This comes from the shortcut “trust the people and ideas you already know.” In the past, it kept tribes close and safe. But today it can make us only listen to what we already agree with, even if it isn’t true.
That’s why people sometimes keep following false preachers — not because the message is true, but because it feels familiar and fits what they already want to hear.
Our brains are not faulty — they are simply using good patterns in the wrong way.
And this is where the preacher of truth has a real challenge: to do two things at once.
First, to break through the biases that keep people from hearing👂.
And second, to understand those same patterns, so the truth can be spoken in a way people can grasp ✨.
1. Speak Through Story: The Parable Technique
Jesus used parables as cognitive bypasses 📖 - they slipped past people's mental defenses because they seemed like simple stories. The brilliance was in their delayed revelation . Many of His parables were specifically about the Kingdom of Heaven👑 because the people’s minds were biased toward expecting a political Messiah who would overthrow Rome. Through stories, Jesus gently shifted their imagination from political freedom to God’s larger plan for the redemption of mankind.
People would nod along with a story about a farmer or a wedding, only to realize later that Jesus was talking about them.
The Parable of the Good Samaritan demonstrates this technique:
* The audience expected the hero to be the priest or Levite (their religious leaders)
* Jesus made the despised Samaritan the hero
* By the time they realized the point, they were already emotionally invested in the "wrong" character
* The question "Which was a neighbor?" forced them to voice what they'd unconsciously accepted
The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard challenged their merit-based thinking:
* Started with a familiar employment scenario
* Gradually revealed God's grace operates differently than human fairness
* By story's end, they're questioning their assumptions about who "deserves" God's blessing
Take this modern parable:
A couple went out to dinner for their anniversary 🍽️. The husband was very polite to the waitress: “Thank you so much for the nice seat!” He was patient when the service was slow: “No worries at all!” He was understanding when his order came out wrong: “These things happen!”
But when his wife mentioned she’d had a hard day with the kids, he checked his phone 📱. When she tried to share something that excited her, he looked around the restaurant. When she suggested they should do this more often, he said, “If we could afford it” — even though he had just left a generous tip for the stranger serving their food 💵.
The waitress walked away thinking, “What a kind man.” His wife drove home thinking, “He’s nicer to people he’ll never see again than he is to me.”
The story makes us stop and reflect: Why do we so often choose kindness for strangers but not for the people we claim to love most ❓
That’s a cognitive bypass at work. Instead of me standing in the pulpit saying, “We often treat strangers better than family,” which might trigger defensiveness, the story slips past our mental shortcuts. It bypasses the bias of self-justification and lets us see the truth for ourselves.
The goal is to help our audience see clearly ✅ - and once they see clearly, the Spirit can do the work of transformation ✨ that no amount of direct argument could accomplish.
Try This in Your Sermon Prep ✍️
As you prepare your next preaching, try this simple exercise:
1️⃣ List the problem statements you want to highlight in single sentences. (For ex: We don’t prioritize God. We are slow to obey.)
2️⃣ List common incidents your audience experiences. (For ex: Morning rush)
3️⃣ Think of a story that can let people see themselves in the problem 📖
💡 Allow it to simmer in your mind. Be observant in everyday life 👀. Notice the stories hidden in ordinary moments. This practice will not only enrich your sermons but also train you to see God’s truth at work in the world around you 🌍.
In Part 3, we’ll look at another of Jesus’s methods: how He used contrast with the familiar (“You have heard it said… but I say to you”) to break through old thinking and anchor people in God’s truth.
