One of my heroes is Eric Liddell. And it’s not because he won an Olympic gold medal.
No, Eric is one of my heroes because of what defined his life…and it certainly wasn’t a 47.6 second race that defined him.
Eric’s life was characterized by one thing — his lifelong passion to be God’s man first of all.
And in the process, he became Britain’s man of the hour, and China’s too.
There is so much I admire in his life, but one thing I especially appreciated was how he prepared before public speaking.
Duncan Hamilton explains Eric’s process in his biography of Liddell, For the Glory: The Untold and Inspiring Story of Eric Liddell, Hero of Chariots of Fire:
The way he said things was as important as what he said. The messages he delivered were uncomplicated. His methodology in preparing sermons never changed. While hours were spent thinking about the content of them, Liddell didn’t write out rigid compositions. Having sat through countless formal sermons, he realized that prepared speeches could be stultifyingly dull for listener and reader alike.
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He preferred to make bullet-point notes in black ink and then speak extemporaneously. If a flare of fresh thought suddenly occurred as he spoke, Liddell could then incorporate it naturally into the text without disrupting his overall flow.
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He liked to weave his sermons in between everyday happenings, his own experiences or what he saw around him, such as an item in a newspaper, an overheard conversation, or a scene he’d witnessed in a street. This, he believed, was always more relevant to people’s lives than quoting the good book to them from the start. It was like stitching together a contemporary fable, the moral of which was always close to home. However circuitous his route to the crux of it, Liddell got there with a biblical passage.
Therein lies the secret to being an effective communicator.
Eric spoke from the heart….to hearts.
A message from the head reaches only the head.
A message from the heart impacts the heart.
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