The World and Everything in It: August 13, 2025

Editor's note: The following text is a transcript of a podcast story. To listen to the story, click on the arrow beneath the headline above.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Good morning!

Today, risking socialism in New York, drawing lines in Texas and cracking down on crime in D.C., can that work?

AUDIO: We don't want to be left holding the bag when 1000 National Guardsmen and 500 Federal officers move on.

NICK EICHER, HOST: That’s all ahead on Washington Wednesday with Hunter Baker.

Also today World Tour, an update on the fight against social media censorship in Australia.

And speaking of social media, a different kind of fight: the fight for your kids’ attention.

MAST: It’s Wednesday, August 13th. This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Lindsay Mast.

EICHER: And I’m Nick Eicher. Good morning!

MAST: Up next, Kent Covington with today’s news.

KENT COVINGTON, NEWS ANCHOR: Washington D.C. policing » Federal authorities have wasted no time taking charge in Washington, D.C.

Today will mark the second full day since President Trump declared a public safety emergency in the nation’s capital and placed D.C. Metro Police under federal control.

Attorney General Pam Bondi told federal agents overseeing the effort:

BONDI:  We're a team. We're in this together. This is our home, all of our homes, and we're here to make it safer and thank you for what you do for our country.

Metro police now report through the Justice Dept chain of command.

And nearly 900 federal law enforcement officers from the FBI, DEA and other agencies were embedded into citywide operations.

DEA Administrator and Acting D.C. Police Chief Terry Cole says so far:

COLE:  We've had 60 arrests that are very impactful. Mm-hmm. We've taken 17 firearms off the streets.

Hundreds of National Guardsmen are also serving in a support role.

Democratic D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has criticized the takeover as unnecessary

Ukraine-Russia » The State Department says Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov spoke this week in preparation for President Trump's face-to-face summit with Vladimir Putin.

The two leaders are set to meet Anchorage, Alaska on Friday to discuss what it would take to end the war in Ukraine.

State Dept. spokeswoman Tammy Bruce:

BRUCE:  The president's not calling this a negotiation. Uh, he is not the one, uh, that asked for it. This is what, as I've equated to you before, his remarks were that this is to see what's happening. See what's possible.

The White House is calling the summit a—quote—“listening exercise.” Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt:

LEAVITT: Sitting face to face rather than speaking over the telephone will give this president the best indication of how to end this war and where this is headed.

This week,  President Trump indicated a land swap between Russia and Ukraine may be required to end the war.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said his government will not cede territory to Russian invaders. And he adds that even if he were so inclined, Ukraine’s constitution forbids it.

Netanyahu Iran water offer » Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is hoping an ongoing drought in Iran will give the Iranian people one more reason to oust the Islamic regime.

In a video message Netanyahu extended this offer to the people of Iran: Reject the radical rulers, and Israel will show you how to gather fresh drinking water.

NETANYAHU: The moment your country is free, Israel's top water experts will flood into every Iranian city bringing cutting edge technology and know-how. We will help Iran recycle water. We will help Iran desalinate water.

Over the weekend Iran's president warned that parts of the Islamic republic… are facing a serious water crisis.

Bureau of Labor Statistics nominee  » President Trump has named his choice for the new head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after firing the last one. WORLD’s Benjamin Eicher has more.

BENJAMIN EICHER: Trump has tapped Heritage Foundation economist, E.J. Antoni to lead the bureau, which produces the government’s monthly jobs reports.

The president fired the previous BLS Commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, earlier this month … who was picked for the job by former president Joe Biden.

Trump accused her of rigging the latest unemployment figures for political reasons … after a weaker than expected jobs report.

E.J. Antoni has been a defender of many of the Trump administration's economic policies and signaled support for the dismissal of McEntarfer.

Antoni will need Senate confirmation.

For WORLD, I’m Benjamin Eicher.

Inflation numbers » The Bureau of Labor Statistics also releases inflation reports. And it reported on Tuesday that consumer prices held steady in July, overall.

Prices rose 2.7%, the same as the month before.

President Trump’s top economic adviser Stephen Miran says the numbers continue to defy predictions by many that Trump’s tariffs would fuel inflation.

MIRAN:  Consumer price inflation is running at a 1.9% annualized rate since the president took office, and that's an example of the effects of the president's profoundly disinflationary policies of deregulation, border control, energy abundance, and tax incentives to boost capital stock.

However, Tuesday’s inflation report did show so-called core inflation coming in hotter than expected. Core inflation excludes more volatile sectors like food and energy and that number rose from 2.7 to 3.1% in July.

Still, the overall number slightly beat expectations, raising hopes of a Fed interest rate cut soon. And that fueled a surge on Wall Street.

I'm Kent Covington.

Straight ahead: more on the federalization of policing in the nation’s capital. Plus, learning to unplug in our screen-saturated world.

This is The World and Everything in It.

NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday the 13th of August.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Time now for Washington Wednesday. Joining us now … political scientist and WORLD Opinions Commentator Hunter Baker.

Hunter, good morning.

HUNTER BAKER: Good morning.

MAST: Hunter, on Monday, President Trump declared a public safety emergency in the District of Columbia over violent crime in Washington. This comes after a DOGE staffer was attacked during an attempted carjacking. The President is mobilizing the National Guard of D.C. to clean up the streets.

Let’s talk first about crime in D.C. There is some dispute over how to read the crime statistics, and whether they show violent crime going up or down. It seems like it would help to define some terms…What factors should we consider when seeing numbers and trends thrown around to support various arguments about crime?

BAKER: Well, there are going to be periods where you can point to a higher crime rate, for example, when we were at the peak use of crack cocaine or something like that, maybe in the 90s, that’s going to be worse than right now. But I think that if you were to look comparatively across cities, my understanding is, is that crime in D.C., maybe homicides, is significantly worse than New York City, and New York City is not known to be the most peaceful place in the world. So if you’re much worse than New York City, then that is not good. So I think that you cannot have the seat of government threatened by crime and chaos.

So generally speaking, it makes a certain amount of sense for Congress and or the president to exert some of this authority to try to settle things down.

EICHER: Hunter, 20 years ago … the D.C. metro police department had a homicide reduction plan with federal agents working alongside D.C. police … and there’s some evidence of success. So maybe it could work … and the D.C. Police Union said it welcomes the help. Here’s the union leader Gregg Pemberton. This audio is from News Nation:

PEMBERTON: I think the concern that we have from the rank and file is that we know is temporary. This, this authority that Trump invoked, is only valid for 30 days, and at the end of that 30 days, as you mentioned in the intro, has has to be established by Congress if it wants to go any further than that. So you know, we don't want to be left holding the bag when 1000 National Guardsmen and 500 Federal officers move on, and now we're here…

So Hunter, I’m curious about the politics of this. Are the politics such that Trump's action will create sufficient public pressure that Congress will have to go along and extend that authority? Or do you think that Pemberton has a point and has something really to be concerned about, that the 30 days come and go and then they’re back to this unacceptable status quo? What do you say?

BAKER: D.C. was governed by a special board up until, I guess maybe the beginning of the 1970s, and the history since then has not been great from any number of angles. It’s within relatively recent memory that the federal government had to take control of D.C.’s finances because of problems in the city’s fiscal management, and now we have this move to intercede because of crime.

I would argue that it might be worth thinking about going back to a higher level of supervision. I actually think that that would make sense, given the stakes of the business that has to be conducted in D.C.

MAST: Well Hunter, if the Texas Democrats quorum break was a Netflix show, I’d be binge watching to see what happens next…dozens of lawmakers are still refusing to return to their posts, and Texas governor Greg Abbott has asked the State Supreme Court to find the lawmakers’ seats vacated. President Trump got in on the action suggesting he’ll send out the FBI to track down the missing members.

Hunter, what do you expect to see in the finale of this situation? And is there more to the series, say a spin-off in California?

BAKER: Well, so this kind of thing has happened before. I think this is the third time in Texas within the past 20 years or so, and that comes with Republican domination of the state where Democrats really have no chance of gaining power in the legislature. And so when you’re deeply, deeply in the minority, walking out and busting the quorum is just about all you can do. Now, on the one hand, it’s understandable, maybe as a way to draw attention to their situation, maybe to punish the Republicans for doing something unusual, like redistricting in the middle of a 10-year cycle, but only—ultimately, they really don’t have a way to win this.

Ultimately, I think what history suggests is enough of them will drift back into the state, one way or the other, and the Republicans are going to prevail.

EICHER: Hunter, this has happened before with Texas Democrats, when Republicans were working on election security and redistricting. Democratic lawmakers ran away over a voting law proposed in 2021. Not only did they run away to try to stop it or at least slow it down, but there were also lawsuits, and those take a lot longer than walkouts do. So going back to 2021, the voting law that was passed in Texas—suit was filed against that, and it has wound its way through the courts over the last several years.

Finally it got to the point of just one step below the Supreme Court, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. We got a decision there over the last couple of days, and that law was upheld as constitutional.

BAKER: That’s right. They’re going to tighten up the mail voting requirements, and they’re also going to have stronger voter ID requirements. Now, I think that in most places, this would not be that controversial. The problem is, is that we have the civil rights history that the United States has. And so there were major abuses with regard to voting in the past, right? And so whenever we talk about doing things to shore up the voting system, the left tends to point back to that history and to sort of claim that we’re trying to bring back Jim Crow or something like that.

But actually I think that if we were to poll the American people, we would see that most people want a more secure voting system. We want to have faith in the result, and we want to reduce the opportunities to interfere with it or to game the system as much as possible. So I think that ultimately, the Republicans are going to win on this—win not only in the court of public opinion, but in the courts, as they’ve done.

EICHER: Now to New York … the Democratic nominee for mayor, Zoran Mamdani, appears to be leading the field in recent polls … with 35% in a crowded field … which is enough to be a pretty commanding lead. The old conservative commentator George Will appeared on Bill Maher’s show and had a provocative take. Let’s hear that.

WILL: I want him to win.
MAHER: You want him to win?
WILL: Yeah. I think every 20 years or so--
MAHER: Wait.
WILL: we need a-- [LAUGHTER] --every 20 years or so, we need a conspicuous, confined experiment with socialism so we can crack it up again. Socialist slogan used to be workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains. The new socialist slogan is, "Trust us, this time it won't be a mess."

Sounds like a little political vaccine … inject some of the bad stuff and build up the antibodies to resist the virus. Do you go along with George Will’s idea here that nothing generates a backlash against socialist ideas like a little socialism?

BAKER: I think that George Will is correct in terms of what would happen. I think that if Mom Donnie became mayor, he would quickly be overwhelmed by the problematic effects of those policies, and I think it would serve as a nice object lesson. On the other hand, we’re talking about a city of many millions of people, and I’m not sure I’d like to see them subjected to that. Now, of course, you know, elections have consequences, and people vote and they get what they voted for. But in my view, people need to think carefully. They need to think carefully about the idea—do we want a government-run grocery store, or are we engaging in a kind of wishing-makes-it-so public policy that to date never turns out well.

EICHER: Before we let you go … I do want to follow up on the notion of consolidating the field. The number two candidate is former Governor Andrew Cuomo. His idea is let’s have a poll mid-September and whoever is second place stays in and the others drop out and consolidate behind the number two to try to stop Mamdani. What do you think the likelihood of that is?

BAKER: It’s a good question. It really depends on whether there is an effective counter campaign. Cuomo, I think, does not have a great reputation in New York State. I don’t think that people are going to be eager to vote for Cuomo, whereas there’s going to be a fair amount of energy behind this young competitor who is leading the pack. So I think that even if you have somebody like Eric Adams dropping out and endorsing Cuomo, I’m not sure it’s going to change the result. So you could end up with sort of this strange interregnum in the history of the mayors of New York City.

MAST: Hunter Baker is provost at North Greenville University and WORLD Opinions Contributor. Thanks so much!

BAKER: Thank you.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: Australia’s fight over online speech.

The government is tightening social media censorship laws—despite a recent courtroom win for Chris Elston, better known as Billboard Chris.

In April, we reported on a tribunal battle with Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. At issue: a post on X by Billboard Chris. He opposed a transgender activist’s appointment to the World Health Organization.

NICK EICHER, HOST: On July 1st, the judge ruled in favor of Billboard Chris and the social media platform. But the ruling was narrow … restoring only the one post.

And the broader crackdown continues. Australians who challenge progressive policies online still face steep fines and censorship if someone complains.

WORLD Correspondent Amy Lewis reports.

ADF CHRIS ELSTON: And in the greatest victory for freedom of speech on planet Earth this year, we just defeated the Australian government, and my post has been restored.

AMY LEWIS: That’s Chris Elston just after the judge’s ruling on July 1st. Jasmine Sussex attended some of Elston’s trial earlier this year.

JASMINE SUSSEX: I was so excited. And, I mean, it was a tiny bit, I wouldn't want to say, bittersweet, but it was, I think, to be honest, if I'm brutally honest, I'm a bit jealous…

Jealous, because Sussex is also fighting the eSafety Commissioner’s overreach, and she shares some of Elston’s lawyers. Sussex is a former breastfeeding counselor who posted on social media that only women can breastfeed.

SUSSEX: I included a photo of the complainant, which he'd given to the Daily Mail, of him, bare-chested, holding his son. It wasn't a nice point, but it just wasn't vilification.

She’s now in the 5th year of litigation—first under Queensland’s antidiscrimination laws and now with Australia’s eSafety Commissioner over her use of the X platform to talk about who can breastfeed.

That eSafety Commissioner is Julie Inman Grant. Her job is to safeguard Australians from online harm, but her actions affect more than just Australia. Here’s Chris Elston again.

ADF ELSTON: Her job is to censor the internet for the entire world, and so the Australian government ordered an American company to take down a Canadian’s post featuring a British article.

Reuben Kirkham is a director of the Free Speech Union of Australia. He says Inman Grant is using tax dollars to fight the people.

REUBEN KIRKHAM: It is most worrying that our public money is being spent in this manner and to undermine our freedoms. It is a world first, but it is not exactly a precedent that anyone would want to set.

Inman Grant’s March 2022 letter to X about Elston’s post said the company had to remove it or be fined more than $500,000 dollars. But since Elston’s trial, Inman Grant has had to change the wording in similar notices to social media companies.

KIRKHAM: She is now reduced to sending these rather bizarre emails that say, ‘We found something on your, on a page, but you may want to think about taking it down of your terms and service, but we’re definitely not requiring you to.’

That’s a victory, but it only goes so far.

After a 6-year battle, the state of Victoria’s Civil and Administrative Tribunal upheld a decision in July by the Medical Board of Australia to suspend a Christian medical doctor’s licence. The decision was based entirely on Dr. Jereth Kok’s private social media posts critical of abortion, vaccines, and transgender ideology. He’d also reposted some satirical articles from the Babylon Bee. Some of the posts were more than 10 years old. Kok had a stellar record with his patients, but the tribunal found him guilty of professional misconduct.

Kirkham says that’s a massive problem.

KIRKHAM: If you don’t have freedom of expression, you don’t have a democratic society. You don’t have those basic western values. You don’t have the truth.

And now there are new challenges to free speech. The State of Victoria just passed new hate speech laws. And the federal government recently passed age verification laws for social media use, adding a YouTube ban for children under 16. Children who break the law won’t be prosecuted, but the digital companies will.

Many people think social media restrictions are a good thing. But enforcing those changes gives the government more control over online conversation. And that’s exactly what some leftist activists want.

Ro Allen is the state of Victoria’s human rights commissioner and describes herself as gender diverse. About a year ago, she spoke to Julian Morrow on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about her strategy to promote gender fluid ideology by squelching online public debate.

MORROW: Does the public debate actually impede things?

ALLEN: 100 percent. Social media, I think people go there to be their worst. You don’t get a really intelligent conversation there.

Allen will be in charge of enforcing the state’s new laws. Jasmine Sussex says Allen’s own bias calls into question whether she will support everyone’s human rights.

SUSSEX: Our Victorian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission is going to be, you know, like judge, jury, prosecutor, investigator, executioner. It's really, really quite scary.

Sussex has seen first-hand how speaking the truth has become costly and “unsafe.” Especially for women who speak out against transgender ideology.

SUSSEX: But you know, it's not high profile women, it's not activists. It's teachers, nurses, social workers, and we're all being, you know, disciplined, silenced, censored, shamed, some of us have lost jobs. We just need to be really clear-eyed about what is actually happening and what the consequences are for women.

Reporting for World Tour, I’m Amy Lewis in Melbourne, Australia.

SOUND: [AOL dial-up screech, connect tone]

NICK EICHER, HOST: It was to the internet what the model T was to the automobile. Slow, but it changed everything. And at the end of it the tedious process. Quite the rush.

AUDIO: You’ve got mail!

Yep, after more than 30 years of connecting people— and doing it at the breakneck speed of 56 kilobits per second! AOL is pulling the plug on dial-up.

The last day: September 30th.

Back in the 1990s, AOL had 10 million customers. Today it’s a little over 150-thousand. So the end of an era.

And here’s the speed leap: from dialup to gigabit fiber is 20-thousand times faster.

SOUND: [Modem tones]

Bye-bye, dial-up. You’ve got nostalgia.

It’s The World and Everything in It

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, August 13th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: breaking free from screens.

Research is confirming what many parents already know: technology can chip away at family life. Attention spans shrink, moods sour, and family time fractures.

EICHER: Clare Morell is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She’s spent years studying the harms of smartphones and social media on kids. Now she’s written a book: The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones. It asks: in our screen-saturated world, can a family truly unplug?

Her answer is yes. It’s counter-cultural, it’s hard work, but she says it is possible to restore what screens have taken: presence, peace, and connection. 

MAST: I talked with Clare about self-control and developing brains, how schools and communities can help, and how to take practical steps to kick digital distractions to the curb. 

Here’s that conversation. 

Clare, good morning.

MORELL: Thanks so much for having me.

MAST: Clare, let’s start with the effects of screens on self-control. You talk at length about that in the book. It's something our listeners certainly value. So can you explain for them how screens work against the goal of developing self-control in kids?

MORELL: Yes. Studies have been done basically to show that kids who are handed a device, instead of being left to themselves when they're having a tantrum or a fit, they actually do not develop the kind of emotional regulation skills or self-control that they should. And so children who are kind of frequently handed devices end up having more what they call externalizing behaviors like tantrums and poor focus and kind of just very dysregulated emotions. And a lot of this kind of again comes down to the brain science that when a kid is handed a screen, it does calm them immediately in the short term, but cumulatively it puts their nervous system (a developing nervous system) into this fight or flight mode where the screen actually releases adrenaline and cortisol in their nervous system. They're very stimulated by the screens and there's no kind of outlet for that. But any time you hand them a screen, you're working against yourself because it may immediately calm them down but it's too overstimulating for their nervous system.

And there's been more and more studies coming out showing that kids who spend a lot of time on screens, particularly between the ages of zero to four, have a very underdeveloped prefrontal cortex. And so that ability then to even exercise self-control is being stunted because that part of the brain is not being activated by the screens.

MAST: You found that smart phones don’t just negatively impact the user… but they also work outward to affect other kids who may not be using that technology. Can you explain how that works?

MORELL: Yeah, it's called negative network effects. And what that means is that because of the nature of smartphones and social media, the problems that come from them are not only individual level, but they actually create harmful group dynamics and a harmful social environment for other kids even who aren't on the smartphones or social media apps. And that's because now the social relationships are all being mediated through the apps and the phones. And so a kid who isn't on the smartphone could actually still experience some of the loneliness and anxiety that the kids on social media are also experiencing just because they're not on the apps. And so there are collective aspects to this problem, which is part of the reason I emphasize so much in the book that if you do the tech exit, find other families to do this with you to kind of create your own collective solutions that your child is not the only one not on the social media apps or without a smartphone. But then I also explain why schools and policymakers play a really important role in trying to back parents up because the school has a lot of power over this culture that is set at the school. And then similarly, policymakers can consider solutions on an even higher level, trying to help empower parents by either age-restricting social media out of childhood or something like that. But I do encourage parents, you don't have to wait on those policy solutions. Even just banding together as a group of parents, you can help mitigate those negative group-level harms.

MAST: In the book, you compare the issue of screens to the issue of drunk driving in the 1980s. So tell me a little bit about that.

MORELL: One of the reasons I talk about drunk driving is because I think the Mothers Against Drunk Driving that was started in the 80s was in response to their kids being harmed by drunk driving accidents and that it actually wasn't enough for parents to teach their own children not to drink and drive. But if there were other drivers on the road who were driving and drinking and driving, they were a threat to everyone, not just to their children, but other families and parents and members of the community as well. And that's why I try to explain like similarly with social media and smartphones, like the effects are not just individual and that you can kind of teach your own children why they're not going to have smartphones and social media, but if their peers have these devices and this is how all the social relationships and social environment is being mediated, it's really toxic to everybody. The effects of those spill over to the community as a whole. And so I kind of say similarly, we need just a movement of parents to rise up and say, like, we're not doing this for our kids. And both kind of at the community level through the schools, parents can have tremendous influence on the schools to say, hey, we want to ban smartphones at our school from bell to bell and create a school academic and social environment free of these devices. But then parents raising their voice to their state legislators, to their Congress members is also really powerful as those legislative bodies are considering, you know, solutions at a higher level to hear from parents that we want this support, like we want help to keep all kids off of social media. And so that's kind of why I use that analogy in the book.

MAST: So let's talk a little bit about detox. So much of this is just, I think, it is still so counter-cultural. You know, there are school programs, sports teams, even churches who require the use of certain apps. How does that work for a family looking to opt out, wondering,

‘How is this possible because of the way the system is set up?’

MORELL: Yeah, so I recommend starting with a 30-day digital detox. I think there's actually a science to why 30 days is so helpful that it actually really takes that long for a kid's nervous system to re-regulate.

Once they go without that and their brain actually returns to baseline, it returns to normal and they will be more calm and able to self calm and emotionally regulate themselves. Now, parents don't necessarily have to give up their smartphones, but putting some serious distance between ourselves and our phones and just saying, here's all these screen-free activities we're gonna fill our time with.

And we're just going to try to establish better habits without the devices. So I would say, start with 30 days. I give some examples of screen detox plans in the book that you can kind of follow, and try to find another family to do it with you if you can. And to your point about the app, we just have to get more comfortable pushing back as parents to say, my kid is not gonna have this app to be on this sports team or part of this youth group. And for every parent that kind of stands up to that tyranny of the smartphone, it makes it easier on the next parent.

MAST: This was part of a longer conversation we had with Clare Morell about what she found in talking to families and her ideas for policy change. We’ll air a longer version of that this weekend on The World and Everything in It feed, wherever you get this podcast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Wednesday, August 13th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast. Sometimes pastors, Sunday School teachers, and Bible Study leaders misspeak as they open the Word of God. But WORLD Opinions commentator Josh Reavis says God can even use embarrassing mistakes for His glory.

JOSH REAVIS: Early in my ministry I was given the opportunity to preach at a church in a neighboring state. It was one of the first times I had ever been invited somewhere outside my home church to preach.

I spent weeks praying and trying to decide what passage I was going to preach. I ultimately landed on Acts 16 and the story of Paul and Silas in jail. I had heard my dad preach that passage and tell that Bible story countless times. I was ready to paint a word picture that would have the people enraptured. By the time I got done with them they’d feel like they had been there singing “Because He Lives” alongside Paul and Silas in their jail cell. I studied, prayed, and prepared like my life depended on it. When the weekend finally arrived, I made the long drive to the church and showed up, Bible in hand, ready to preach.

When the congregational singing concluded I made my way to the pulpit and for the next 30 minutes I let it rip. The whole thing felt like a blur, but I made it through, and in my mind, I felt like it went pretty well. Not bad for a rookie! I walked down the platform steps and sat down next to the pastor. He leaned over towards me, and I was expecting a “good job!” He whispered, “It was Paul and Silas.” I looked at him blankly, unsure what point he was trying to make.

“Excuse me?”

He repeated himself…“It was Paul and Silas.”

I furrowed my brow and asked, “What did I say?”

“You said Paul and Barnabas.”

My first thought was, “what a jerk move. I get done preaching, and you point out the one mistake I made?”

The only response I could muster was: “When did I say it?”

What he said next hit me like a heavyweight punch to the gut.

“The whole time.”

Turns out I preached for 30 minutes about Paul and Barnabas in jail. I talked about Paul and Barnabas getting arrested, Paul and Barnabas singing, and Paul and Barnabas sharing the gospel with the Philippian jailer. Thirty. Minutes. And I didn’t mention Silas once.

I was devastated. I was sure that was the last time I’d ever get asked to preach anywhere. I had my one shot, and I blew it.

To be fair to the pastor, he did the right thing. I needed to know. He also took the time after to encourage me. He told me that it wouldn’t be the last time I’d make a mistake like that while preaching. And he was absolutely right about that one. He also reminded me that God doesn’t require perfect sermons.

Laying an egg in the pulpit always stings. And if you take the responsibility of preaching seriously, which you should, you will fight feelings of guilt about confusing the congregation or muddling the message. But there is hope, even for the worst sermons. I mentioned earlier that I never said Silas’ name in my sermon, which is true. But I did say his name that night. At the beginning of my sermon I read the entire story, word for word, verse by verse, straight from my Bible. And even though the congregation had to navigate through my convoluted message, the Scriptures were clear as a bell.

Romans 10:17 doesn’t say, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by a perfect sermon.” By God’s grace, “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God.” Whether you’re preaching a sermon, teaching a Sunday school lesson, or doing family devotions, at some point you’re going to deliver a stinker. But if you’ll be faithful to the Word of God, I believe He will keep His promise in Isaiah 55:11, and His word “will not return void.”

The old saying goes, “God can draw a straight line with a crooked stick.” And I believe God can redeem a bad sermon, for His glory, and our good.

I’m Josh Reavis.

NICK EICHER, HOST: Tomorrow: a new study reveals that the divorce rate has been falling. We’ll explore why. That and more tomorrow.

I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

The World and Everything in It comes to you from WORLD Radio. WORLD’s mission is Biblically objective journalism that informs, educates, and inspires.

The Psalmist writes: “O Lord, make me know my end and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting I am!” —Psalm 39:4

Go now in grace and peace.

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