'The truest sermon you'll ever give is simply the life you live.'
The Truest Sermon
We tend to believe our influence lives in what we say, the advice we hand out, the lessons, the opinions, the good talking-to’s. The truth is quieter and far more powerful than that. People don’t really learn who we are from what we tell them. They learn it from how we live. Every single day, whether we mean to or not, we are preaching a sermon, and it’s made of our actions, not our words.
My Father’s Sermon
My father was not a man of many words. He never once sat me down to lecture me on how to be a good man. He simply was one, quietly, day after day, and I absorbed it without either of us ever naming it.
When I moved back into his home at a low point in my life, he didn’t give me a speech. He said seven words, “We are family, and we help each other,” something I needed to know and be comforted by. I’m endlessly grateful for the aspects of himself that rubbed off onto me, and now to my children. None of it through instruction, all of it through example. That was his sermon. He preached it just by being who he was, and it has outlived him, and now in all of us who had the privilege of knowing him.
They Watch How You Live
This matters most with the people closest to us, and especially with children, because they are always watching. Little ones learn almost nothing from “do as I say.” They learn from what they see, how they feel or sense in every moment. We can preach calm and live in chaos. We can preach kindness and be sharp at home. We can tell them to chase their dreams, while quietly abandoning our own. They feel, sense, hear or see the gap between what we say and how we are, and it’s the how they take on board.
As Maya Angelou so famously reminded us. ‘People forget what you said and even what you did. How you made them feel is the thing they hold onto.’ That feeling is the real sermon delivered not in a single word and remembered long after every word has faded.
The uncomfortable, freeing truth is that we are teaching all the time, whether we intend to or not. The only real question is what!
You Can’t Preach ‘The Garden’ From ‘The Tip’
You can only ever give away what you actually have. If you’re living down in ‘The Tip’ caught in the noise, the reactivity and the swirl, then that is the sermon the people around you receive, no matter how good your words are. Nobody is convinced by a lecture on peace delivered by someone at war with themselves.
This is exactly why the inner work is never selfish. When you do the quiet work of moving toward ‘The Garden’ becoming the observer of your life rather than the reactor to it, that becomes your sermon, and it rubs off on everyone near you. As I have written in my book, tending your inner garden transforms not only your life, it transforms the lives of those around you. You change the room by changing yourself.
Live It First
None of this asks you to be perfect, a flawless sermon isn’t the point, and no one’s buying it anyway. Your people don’t need you to be flawless. They need you to be real, and to be genuinely walking the road you’d point them down. The most powerful thing you’ll ever do for the ones you love isn’t telling them how to live. It’s quietly becoming someone worth learning from.
A Question to Sit With
The honest question to carry this week isn’t about your words at all. It’s this:
‘What is my life currently teaching the people around me?’
If you’d change the answer, you don’t change it with a speech. You change it the same way my father did one honest, lived day at a time. That’s the only sermon that ever truly lands.
Have a great week,
Michael
📖 Where the F*ck Do Our Minds Go? — Navigating the Paths Between Chaos and Clarity → Get the book