Friday, October 26, 2012

Frequently Asked Questions Part 2

Recently I wrote a sermon about Jesus being asked, "Which is the most important  commandment?"  Jesus responded by giving not only the most important commandment, but the second most important commandment as well. It reminded me of a recent post on this blog about the most frequently asked question I receive at Sermons4Kids. The most frequently asked question is, "Do we have permission to reprint the sermons and activities from the Sermons4Kids web site?"  Now that you know the answer to that question, it seems appropriate that I now deal with the second most frequently asked question.

The second most frequently asked question received at Sermons4Kids is, "Do you have a sermon about _____?"  You can fill in the blank with any subject you might imagine.  Whenever I receive such a question, the first thing I do is to go to our Site Search Tool.  You will find this valuable tool in the left column of all main pages on the web site.  Every Monday morning our entire web site is indexed to insure that the most recent sermons will be included in the search results.  So, if someone writes and asks if I have a sermon about communion, I type communion in the search box, click the search button and a page opens showing that we have six sermons about communion!

It is very helpful to know something about how a search engine works. If you use our site search tool to search for the word love, it will yield a list of 356 documents!  Not very helpful, is it?  If you search for "love your neighbor" with the phrase in quotation marks, it will find only those pages with that exact phrase.  The results will yield 12 documents.  Now, that's more like it!  Looking for a sermon for Mother's Day? Search for mother's day without quotation marks and you will find 495 documents because it will find every sermon that has the word mother or the word day.  Search for "Mother's Day" in quotation marks and you will find 7 documents.

To help you know how to get the best results from your searches, we have a Search Tips page on our web site.  It will give you many suggestions on how to make your searches more productive.  Oh, by the way, these tips will work on Google, Yahoo, Bing or just about any search tool. I hope after reading this post you will visit our web site and try our "Site Search" tool. Play with it! Type in "John 3:16" and see how many sermons you find.