Sermon Tone Analysis

Grace to you and peace from God the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.

It continues to be a great honor and pleasure to be here today with the intended purpose of sharing in the Word of God.

We have spent the past two Sundays specifically describing the greatness of Jesus Christ.

We have seen that he is the physical embodiment of God, the rightful heir of the universe, the hand of creation, the one holding all things together, the leader of the church, the fullness of God, and the great reconciler by the blood of His cross.

I’ve told you that these aspects of great our great treasure troves for our exploration into the person and work of Jesus Christ.

I hope that you have taken some time in the past weeks to really dwell upon the greatness of Jesus Christ.

This evening we are going to talk about the importance of worship and we will see that as we dwell upon the revealed greatness of God we are thus compelled to worship Him.

Make it a point to join us for that this evening.

But this morning, I want to start from the exact antithetical position from the greatness of God.

I would like us to take just a few moments to consider the brokenness of our world.

Our world is broken.

It is so full of darkness.

If you don’t believe me, just look at the news!

At the time I was preparing this sermon earlier this week, here were five of the top stories from the Associated Press Website:

[Tropical Storm] Fiona grows into Category 4 storm, heads towards Bermuda

Climate-fueled wildfires worsen danger for struggling fish

48 exploited pandemic to steal $250 from food program

Bombs disrupt critical Ukraine [farming] industry

Racism seen as root of water crisis in Mississippi capital

You may think that all of that seems so far a way removed from us here in Kentucky, well here were five of the six top headlines on LEX18.com:

Nicholasville Police arrest bakery owner, charged with arson.

Multi-vehicle crash highlights importance of car seats.

Mother facing charges after death of 14 month old baby in Cynthiana.

Georgetown Police: Increase in fake gold sold at gas stations.

Police: Man shot on Dale Drive in Lexington

The sixth top headline on LEX18 was telling us the weather is too hot to be fall!

Now, don’t get me wrong.

I know good and well that news headlines are designed to highlight the negative things going on because that generates more clicks and views for them.

My point in bringing this up isn’t to make a case that the bad outweighs the good, or anything like that.

My point in bringing this up this morning is to alarm us that bad exists at all! Remember a few moments ago, I said that this opening would be the antithesis to the greatness of God.

God is perfect in every single way.

Our world is antithetical to that because it is broken in every single way.

Around us going on right this moment there is wanton destruction, exploitation, violence, and injustice.

This is entirely juxtaposed to the righteous, holy, and just God above, the great Jesus describe in the first part of Colossians 1.

In many ways we’ve become numb to the brokenness of our world, but the state of things should not sit well with us, because it has not always been this way, nor was it originally designed to be so.

At the end of the creation narrative in Genesis 1 we read

Things were good in the beginning!

The Garden of Eden was idyllic!

Man had his job to tend to the earth and he walked with the Lord in the garden!

But then man sinned against God and the ground was cursed!

Adam’s sin led to the whole earth, the ground, being cursed.

Thorns and thistles, broken relationships, broken sweat, death was now the destiny.

We may return another day to give the Creation and Fall narratives the exegetical attention they deserve, but for our purposes this morning, we should all take note that the brokenness in humanity should not sit well with us because it was not a part of our original design, nor will rampant sin be apart of our eternal destiny.

We see brokenness all around us, but before we get into our study today, I want to draw our attention off the sin and brokenness that is around us and on to something closer to home.

There once was a young couple moved into a new neighborhood.

The next morning while they are eating breakfast, the young woman saw her neighbor hanging her clothes on the line to dry.

She said to her husband, “That laundry is not very clean.

She doesn’t know how to wash correctly.

Maybe she needs better laundry soap.”

Her husband looked on, but remained silent.

Every time her neighbor hung her wash to dry, the young woman repeated her observations about the dirty laundry.

About one month later, the woman was surprised to see a nice clean wash on the line and said to her husband: “Look, she has learned how to wash correctly.

I wonder who taught her how to get it right?”

The husband said, “I got up early this morning and cleaned our windows.”

We have no problem seeing the sin and brokenness that is around us.

Today we are going to begin by seeing the sin and brokenness that is within us.

Open your Bibles to Colossians 1. Today we are going to be picking up in verse 21 and only making it through verse 23.

In this series that we have entitled “Living the Christian Life.”

Today’s message may end up being the most important.

In just these three verses we see the gospel, that is how someone is reconciled from their brokenness and restored to a perfect God.

If you are here this morning and you know the Lord, then please understand that Paul’s original intended audience with these words were believers.

It is good for you to reflect back on when you came to first understand this truth.

Dwelling on the goodness of Christ to save you produces worship and revitalizing our aptitude to serve.

But if you are here today and you have never truly understood what it means to be saved, then listen up and listen closely, because today may very well be the day God opens your eyes to His goodness.

Read with me Colossians 1:21

In this verse Paul lays out very clearly what is both the temporal and the eternal state of everyone who has not been reconciled to God.

We will get to how someone is reconciled to God in a moment, but first let us lay out

The Situation.

In this verse we are given three descriptors of everyone who has not been reconciled to God.

The first of which being, alienated.

Now I think that to some extent all of us have experience in feeling alienated.

If you’ve ever been the new kid at school or workplace, maybe you've moved cities or states, then you have probably felt some sort of alienation.

Unless you’re Charlie Davis, and never met a stranger, it’s likely that you know that sensation that I am talking about here.

Maybe during the uncertain times of Covid you found yourself isolated and disconnected to those around you.

Those are all valid feeling that we have experienced to some degree.

But the alienation being discussed here in verse 21 goes much deeper than simply feeling uncomfortable in a social setting.

The Greek used here for the word rendered alienated is the perfect tense and the passive voice.

This means that something happened to all men in the past to cause them to be estranged.

Something has happened to divide the relationship.

It is a categorical shift that occurs between two parties.

An alien is one who does not “belong.”

He is a stranger and foreigner, without the rights and privileges of citizenship.

Being alienated means that the status of citizen was changed to alien.

In the United States, there are four ways in which our Government strips away the rights and title of citizen from even natural born Americans:

Run for public office in a foreign country

Enter military service in a foreign country

Apply for citizenship in a foreign country with the intention of giving up U.S. citizenship

Commit an act of treason against the United States

In each of these cases the person makes it known that they prefer their citizenship elsewhere.

As a sovereign nation, the US has every right to remove those who would act against it physically and politically.

From that time forward, the offending individual no longer has the rights and the privileges of a US citizen.

Nor should they have children, would those children be considered US citizens.

The hereditary nature of citizenship is not applied if the parent’s are no longer citizens.

Now, I’m going to stop this example here because yall didn’t come here this morning for a civics lesson.

I bring all of this up to remind you what happened with our great great great great great great great grandpappy Adam! Adam committed treason!

He sinned and offended not just a sovereign nation, but the Sovereign, Holy, Perfect, Righteous God! From that time the whole line of Adam, all of mankind was alienated from God! Adams sin is the act that estranged His whole line from the Holy God.

You might say Brad, all he did was take a bite of fruit.

But do not forget that that was the one thing God had told him not to do in the garden.

The reason we view it as such a small thing is because we have become so accustomed to the myriad of sin that surrounds us.

We try to justify the sin of Adam because we know we have done and still do much worse!