Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome

Good morning, everyone.

Let’s open with a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, you have made your people to be a people of the book.

We love your Holy Word.

We read it, sing it, pray it, and inwardly digest it.

Help us to hear the story of the Bible, and most importantly, help us to located ourselves within that story so that we can understand who we are, where we are, when we are, what’s gone wrong with the world, what you’re doing to fix it, and our role in that great salvific story.

Give us eyes that see, ears that hear, and hearts that understand, and we ask all of this in the same of your Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Amen.

Thank you all for coming.

I’d like to officially welcome all of you to to the start of our new Adult Catechesis course:

The Story of the Bible

We’re going to get into that story, the Story of the Bible, in broad outline format before we close today, but for right now, to start our course off and before I start doing a bunch of talking, I want to hear from you.

We don’t have time to hear everyone’s answer, but we’ll take a few minutes right now to hear a few replies to this question:

What is the one question that you want to ask about the Bible?

I’m not going to give any answers right now.

I’m only going to listen, but I want to hear from you what kind of questions are on your mind.

So let’s open this open.

What is the one question you’d like to ask about the Bible?

Parking Lot

Okay! Thank you for those questions.

Everything you’re asking will help me prepare for this course and gives me ideas about courses for the future.

One thing in particular that we should talk about right now is the parking lot.

And no, I’m not talking about the parking lot outside.

I’m talking about the parking lot that we have in this class.

In an effort to get me to stay focused on the topic and task at hand, if you ask a good question, but one that isn’t directly relevant to what we’re talking about in the moment, I’m going to say something like, “We’re going to put that question in the parking lot,” which means maybe I’ll answer it in weeks to come or maybe it will be in an entirely different course or context.

I hope that you understand we’re doing this not to ignore your questions, but to keep us, and by us I mean me, focused on that week’s objective.

And this week’s objective is to introduce the course, to explain what we’re doing, and most importantly, why we’re doing it.

As you might recall, this is fundamentally a course on:

Discipleship

That might not be apparently, so let me explain what I mean by that.

Our Lord’s great commission to his church is found in Matt 28:19-20

Of everything that’s said here in these important verses, the emphasis falls on the word “make disciples.”

In Greek, that’s the only imperative or command in these verses.

Everything else is participles.

Everything else is tangential to that command.

But what does it mean to make disciples?

For some people, making disciples is equal to evangelism.

We preach the Gospel, someone believes, and we have made a disciple.

But I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind.

In that analogy, becoming a disciple is like crossing a line.

On one side of the line you’re not a disciple, and on the other side you are.

I suggest, on the contrary, that Jesus gives his church a much more difficult task.

Getting across that line may be the start of discipleship, but a better analogy for what Jesus has in mind is the process of baking bread.

Making a disciple is like making bread.

All along the way as you gather ingredients, preheat the oven, mix the ingredients, knead the dough, and then finally place it in the oven (and I’m certainly leaving out some steps), you’re making bread.

But this (and this is important):

You haven’t made bread until you’ve pulled the finished bread out of the oven.

The goal isn’t the process.

The goal is the finished product.

Crossing the line and praying the prayer is the beginning of the process of becoming a disciples, but that certainly isn’t all that Jesus had in mind.

Jesus’ command that we make disciples isn’t merely about the beginning of the process, but the end and everything in between.

It’s about making:

“Fully-Baked” Christians

So the question we have to ask ourselves is how we get from where we are to there, how we get where where we are to the goal.

How do we help each other, and the nations outside our walls, become fully-baked disciples of Jesus Christ?

There are lots of potential answers to that question, but at the foundation of them all is the question of identity.

What does it mean to be a disciple of Jesus Christ?

Or, how do we identify a disciple of Jesus Christ.

What does a disciple of Jesus Christ do?

What’s the goal?

What problem is he or she trying to fix, and what’s the solution?

That’s what this course is about.

I want to teach you the story of the Bible in broad outline form so that you, as a disciple of Jesus Christ, can locate yourself in the story and have a better understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.

This course isn’t like a course on the story of the Lord of the Rings.

We’re not just telling a story, even a great story.

And it is a great story.

But the goal here is for you all to be able to locate yourselves in that story, to understand yourselves as participants in that story.

We’ll get to this later, but the danger is that if we don’t know the story well, first, we won’t be able to share it with others, and second, if we get the story wrong, where it began, where it’s going, and what happened in between, we may misunderstand our role.

We may misunderstand what it means to be disciples.

So in terms of discipleship, this is at the foundation of everything.

Worldview

Another term for what we’re talking about here is worldview.

I suspect most of you have probably heard this term before, but for those who haven’t, simply put, and you can see this in the term itself, our worldview is how we view the world around us.

But it’s actually a bit more complicated than that.

Our worldview isn’t simply how we view the world.

Rather:

Our worldview is how we understand our place in the world.

A worldview can be charted or understood upon an axis with four points.

You have this in your handout, but let me put it on the screen.

Our worldview is a combination of the stories we tell, the symbols that define us, the actions we take in the world (that’s that word praxis), and our answers to five specific questions.

We’ll come back to those questions in a minute, but for now, I want to look at each part of this axis, starting with story.

Story

We are the stories that we believe.

We are the stories that we inhabit intentionally or unintentionally.

Most of the stories that we believe and inhabit are told to us by other people whom we trust, whom we love, and we accept them and inhabit them.

From our earliest days, we make sense of our lives based on the stories other people tell us.

There’s a sense in which you could call this indoctrination, but put quite directly, there’s no other option.

Stories are how we as human beings make sense of the world.

And please note that I’m using story as a very broad term.

I’m using story in such a way that even an individual word (and you might say, well, that’s just one word) has inherent in them stories.

They have beginnings, ends, and inherent roles in those stories.

Think about who are mom is.

We’re simply told who are mother in since we’re little.

We’re told to call her mom.

We’re taught how to respond appropriately to our mother.

In fact, we figure this our implicitly.

We figure out what gets us positive responses from those around us, and we embrace those roles.

Who our dad is.

There’s a story there too.