Sermon Tone Analysis
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Good Morning and Welcome to Sylvania Wesleyan Church.
I am so Glad that we can be gathered together this morning.
Tis the season.
Tis the season for so many things.
We often refer to this time of the year as the Holiday Season or for Christians the Christmas season.
It is a time of year where we have several holidays in quick succession.
It is more than that though.
It is more than just a couple of holidays for us.
It isn’t just merely a day which we give presents to each other and share words of love and affection.
It is more than what the commercialization of this time of year has told us it is.
It is the time of year that we remember the coming of Jesus.
It is the start of the hope that we find in Christ.
This morning than and the next several weeks leading up to Christmas we will be in a series called
“Tis the Season”
This morning we will be beginning with the Tis the season of Anticipation.
Anticipation is a funny thing.
I don’t know about you but i have a love hate relationship with Anticipation.
See, I love anticipation because it is what makes things exciting and keeps it interesting especially around holiday’s like Christmas.
Christmas as a Kid
Take a moment and either remember what it was like to be a kid on Christmas Eve or what it was like for your kids on those days.
What is the one thing that almost every kid struggles with on that night?
They struggle to go to bed.
They struggle to go to sleep because they can’t wait for the morning.
The Anticipation is killing them.
They are sitting on pins and needles in excitement waiting for the morning to see what they got for Christmas.
Not only do they struggle with going to sleep let’s be honest they struggle with staying asleep.
Think about it the classic story of the kids not waiting for their parents they get up and go dive into the presents and start opening everything while the parents sleep.
Or they jump on the parents at 5 in the morning and wake them up ready to open presents instead of enjoying some rest.
My Dad had a defense for this.
He messed with us a couple years because he wouldn’t let us open presents till we were cleaned up, dressed, and had eaten breakfast.
Than he would also take the time to read us the Christmas story from Luke.
He slowed us down.
It worked too because we never really rushed the morning of Christmas but the anticipation would build for that first present.
That anticipation though would grow.
This time of year brings it out.
This morning we sit 4 weeks from Christmas morning and while that seems like it is a long time to wait it is amazing how fast it will go.
Why do we look forward to Christmas Morning?
That got me thinking why do we look forward to Christmas morning so much?
Now the practical answer is the presents.
The Spiritual answer is because Jesus is born and it is the day that we celebrate that.
Yet, why does that make it so amazing.
Why couldn’t it be say on New Years, or some other day?
The point is that we have come to anticipate this day because we learned to.
We were taught to look to this day as important and as something special.
To appreciate what happens that day we have to know the end of the story.
To Understand the Beginning We have to look to the End
Think about it the first couple years of a kids life Birthday’s and Christmas aren’t that exciting.
Babies have no idea what is happening.
we buy them all kinds of presents and than they end up in the box having the time of their life.
They don’t understand why those days are special.
They have to learn.
At some point they realize the end of the story is presents so now the beginning of the season is more exciting.
They learn to sit in anticipation of the coming of Christmas.
It really isn’t that different when it comes to our view of the coming of Jesus.
We look forward to his birth because we know how the story ends.
We know that he dies on the cross to forgive us of our sins.
If we didn’t know that it is nothing more than any other birth of a baby boy.
This is why we look at this mornings passage because we need to be reminded of what the end looks like.
Turn with me to
Romans chapter 13
We will be in verses 11-14
The Present Time
One of the first things that stands out to us this morning from the passage is the idea of the Present.
The present is always an interesting thing to look at.
We look around at the present day and we think that the sins of this world are the worst they have been.
I have thought about that a lot in the recent years.
If you study history and you look at our world the reality is that sin hasn’t really changed all that much.
Verse 13 pretty much sums up the sins that we face each day in our world.
The truth is we live in a world that is focused on how we can take care of ourselves and what we want to bring us pleasure.
Instead of living a life that is of sacrifice and focused on God.
It doesn’t matter what time you are in these core focuses haven’t changed.
Yet the Hour has come...
The Hour has Come...
Its time to wake up.
The alarm clock is ringing.
It is time for us to wake from our slumber.
to realize that more now than ever before our salvation is near.
Both in the sense that we wait in anticipation of the coming of Jesus in celebrating that at Christmas time and in the sense that He is coming again some day soon.
This idea of waking up got me thinking about alarm clocks.
I have come to understand in this world there are two types of people in the world when it comes to waking up.
There is the person who gets up when the alarm goes off and the person who hits the snooze button.
The Snooze Button
Now I have to confess i am not a snooze button person.
I have never really learned to use it.
When the alarm goes off it is time to get up.
I know people though that will hit the snooze button 7 or 8 times.
They plan for this.
They set their alarm knowing they will hit it that many times.
I want you to think about that.
The average snooze button time is 7 min.
I had to look that up by the way.
If you hit the snooze button 7 times you just woke up for the first time 49 minutes before you actually had to.
That’s almost an hour of uninterrupted sleep that you could have had.
I don’t get it but to each their own i guess.
The problem with the snooze button is if we aren’t careful you miss waking up on time.
Remember V. 11
If we hit he snooze button on our faith too many times we will realize that the hour has already come.
It is time to wake up from our slumber.
Wake from our Slumber
When Paul speaks of slumber it is commonly thought he is referencing the lethargic Christian.
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