Sermon Tone Analysis

You should all consider yourselves extremely fortunate this morning, because today, I’m going to tell you all about my illustrious high school football career.

Now, what you should know to start is that I was never very athletically inclined.

I played Little League baseball for a few years as a kid, until a fly ball bounced out of my glove and hit me in the nose.

Hard.

That day was my last day on a baseball field.

For a few years after that, I was content to confine my limited athletic abilities to a bicycle or skateboard.

But after we’d moved to Suffolk from Portsmouth and I’d spent my freshman year at a new high school, my parents encouraged me to find some kind of extracurricular activity that would help me meet new friends and give me a broader high school experience.

And that’s how I found myself — in the summer between ninth and 10th grades, preparing to join the football team.

Now, I knew almost nothing about football.

I was slow and not particularly strong.

And I couldn’t catch or throw.

But aside from all that, I was perfect for the football team.

Which means simply that anybody who tried out for the team was able to join it.

What I didn’t expect, since I had no real experience with team sports, was how hard things would be.

Every year, when August 10 rolls around, my mind still goes back to those two-a-day practice sessions we had back then, right smack in the middle of the worst heat and the most brutal humidity of a Southeast Virginia summer.

By that time of the year, the grass on our practice field was mostly dead.

And by the time 40 or 50 guys had gone through their drills twice a day for a week, it was pretty much a dust bowl.

And as the sweat dripped from us, the dust would coat every exposed inch of skin, and we’d soon be covered in mud, even when there wasn’t a rain cloud in the sky.

Since I didn’t really have any skills, I was relegated to working with the offensive and defensive linemen.

And so, I was constantly either blocking or being blocked.

Tackling or being pushed to the ground.

Such FUN!

And then, there was all the running.

Forty-yard sprints.

Shuttle drills.

Laps around the field.

And more laps.

And then some more.

And all of that running while feeling as if someone was sticking a knife in my side.

I hated it.

I remember coming home one evening, near the end of that first week of two-a-day practices before the 10th grade, and telling my parents I was quitting the team.

I don’t remember exactly what they said to me, but the gist of it was this: “Oh, no you’re not!

You’re going to finish at least this season.”

And so, I had learned an important lesson: Be careful what you commit to doing, because Mom and Dad won’t let you back out of it.

Well, that was the immediate lesson, but the larger lesson came some time later.

I ended up playing football through my senior year, when the guy who started at left offensive tackle (my position) was hurt early in the season and I was moved up to start for the rest of the season.

Our team went undefeated that year, and to this day, I can claim (whether it’s true or not) that my contributions were vital to our success, even if the most successful plays we ran were always to the right side of the line, rather than the left.

I was actually given the Golden Helmet Award during our team banquet that year, but since I was talking and joking around with some of my teammates during the coach’s speech, I still don’t know exactly what I’d done to earn that award.

But I can tell you the BIG LESSON that I learned, and it was this: Don’t give up.

When things get hard (and they will), keep on keeping on.

There is a sense of accomplishment we get from bearing up under our troubles that we can never experience if we give up.

Jesus talked about this in His Parable of the Sower.

Let’s look at Matthew’s account of this parable in Matthew, chapter 13.

And, after an interlude in which He explained why He so often spoke to the crowds in parables, Jesus explained to the disciples what this parable meant, starting in verse 18.

Now, there has long been disagreement among scholars as to what groups are represented by the different kinds of soil in this parable.

Two groups seem clearly identifiable.

The first, the one represented by the hard path, where the message of the gospel falls and is snatched away by the evil one without ever taking root, represents those who have never accepted the gospel.

These people have heard the message of God’s Son, who gave His life so that they could be saved from the punishment we all deserve for our sins against God.

Yet they have rejected that message.

They have rejected the gift of salvation that Jesus offers them.

The hardness of the path is like the hardness of their hearts.

There is no way for the seeds of the life-giving gospel message to germinate in them, because they have hardened their hearts against it.

The second easily identifiable group is the fourth one, the one represented by the good soil, where the gospel is sown in them and takes root and bears much fruit.

These are the people who have been saved by God’s grace, through faith in Jesus.

But not only have they accepted the gift of salvation, they have also allowed the indwelling Holy Spirit to change them and make them bear fruit.

They are characterized by the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

And these fruits of the Spirit are then what the Holy Spirit uses to help them become fruitful ministers of the gospel, to help them become disciple-making disciples.

The controversy in this passage is over the question of whether the groups represented by the rocky soil and the thorny soil are saved or unsaved.

There are good arguments in either direction.

But the point Jesus was making isn’t so much about salvation as it is about whether a person is responsive or unresponsive to His message about the Kingdom of Heaven.

Both of these intermediate groups have heard the message of the gospel and had an initially positive response to it.

Perhaps both even responded with saving faith.

But in both cases, the people in these groups turn out to be unfruitful.

In the case of those represented by the thorny soil, their unfruitfulness is a result of them becoming distracted by the cares of this world.

But in the case of those represented by the rocky soil, it is affliction or persecution that causes them to be unfruitful.

When times get tough, they give up.

And I want you to notice what Jesus says about hard times in verse 21.

It’s not a matter of IF affliction or persecution arise, but WHEN.

We who follow Jesus in faith can EXPECT hard times.

They may not manifest themselves in the kinds of persecution that first-century Christians faced, but there will be hard times for us, nonetheless.

The Greek word for affliction here is “thlipsis,” and it’s translated elsewhere as tribulation, trouble, anguish, persecution, or burden.

And it can result from the actions of others or simply the brokenness of the world.

One of the things we should understand from this range of meanings is that the problems of living in a sin-broken world don’t just magically disappear when we begin to follow Jesus.

Nor do we escape the consequences of our own sin because we are Christians.

Jesus saved us from the condemnation we deserve for our sins, but the consequences still remain.

Families are broken, relationships are shattered, health suffers, and justice must be served.

But even setting aside the afflictions we bring upon ourselves because of our own sins, there are afflictions — there are tribulations — we will experience simply because we are Christians living in a lost world.

Jesus warned us about that in John 16:33, where He had been telling His disciples about the promise of the Holy Spirit, who would come to dwell within them after He had returned to heaven in His resurrected body.

“In the world, you have tribulation.”

In the world, you have affliction.

In the world, you have troubles.

Note that He doesn’t say “you WILL have troubles.”

What He says is in the present tense.

“In the world you HAVE tribulation.”

They were already experiencing troubles.

They were already experiencing affliction.

They had met Jesus, and they had turned their lives over to Him.

They had aligned themselves with Him and with His values, rather than with the values of the world.

And so, they were experiencing trouble.

This fits perfectly with what Jesus said back in verse 21 of the passage in Matthew.

When — not if — affliction or persecution arises, He said there, the people of the rocky soil fall away.

But He also gives the reason for the affliction there.

Do you see it?

“Because of the word.”

Because of the gospel message of a Savior sent to redeem fallen mankind from its sins.

The gospel itself is the catalyst that brings believers under persecution and affliction.

If the devil can cause your faith to wither under affliction, then he no longer has to worry about you bearing fruit for the Kingdom of God.

By giving up, you’re out of the game.

And so, he brings affliction and troubles to us throughout our lives as Christians.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention the past several weeks, you should be wondering by now what all this has to do with the 13 imperatives given by the Apostle Paul to the church in Romans, chapter 12. That’s what we’ve been talking about for the past couple of months.