Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
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Disgust
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Fear
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Joy
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Sadness
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Language Tone
Analytical
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Confident
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Tentative
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Social Tone
Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Agreeableness
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Emotional Range
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Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
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Social Tendencies
Anger
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Shame
[being told off, someone else being told off, ]
[Context: a lot of sexual sin in Genesis |- we’ve left most of it unexplored - this is the wide angle look at it
[in theory we’re up to the account of an attmpted abduction marriage of Jacob’s daughter, and followed quickly by an account of Judah and sexual sin in his household
Why are we doing this?
Can’t we just skip over - we can get the impression God doesn’t care, isn’t just, anything goes.
But we need to hear another word at the outset.
God’s grace - as we talk about sins you may be a victim of, have been entangled in, are near to,
There is none of us in this room untouched by this.
Sex is God’s good gift
Gen 1 and 2
male and female in God’s image - equal dignity
This is what God is pleased with - (whole book in OT celebrating it)
IT is what he blesses and calls very good.
(made in image, bone and flesh, for this reason)
one flesh - sex is for marriage - people don’t need sex, marriages do
sex is for marriage and marriage is for many things
Jesus - he made them male and female
Marriage not for everyone.
Marriage setup by God.
(The ‘except for sexual immorality’ - because sex is for marriage || immorality dishonours God’s design)
Giving then committing (consent and vows)
This is what God is pleased with - (whole book in OT celebrating it)
IT is what he blesses and calls very good.
Sin distorts God’s gifts
The naive approach is to say there are many pictures of marriage and sex in the Bible.
It’s true there are many pictures - but they’re not presented as pleasing to God.
All the other activities are described as sexual immorality
Gen 34 and 38 have some pictures of it.
The sin of sodom and gomorrah is often singled out as sexual
and whilst the sexual sin of sodom and gomorrah is sin, it is amongst their many others
and the account of them is amongst many other sexual sins in Genesis
But so did Genesis 4 with Adah and Zillah
Power rather than service and delight.
A long way from bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh - there is no place for threatening, abusive behaviour.
Husbands love your wives.
Lay down your lives for them.
Sons of god seeing and taking daughters of man (Abimelek, Pharaoh)
Seeing and taking.
Sexual attraction for material benefit and safety.
Abraham and Hagar, Sodom, Lot’s daughters
Manipulative use of sex and surrogacy for children at any cost.
(Sodom not the place to go regarding same sex attraction - not the point of the narrative here,
Jacobs wives and maidservants
Dinah (seeing, taking) - no consent, no marriage
Judah and Tamar (seeing, taking - Tamar originally, Onan, Judah himself)
Look at the giving.
Also notice the counter-cultural ordering of instructions.
This is in contrast to Lording it over one another.
We read these accounts in Genesis and are rightly troubled.
I doubt we’re troubled enough in the main though - we’re fed so much by the world around us that we lose sight of how God sees things.
God is not silent - we’re already seen his good design in the opening chapters of Genesis.
Also, can you see the very many ways sin has distorted God’s good gift.
Same sex sin is only one of many ways.
Yes, right now it’s where our culture is having a head on clash.
But there’s actually many distortions on display in Genesis, and in our lives.
God calls us to two options:
faithful marriage of a voluntary sexual union between one man and one woman entered into for life to the exclusion of all others
holy singleness
Grace at the end
Our whole time spent in the lives of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob has shown again and again that God chooses messy grabbers because of his mercy.
The good news is not then to say none of the grabbing matters.
It does.
It has no place amongst God’s people.
If you are a Christian, Christ has joined himself to you.
He is with you.
Don’t drag Jesus Christ into sin with your body.
More than the grabbing matters, God’s grace gives us power:
God chooses grabbers, washes grabbers, rebukes grabbers, and give grabbers the power to give up grabbing.
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