Sermon Tone Analysis

INTRODUCTION

Many outside the church wrongly think that Christians don’t have any struggles.

That they are perfect, and are isolated from reality.

As Christians we make matters worse when we gather together in the church.

We tend to live according to some sort of unwritten rule where we are all supposed to try and pretend that we have it all together.

Of course we as Christians know that we do not have it all together.

We are real people, who live in a real world, and have real struggles.

The only difference is that we have had a life-changing encounter with a real God, Jesus Christ.

Once we embraced the gospel, our lives were radically transformed and changed.

We can see the fruit of this transformed life when we look at our actions (reading our Bible every day, praying, going to church, talking to others about God and the Bible, etc.), but all of these changes have come about as a result of a tranformed heart.

Thessalonica was a city in need of this kind of transformation.

Thessalonica had a population of more than 200,000 Romans, Greeks, and Jews.

It was a powerful commercial center because of it’s prime location on the Aegean Sea as well as the popular Roman Empire’s Egnatian Road.

This meant that many diverse cultures intersected in this city.

It was the New York, Houston, or Boston of its day.

Yet for all the benefits the city had, it was lost.

The Greeks filled the temples, the Jews filled the synagogues, the Romans paid homage to Caesar… there was a spiritual darkness in the city.

Paul knew that if the gospel was going to break through the religious darkness of the city, it needed to shine in the hearts of the people.

Paul knew this was a strategic location from which the gospel could go out to Rome in the West and to Asia Minor in the East.

The Gospel Motivates

As a child I remember hearing the words, “be careful” a lot, and as a parent I find myself saying them a lot as well.

We do not want our children to take unneccessary risks.

Can any of you think of a time when you took a risk?

Maybe it didn’t work out… or maybe it did.

Despite my parents warning me to be careful, I still managed to:

smash the back window of our car with a rock,

cut my finger trying to cut off the top of a sucker,

hit my sister in the face by taking a slap shot with a hockey ball after convincing her to play goalie.

We took a risk a few years ago by moving our family to Kentucky to attend seminary.

This involved lots of risk including:

selling our home,

quitting my job,

moving away from family/friends/church

starting over somewhere new,

depending on God

We consider that risk has paid off as we have now been serving as Associate Pastor couple of this church for over a year and a half now.

I would never go back to life before now that we are on the other side.

WAIT FOR THEIR ANSWERS...

The truth is that the Christian life is has risk right from the very beginning.

Jesus put it this way in:

Luke 9:23-24 “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.

For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.”

This sort of life is not something we naturally want to pursue.

We must have a supernatural motivation.

That motivation is the gospel, which motivated Paul to bring the gospel to Thessalonica.

Let’s begin reading in Acts 17:1-9.

The gospel motivates us to go and tell.

We remember that Paul had been saved by God while on his way to persecute Christians, but now he was the one being used by God to go and spread the message of the gospel around the world.

In Acts 16, we find out that Paul had a vision of a Macedonian man urging him to “Come over to Macedonia and help us”.

Paul, along with Silas and Timothy immediately traveled to that area.

They knew that it was a spiritually dark place, that was culturally diverse, but it would be a strategic location for further spread of the gospel.

We become passionate about the advancement of the gospel.

Acts 17:1-2 “Now when they had passed through Amphipolis and Apollonia, they came to Thessalonica, where there was a synagogue of the Jews.

And Paul went in, as was his custom”

After leaving Philippi after having experiencing much hardship, rather than being discouraged and giving up, they continue and move on to Thessalonica.

Paul immediately goes into the synagogue in hopes of advancing the gospel.

His focus is not on his comfort or benefit, but advancing the gospel.

God honors some with great suffering and grants them the grace of martyrdom, while others are not tempted beyond their strength.

But in every case it is one cross.

It is laid on every Christian.

The first Christ-suffering that everyone has to experience is the call which summons us away from our attachments to this world.

It is the death of the old self in the encounter with Jesus Christ.

Those who enter into discipleship enter into Jesus’ death.

They turn their living into dying… Whenever Christ calls us, his call leads us to death.

— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

No matter what difficulties Paul suffered, he endured it because he knew the truth he had was greater than anything in this life.

Therefore, he was not ashamed of the gospel.

We become passionate about the proclamation of the gospel.

Acts 17:2-4 “And Paul went in, as was his custom, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead, and saying, “This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ.”

And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women.”

There are no shortage of opinions of how we ought to live in our day, yet one thing that makes us as Christians distinct from the rest of the world, is that we do interpret the world through the lens of culture, or popular opinion.

We interpret the world through the lens of God’s Word.

Paul was not seeking to add another religious opinion to the mix, but to overturn everything they thought they knew to be true, and turn them to the One True God.

Notice he reasoned with them FROM the Scriptures.

He wasn’t just talking about the Bible, but talking from it.

He used the Bible to show them that Christ’s suffering and rising from the dead was prophesied from the Bible long before it happened, and was a part of God’s plan.

Jesus was the Messiah!

We see the impact of this message on those listening.

We read that in verse 4, Acts 17:4 “And some of them were persuaded and joined Paul and Silas, as did a great many of the devout Greeks and not a few of the leading women.”

The gospel had arrived in Thessalonica!

But it was about to present them with some problems…

AS YOU THINK ABOUT YOUR OWN LIFE, WHAT DO YOU THINK ARE SOME OF THE BIGGEST BARRIERS TO SHARING THE GOSPEL WITH OTHERS?

Despite these problems, we will see how…

The gospel motivates us to press on and persevere.

Acts 17:5-9 “But the Jews were jealous, and taking some wicked men of the rabble, they formed a mob, set the city in an uproar, and attacked the house of Jason, seeking to bring them out to the crowd.

And when they could not find them, they dragged Jason and some of the brothers before the city authorities, shouting, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also, and Jason has received them, and they are all acting against the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus.”

And the people and the city authorities were disturbed when they heard these things.

And when they had taken money as security from Jason and the rest, they let them go.”

There are 3 basic responses to the preaching of the gospel:

People will get angry

Anger will give rise to persecution

Some will embrace it and be saved

The message of the gospel hit very close to home with the Thessalonians, and they didn’t like it.

If Jesus was the true King, then Caesar was not.

If Jesus was the only Saviour, then all the shringes and temples were worthless monuments built to worship worthless gods.

If Jesus was in fact the Son of God, then God must be real.

And if God was indeed real, then they were accountable to Him.

They were determined to stop this message from spreading.

When Jesus Christ is faithfully preached, you don’t have to go looking for trouble; trouble will often come looking for you.

— Mark Howell