Sermon Tone Analysis

How do we live?

I ask that question very carefully because everyone has an opinion about how to answer that question.

I googled that question and got over 23 Billion hits.

I scanned through about 10 pages of answers.

A very popular answer was a Japanese book which seems to be geared to younger readers.

I was pleasantly surprised by the number of Christian websites that were within the first 10 pages of hits.

There was a Buddhist website with lots of answers on how to live for yourself.

I came across a page that seems to be the core problem within the western Church today.

The website had nothing to do with Christianity, but it reflects a problem as to why the Church seems to have become irrelevant in society.

The theme of the website was “How to live in your truth.”

One thing that I’ve learned in life is that my truth is often a bold face lie.

There have been many years of my life that I wanted things to be my way.

My truth was far different from the real truth that is found in the words of this book.

When Adam and Eve bought into the lie that Satan presented to them, all of humanity has bought into the lie that we know best.

God created us in His image.

Sin broke that image, however, God has been on a rescue mission ever sense to redeem his creation.

The rescue mission culminated with Jesus came as the Messiah.

The Ten Commandments that God spoke provide for us the foundational ethic by which we are to live.

God said:

Those first four commands reflect on our relationship with God.

The other six reflect on our relationship with each other.

They are not intended as an end all of things we are to do or not do.

You’ll remember that Jesus was asked what he thought was the greatest of all the commandments of God.

Matthew 22:36-40 “36 “Teacher, what is the greatest commandment in the Law?” 37 He replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind.

38 This is the first and greatest commandment.

39 And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself.

40 All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.””

All the commandments Jesus summed up in two, Love God with everything you go and love your neighbor as yourself.

So easy to say, but so very hard to do.

In my research I came across one website that had 101 ways to live life to the fullest.

Some of the ideas presented were good ideas, but not one of them mentioned God.

The vast majority of them focused on self which I guess was to be expected considering the list was about living life to the fullest.

Living for self, selfishness, idolatry has been the headlining sins since the Garden of Eden.

God has called us to an entirely new way of living where self dies so that we can live for Christ.

Last week I read from Peter’s first letter with that reminder

This being holy is not something that we do.

It is what God the Holy Spirit does in us.

Yes, there are things that we quit doing because God has identified them as sinful.

But this transformation is a work of the Holy Spirit.

Paul wrote in his letter to the Ephesians that we have been blessed “in Christ with every spiritual blessing that comes from heaven.”

One of those spiritual blessings is the transforming power of the Holy Spirit.

He goes on later in that letter to write in chapter 4

That old self is put away.

He said that the old self is corrupt and deluded by its lusts.

Let me just give you one example of how corrupt and deluded many who claim the name of Christ have gotten today.

I stumbled across a talk given by a priest in the Anglican Church of Australia.

The talk, I cannot bring myself to call it a sermon, it was entitled “Queer holiness and human longing for transformation.”

I would rewrite the title to that talk “Sin and the human longing to fulfill the lust of the flesh.”

That is an example of the corruptness of natural humanity, a way from God we are corrupt and deluded as Paul says.

We are dead to that old person.

Paul says that we are to “clothe ourselves with the new self.”

In Colossians Paul wrote about clothing ourselves in Christ.

Holiness is an entirely different way of living.

There is no room for sin in our lives.

The Apostle John delved into this topic.

He wrote in his first letter about forgiveness of sin and the results of that forgiveness is love because God has loved us.

Our end goal is to be like Christ.

He is holy, pure and righteous.

The goal is not to just follow a list of dos and don’ts.

John wrote

The hope that John is writing about is the hope in the return of Jesus.

This hope encourages to live a holy life, a life that is modeled after the life of Jesus.

So getting back to that question of “How do we live?”

We are to live a life of holiness and love.

Paul wrote in verse 10 of our text

Corrie Ten Boom in her book The Hiding Place tells an encounter she had long after her release from the Nazi Concentration Camp.

She spent her life telling the story of God’s forgiveness and love.

She had just spoken at a a church and a man came up to her and she recognized him as on off the S.S. Guards.

She wrote:

He came up to me as the church was emptying, beaming and bowing.

“How grateful I am for your message, fraulein,” he said.

“To think that, as you say, He has washed my sins away!”

His hand was thrust out to shake mine.

And I, who had preached so often to the people in Bloemendaal the need to forgive, kept my hand at my side.

Even as the angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them.

Jesus Christ had died for this man; was I going to ask for more?

Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him.

I tried to smile.

I struggled to raise my hand.

I could not.

I felt nothing, not the slightest spark of warmth or charity.

And so again I breathed a silent prayer.

Jesus, I cannot forgive him.

Give me your forgiveness.

As I took his hand a most incredible thing happened.

From my shoulder along my arm and through my hand a current seemed to pass from me to him, while into my heart sprang a love for this stranger that almost overwhelmed.

And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on His.

When He tells us to love, our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself (ten Boom, p.215).

David Seecombe in his commentary on this passage wrote:

as disciples we know that however faithful we may be in keeping the requirements of the law, we are not called to reach some pass mark, but to fulfil the law, to overflow it, to swallow up its ‘thou shalt nots’ with friendship and positive love, just as Jesus did.

‘Love is the fulfilment of the law.’

Love is the fulfilment of the law.

I hope we grasp that.

In the Covenant of Christian Conduct that I have been referencing the past two weeks, there is a sentence that says:

The Church of the Nazarene believes this new and holy way of life involves practices to be avoided and redemptive acts of love to be accomplished for the souls, minds, and bodies of our neighbors.

I read a story of a pastor of what was once a very large and wealthy church who had found itself in a changing community.

One day he was headed into the church “when he met a very respectable woman in the congregation – a wealthy woman, “a pillar in the church” -- having been a member all her life with parents and grandparents who had been a part of that congregation.

She could hardly walk through the hallway because of all the poor people who had come to get a meal.

With a degree of anxiety and some judgment in her voice she said, “Dr.

Bales, what on earth are you doing in the midst of all of this?”