Sermon Tone Analysis

On this day that Christians around the United States celebrate as Sanctity of Life Sunday, we will have the honor in a few hours of celebrating the life of Judy Kovalik, a dear sister in Christ who departed this life a week ago today.

And as I considered my message for this week’s worship service, I looked at the series that we’ve been working our way through — one that I’ve titled Time for Something New — and I realized I’d made a mistake in the order of the messages I plan to present.

We’ve already talked about the new heart and the new Spirit we receive, by God’s grace.

And we’ve talked about how believers are made into new creatures with new ambitions because of their faith.

I had planned to talk this week about the Bible’s promise of a new name for those who are overcomers in Christ.

But then, I realized we can never BE overcomers if we are not alive in Christ.

And so, I saw that I needed to switch sermon topics this week and talk, instead, about the new life we are promised as believers.

And, when I noticed that this was Sanctity of Life Sunday, I thought, “Oh, how appropriate!”

But then, I realized that we’d also be burying Judy today, and I wondered whether this message might not be the wrong one to deliver, after all.

What I came to understand, as I struggled through the sadness of this week, and as I spent time with Rich and then worked on the message for Judy’s memorial was this: The only reason there is any hope in the midst of such a loss is that Jesus died and rose again so that those who follow Him in faith might have LIFE.

And then I realized that, as He so often does, God was working all things together for good, even in the planning of this message today.

He showed me the connection between this church’s support of a ministry that saves the lives of unborn babies and the joy we can have in the knowledge that the spirit of Judy Kovalik is alive in Christ, waiting in heaven for the day when she will be reunited with her resurrected and glorified body and the day when her savior and mine will make ALL things new.

And so, we turn our attention to the third promise of newness to believers, the promise of a new life.

The Apostle John waits until the second-to-last chapter of his book to tell us his Holy Spirit-inspired purpose for writing the Gospel of John.

But when he does so, John gives us his Gospel’s purpose statement in words clearer than just about any we see elsewhere in Scripture.

We see that purpose statement in John 20:30-31:

Jesus performed many miracles throughout His three-year ministry here on earth.

And he performed these signs and miracles out of love for the people who benefitted from them.

But even more than that, He performed them to demonstrate the authority of the message He was bringing mankind from God.

The idea was that someone who could do such impossible things as restore sight to the blind, make lame people walk, and raise others from the dead MUST have been sent from God and with God’s authority.

And if that person came from God, then the things he said must also have come from God.

And so, what John says here in verse 31 is that he has described the miracles in his Gospel so that those who would read about them in later times might believe that Jesus is who He said he is: the promised Messiah-Savior and the very Son of God.

And the result of that belief, John says here, is LIFE.

Life in Jesus’ name.

Now, most of you have heard me say before that the word “life” in the Bible means more than simply a physical description of biological processes.

And I wanted to start today’s message with this verse, because I think it’s clearer here than, perhaps, anywhere else in Scripture that this is the case.

We can tell from verse 31 that John isn’t talking about life in the sense of the physical act of a heart beating and lungs respirating.

We can tell that, because the people John expected to read this Gospel are people who are already experiencing those biological processes.

If they weren’t alive physically, they wouldn’t be reading or hearing his words.

And that’s a key to understanding some other important things in the Bible, too.

Think, for example, about what God told Adam and Eve would be the result of eating from the forbidden tree of the knowledge of good and evil back in the Garden of Eden.

We see this all the way back in Genesis, chapter 2.

Now, you know the story.

Adam and Eve were tempted to eat from that tree by the serpent.

He told them they’d be like God if they did so, and they wanted the ability to choose for themselves what was good and what was evil, just as we do today.

And so, they ate the fruit from that one forbidden tree.

And they DID die, but in Genesis, chapter 5, we learn that Adam lived to be 930 years old and that he had fathered many children with Eve.

So what happened?

God had said that if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, "in the day that you eat from it, you will surely die.”

So, why didn’t they die that very day?

Well, there are two things going on here.

First, God is gracious and merciful and loving.

And if he had not allowed fallen mankind to procreate, then He would have had no way to demonstrate His great grace and mercy.

And so, just as He has for all mankind since that time, God demonstrated His patience and His grace and His mercy by forestalling His final judgment on sinful mankind.

But the second thing that’s going on in God’s statement in verse 17 is something that’s easier to understand when we know that Jesus came to give LIFE to those who were already physically alive.

For mankind, at least, there is more to true life than biological processes.

There is a spiritual component to life that Scripture tells us is even more important than the biological component.

And it was this spiritual component that died for Adam and Eve the very day they sinned against God in the Garden of Eden.

You see, what they had been given when they were created and placed in that garden was a life of contentment in the presence of and in complete dependence upon God.

He walked in the garden in their midst, and He provided everything they needed for peace and contentment.

But when they sinned against Him, they chose to turn away from their calling to demonstrate the character of the God in whose image they had been made.

Instead, they chose to take upon themselves the character of Satan, the deceiver who had appeared to them in the form of a serpent.

They wanted to make God into their OWN image, rather than displaying His image in them.

They rebelled against God.

They rebelled against their Creator-King.

They severed the very connection for which they had been made.

They could no longer be in the presence of a perfectly holy and righteous God, because they had chosen unrighteousness.

And so, they were cast out of the Garden and out of God’s presence.

They were spiritually dead, even as their bodies began to decay.

“Dying, you shall die.”

That’s the literal translation of the Hebrew in verse 17. “In the day that you eat from it, dying you shall die.”

Their bodies would slowly die, and while their bodies died, they would be spiritually dead.

And we won’t spend time going through it, but if you look at the last half of chapter 4 in Genesis, what you’ll see is a long list of Adam’s descendants, all the way through Noah.

Each one is named, along with his firstborn son, and each one’s lifespan is listed.

The repetition is important.

“He lived, and he died.

He lived and he died.

He lived and he died.”

And the point is that death now reigned on the earth.

In their disobedience, Adam and Eve created a problem that we still have with us today.

Where there is sin, there is death.

We see the physical manifestation of sin’s effect on the world in stark terms on days like today, when we gather to bury a loved one.

And we see the spiritual manifestations of it every day on the front pages of newspapers, in the broken homes of children whose fathers have deserted them, in friendships shattered by greed and adultery, in the poverty-stricken streets of Haiti or Nicaragua or so many other places.

There is no place we can turn our gaze upon the earth that is not stricken by the spiritual consequences of sin.

And that’s because, as the psalmist wrote, “There is none righteous; no not one.”

Each one of us, as the Apostle Paul wrote, is “dead in our trespasses.”

We are the walking dead.

The biological processes that animate our physical bodies may be pumping our hearts and moving our lungs, but the life that matters most — the spiritual life of fellowship with the God who MADE us for that — is DOA.

We cannot have that fellowship with God for which we were made any more than Adam and Eve could have it after they’d sinned against Him.

And the reason is the same: We are all sinners; we’ve all fallen short of God’s perfect standards.

We’ve all rebelled against Him in small ways and great ways.

They severed the connection with Him.

But we confirm that we’re just like they were every time we lie, every time we cheat, every time we steal, every time we think hateful thoughts about someone else, every time we put our own desires above the needs of others, every time we gossip or quarrel or deceive.

And make no mistake: We’re not just sinners because we sin.

We sin, because we are sinners.

We have inherited the image of our first parents, those first sinners, and we are born into slavery to sin.

We are born subjected to sin and therefore subjected to death, both physical and spiritual.

That’s at the root of a Christian doctrine known as “total depravity.”

Total depravity doesn’t mean that we’re as bad as we can possibly be.

Rather, it means that every part of us is infected by sin.

And because we are so infected, we are separated from a holy God; that most important relationship is dead to us.

But God is good.

And God is gracious and merciful.

And God loves us.

And so, He sent Jesus, his unique and eternal Son to live among us as a man.

He experienced all of the temptations that we experience, and yet He did not sin.

He was obedient and in perfect fellowship with God throughout His life.

And because of Jesus’ great love for mankind, He gave Himself as a sacrifice at the cross, taking upon Himself all of our sins — yours and mine — and the just penalty for those sins.

He suffered both physical death and the spiritual death of separation from God at the cross so that we who follow Him in faith can have the life that truly matters, the life for which we were all created, the spiritual life of eternal fellowship with God.

And in His resurrection from the dead on the third day, Jesus demonstrated that He has the power to keep His promise of bodily resurrection for those who have followed Him in faith.