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.
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Tone of specific sentences
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What do you do with all your family pictures?
There are some who put their pictures in shoe boxes and store them in the closet.
Others, a little more industrious, put their pictures in photo albums.
But whether they’re in a shoebox or a photo album, the pictures are stored away.
You get them out occasionally to look to view.
You recall a special time or laugh at the old styles.
Then there are the pictures you put in a frame and hang on a wall for everyone to see.
We’ve been looking at the Beatitudes on Sunday morning and in our walk through the gospel of Matthew on Wednesdays we are now coming to chapter 5 and the Beatitudes.
Since I’m preaching on them on Sundays I’m not going to cover them tonight.
Instead we will skip over them and pick up with the next passage.
However, as we think about the Beatitudes we shouldn’t think of them in terms of a check list of activities we need to complete.
“Blessed are the poor in spirit.
I’m certainly poor.
Check.
Blessed are those who mourn.
Been there, done that.”
Instead, Jesus is giving us a picture of what Christians look like.
And this is not the kind of picture that is to be put in a photo album and stored away.
This is a picture God wants the whole world to see.
When people look at our lives, what picture are they seeing?
Matthew 5:1-16 VIDEO
Like a picture you hang in a prominent place in your home so that every visitor can see it, you are God’s picture he wants everyone to see.
Notice the scope Jesus mentions.
You are the salt of what?
You are the salt of the earth.
You are the light of what?
You are the light of the world.
Jesus doesn’t limit it to Jerusalem or Israel.
He’s not limiting to the community or town we live in.
Jesus says we will have influence over the entire world.
We have a mission to show the entire world what God is like.
Think about what God is like.
There are so many adjectives we might use to describe God, but here are just a few: love, patience, grace, mercy, forgiving, and holy.
All of those and more describe who God is and what he is like.
Shouldn’t we be sharing that with the world?
Does the world see those things in us?
Can the world see God through us?
We are the salt of the earth and the light of the world.
SALT
We’re familiar with the analogy of salt.
Salt is used preserve meet.
Without it the meet would quickly turn rancid.
With the salt they were able to keep the meet edible for lengthy periods of time.
In the same way Christians help preserve the society they are in.
What would our country be like if there were no Christians?
What would the world be like today?
There are many that like to point to how far cultures have improved over the years.
Cultures are not as barbaric as they once were.
But how many of those improvements are a result of the teachings of Jesus lived out in his followers?
We are a preserving agent to the society around us.
Salt is used to flavor food.
I like salt, though we don’t use a lot of salt in our food.
I have a friend who the first thing he does when he eats out is salt his food.
Before he takes the first bite he’s pouring more salt on it than I would use in a month.
We just start passing him salt shakers when we sit down because we know he’s going to want one.
He likes salt.
People may differ on how much salt they like on their food, but salt gives flavor.
Christians give flavor to the communities in which they live by their acts of grace and mercy.
Salt creates thirst.
The saltier something is the more you want something to drink.
Some have said movie theatres deliberately over salt their popcorn so movie goers will buy more drinks.
I don’t think that true since they give free refills on the drinks, but both the popcorn and drinks are very expensive.
Like salt that creates thirst, as Christians we are to live in such a way that people want to know more about God.
Salt was a symbol of purity in the Roman world.
Salt symbolized purity in part because of the process they went through to get the salt.
Their primary source for salt was sea water which had to be evaporated in in the sun.
Christians are to be pure and holy.
In the Roman world soldiers were sometimes paid with salt.
Our word “salary” comes from the Latin word for salt.
We get the phrase “worth their salt” from this as well.
Because salt was so important it had a great value.
Are Christians of value in the culture today?
Jesus said that we are the salt of the earth.
We are to preserve, flavor, and add value to the world around us.
Our role is not to be against the culture.
That’s what we see so much of.
That’s what the world sees so much of.
The vast majority of teenagers and young adults, when asked about their views of Christians and the church mention what the church is against.
We are against many things.
For example, we do not favor abortion.
We do not favor homosexuality or same sex marriages.
However, the world only sees is the things we’re against even though there is so much more that Christians do to help others.
Even when the culture is completely against the things of God we are not to be against the culture, we are to enrich the culture.
The Scottish translate the word “savor” by using the more expressive word tang.
I like their word.
Listen to how it sounds.
“You are the tang of the earth.”
That adds a little to it since we aren’t used to hearing it that way.
Are we a tang to the community?
Now listen to the rest of the verse.
“You are the tang of the earth, but if the salt has lost its tang how can it be made tangy again?”
One commentator wrote:
The problem today is too many church members have not only lost their tang as salt, but as pepper they have lost their pep also.
As disciples of Jesus we have one great function – we are to be the salt of the earth by living out the picture of discipleship Jesus described in the Beatitudes and throughout the rest of the Sermon on the Mount.
If we fail to exhibit this spiritual reality, if we fail to live differently than the world around us, then we will have lost our saltiness.
We will have lost what makes us distinctively Christians.
And we will have lost what we need to be heard by those around us.
It would be like salt losing its saltiness.
I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t make sense.
If there is no saltiness there is no salt.
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