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
0.1UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.1UNLIKELY
Fear
0.08UNLIKELY
Joy
0.66LIKELY
Sadness
0.46UNLIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.58LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.62LIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.84LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.73LIKELY
Extraversion
0.51LIKELY
Agreeableness
0.96LIKELY
Emotional Range
0.38UNLIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
Well, we are coming off of the single most important holiday of the season.
Valentine's Day.
Am I right?
Like, this is this is the greatest holiday ever.
Now, here's the thing.
I've discovered that Valentine's Day is quite polarizing, right?
Some people hate it.
And those people that hate it, they love to dog the people who love it.
And some people love it.
And the people who love it, they love to dog the people who hate it.
We all have opinions about Valentine's Day.
Like we all have opinions about our pizzas, right?
Some of us swear by one pizza.
And if you agree, great!
But if you if you differ from that, then you are absolutely wrong!
I wonder if we ever make our opinions, idols.
But that's not the topic for today.
That's another story.
We are continuing on our God's at War series where we are looking at idols.
And what we've been kind of saying is that every day these things battle for our attention, our time, our resources, our families.
Some of these idols are easily recognized and others are more subtle.
As we allow them into our lives, they feed off our true desires, our hungers and our wants.
We think they bring fulfillment and purpose.
But before long, they take control, they grip us tightly and they convince us that they belong.
And we find ourselves at war with these idols, these false gods.
And oftentimes we surrender ourselves to these idols.
And so we've been looking at what some of these different idols are over the past handful of weeks.
And so, coming off of Valentine's Day, we are fittingly going to continue with this series and we're going to talk about the idol of love.
Now love is quite prevalent in our culture, right?
That's kind of an obvious thing to say.
Again, we just got off of Valentine's Day.
It's a day where our infatuation with love is on full display:
the roses - the roses that you can buy a week before Valentine's are now three times the price for Valentine's week.
The candy - the candy that you can buy Chelsea got me heart candy heart, with little chocolates and at Russell Stover, like this.
They usually have like 20 different pieces of candy, we open that thing up and there were there were, I think seven or eight pieces of candy.
And it cost the same if not more!
the chocolate, the candy, the dining reservations, that you have to book no less than a month and a half out in order to get anywhere good.
But it's not just February 14 that touts the idea of love.
It is literally all over the place.
Think of the hallmark movies, the rom coms, the bachelor, and then the Bachelorette.
And even shows like Chicago Fire and Chicago Med and Chicago PD that are seemingly about something else - shows about our public servants and the work that they do on a day in and day out basis.
But the reality is, they are simply another avenue to paint the love story.
And then there's the more extreme portrayals of Love.
TV shows like love Island.
If you've never watched it, maybe you should consider yourself lucky.
And there's a show called Love is blind, where people get married to people that they've never even seen.
I think that they even talk to each other through a wall and then they finally see each other down the road.
And if that weren't enough, there's a love is blind Brazil edition.
And then there's a love is blind Japan edition.
I even saw that there is a show called dating on the spectrum that follows people on the spectrum as they look for love.
The list goes on and on and on.
And we haven't even mentioned the songs about love and we can't go on because we will be here forever talking about all of this stuff about love.
And don't mishear me.
I'm not bashing any of it.
I love love!
The romanticizing of love in and of itself is not bad.
I think though as we've talked about with all of these idols, it's not that they are necessarily in and of themselves bad.
It's when this kind of love becomes the sole pursuit of our lives.
In other words, when it becomes idolatry, that's when it becomes a problem.
Now some of you like the dysfunctional aspects of love show.
Some of you really dig some of those shows I mentioned and others simply because of the dysfunctional nature of love that is portrayed.
Some of you have all of those shows queued up on your Netflix and you love the dysfunction.
No shame!
But can I introduce you this morning to another option for you to find these dysfunctional love stories?
It's the Bible.
And I want to invite you this morning into one of those stories.
We're going to be in Genesis chapter 29.
This morning, and if you'd like I would invite you to follow along, We're not going to read the entire story but we will we will pick up in a minute in Genesis 29.
This is a story that has lots of dysfunction.
I also want to say from the beginning that there are lots of directions that this story could go.
And the things that I'm kind of pulling out of this story for this particular sermon, are no way intended to minimize some of the other stuff that may be found in here.
In fact, there are some things in this story that will leave you scratching your head and wondering why is it happening that way?
I don't want to minimize that.
But that's simply not where we're going to land today.
In Genesis 29, we find the makings of a true love story, the kind you would expect to find on reality TV.
It's a love story that takes an unexpected turn, like many love stories do.
It begins when a man named Jacob falls in love with a young woman named Rachel.
Now we don't have time, again, to read the entire story of Jacob and Rachel.
But let me catch you up to where we're at.
Jacob, the second born son of Isaac was the brother of Esau.
Now if you remember Jacob receives, or rather Jacob steals, Isaac's blessings.
And he goes on his way.
He goes about in hopes of finding family to work for, after stealing, Isaac's blessing.
And as he goes on his way, he happens upon some flocks of sheep.
Come to find out, this was the flock of Laban, which happened to be Jacob's maternal uncle.
Again, there are parts of this story that are just weird, and there's weird parts of love stories throughout the Bible.
And it just is what it is.
And we can't get sidetracked with that this morning.
So, Jacob comes upon this flock of sheep and finds out it's Laban’s flock.
Laban is kind of who he was looking for.
And the shepherds that were there watching the flock, they sent for Laban at Jacob’s request.
And while Jacob was waiting for Laban, Laban’s second born daughter, Rachel came to where Jacob was waiting with the flock.
Now, this is one of those kind of classic romance movie scenes here, right?
Jacob is there among the sheep, and he's waiting for Laban to come in from a distance he sees this beautiful young lady walking towards him.
And it's just like, it's just like the movies portray.
He sees her from a distance.
And as she comes closer, she starts to come into focus.
And it is just love at first sight.
And so Rachel comes to where Jacob is, with the flocks.
And the Bible tells us that Jacob greets her with a kiss.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9