Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction:

Illustration:

All successful football teams have a 12th player—the crowd.

The volume and enthusiasm of the home-field audience can make the difference between a win and a loss.

In the frenzy of a game, it’s hard to sit still and keep quiet.

The same is true whenever we have good news.

We can’t hold it in.

We want to share.

In Scripture, we see the same principle at work about sharing spiritual truth.

1. Good News Is for Sharing (2 Kings 6:24–7:9).

The city of Samaria was under siege; within was famine and starvation.

Outside the walls were four lepers who decided to defect to the enemy in hopes of staying alive.

Approaching the opposing camp, they found it deserted and began helping themselves to food and provisions.

Suddenly, coming to their senses, they said, “We do not well: this day is a day of good tidings, and we hold our peace...”.

It isn’t right when we discover the wonderful news of Christ, but don’t pass it on.

2. Bottles 'bout to Burst (Job 32:15–21).

Young Elihu described himself as “full of matter... .the

spirit within me constraineth me.

Behold, my belly is as a wine which hath no vent; It is ready to burst like new bottles.

I will speak, that I may be refreshed..”.

How descriptive of Christians who are filled with the Spirit.

3. A Gospel Geyser (Ps.

39:1–3).

David decides to keep his mouth shut, but, “My heart was hot within me; while I was musing, the fire burned.”

We need a fire in our belly, spilling over into the lava of a loving witness.

4. A Fire in the Bones (Jer.

20:1–9).

Jeremiah had been beaten and humiliated in the stocks for his preaching.

In reaction, he tells the Lord he is quitting the ministry.

But the fire in his bones would not be quenched.

Vance Havner said that Jeremiah did not merely have something to say; he had to say something.

In one of his messages, Havner asked why we don’t have a similar “bone fire.”

Turning to Acts 19:19, he read about the Ephesians who, coming to Christ, burned their sinful paraphernalia in a bonfire.

Havner suggested we can’t have bone fire until we have a bonfire.

Hearts Afire

But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing and I could not stay.

- Jeremiah 20:9.

Did not our heart burn within us while he talked with us by the way and while he opened to us the scriptures? - Luke 24:32.

Those of us who are tempted to get under the juniper because of the condition of the church might do well to ponder the spiritual state of England two hundred years ago.

It was a dark hour.

As someone has put it, "The Puritans had been buried and the Methodists were not yet born."

In one section only one Bible could be found and that was used to prop up a flower-pot.

It was publicly advertised in front of drinking places that one could get drunk for one penny and dead drunk for two.

France had gone into infidelity and England would have followed had not a young preacher on May 24, 1738, attended a meeting on Aldersgate Street and felt his own heart strangely warmed.

The course of a nation was changed because one preacher had a heartwarming.

John Wesley did more to make England over than all the experts and reformers.

This old world is in a sad way now, and lately it has almost been wrecked by hotheads.

The only hope, as in Wesley's day, is a spiritual revival, and that calls, not for hot heads, of which we have a plenty even in the church, but for hot hearts.

You recognize the texts.

In the first, Jeremiah is ready to quit preaching.

He is like that preacher who wanted to resign but who was impressed within that what he needed was not to resign but to have his commission re-signed.

He tried to quit but couldn't.

He developed a bone-fire.

Here was a prophet with a holy fever, a preacher running a spiritual temperature, a man of God with a burning heart.

The other text brings us to the Emmaus disciples after those exciting crucifixion days in Jerusalem.

They were trudging along a country road, half-believing, half-doubting, suffering a let-down both in body and spirit, when the Lord caught up with them.

They were right in their facts: "This is the third day."

But they were wrong in their conclusions, for, since it was the third day, they should have been expecting to see the risen Christ around any bend of the road.

They were right in their chronology and in their theology, but they had no doxology.

And even when the Lord did appear, their eyes were holden, He was a veiled Christ.

But when He expounded the Scriptures they developed a holy heartburn, which led to an experience that stirred their hearts and turned them into radiant witnesses.

Their plight before their hearts were warmed is typical of thousands of orthodox Christians today.

At the bottom of all our troubles lies unreality in our Christian experience.

We are walking with a veiled Christ.

We need a holy heartburn.

A. J. Gordon once classified some obstreperous church members as "figureheads, soreheads and deadheads."

He might have added "hotheads," of which there is always an abundance.

But a man may have a hot head and a cold heart.

Christmas Evans, just out of a theological controversy, was convicted of a cold heart as he rode along through the mountains one Saturday afternoon, traveling on horseback to preach next day.

Great preacher that he was, he needed a heartwarming and got it after hours in prayer.

Alexander Whyte was wont to watch the radiant throngs that emerged from Mr. Moody's great meetings in those Pentecostal days during the mission to the British Isles.

Their hearts had been warmed by the ministry of the Spirit.

Mr. Moody went to Scotland some years after the Disruption and found the churches cold and divided.

But he did not go to Scotland as an expert; he went as an evangelist, exulting in the grace of God.

A witness said, "It seemed as though someone had set to music a tune that had been haunting thousands of ears."

He warmed their hearts.

One thinks of the professor who wrote a very learned book on love.

The only defect was, the professor had never been in love.

When he took the manuscript to a typist to have it prepared for the publisher, the typist turned out to be a very lovely lady, and when their eyes met something happened to the professor that was not in the book.

He was happier in five minutes with love in his heart than he had been in thirty years with love in his head.

Something like that needs to happen to a lot of fundamentalists.

Some of our churches are frozen together when they should be melted together.

We have plenty of orthodoxy, plenty of teaching, plenty of activity; there is an abundance of good things, and in the midst of it all we are like a cat drowning in cream.

There is plenty of discussion of revivals, causes of revival, hindrances to revival, ways and means of revival: the only thing lacking is revival.

We agree that it is the work of the Spirit, but here again we spend our time arguing over the expressions and missing the experience.

Baptism, filling, enduement, victorious life, perfect love, full surrender—we are like a crowd of beggars discussing the merits of different kinds of pocketbooks and all of them "broke"!

We are afraid of extremism, until we are guilty of the worst extremism of all, the extremism of impotence.

Some of us are so afraid that we shall "get out on a limb" that we never get up the tree!

Whatever you choose to call it, we need a heartwarming, a heavenly bone-fire, a holy heartburn.

Our heads and hands have outrun our hearts.

We have forgotten that the way forward is not head first but heart first.

We have been wagging our heads and working our hands instead of warming our hearts.

To be "fervent in spirit" is to be "boiling in spirit," and to boil we must be near the Fire.

How shall we obtain the burning heart?

Jeremiah said it was God's Word that did it and it was Jesus expounding the Scriptures that did it and it was while listening to Luther's exposition of Romans that Wesley's heart was warmed.

There is, indeed, the strange fire that Nadab and Abihu offered instead of supernatural fire from above.

There is the false fire of Isaiah 50:11: "Behold, all ye that kindle a fire, that compass yourselves about with sparks: walk in the light of your fire, and in the sparks that ye have kindled.

This shall ye have of mine hand, ye shall lie down in sorrow."

There is the Divine Fire which is the gift of God, and this fire Paul urged Timothy to stir up within him.

Every Christian has the Holy Spirit, but the fire often dies down, and he must needs wait on God through the Word and prayer and rekindle the flame until the love of God is shed afresh in his heart, for, like Ephesus of old, we leave our first love, and because iniquity abounds our love grows cold.

It takes time to do that, not because God is reluctant but because we are rebellious.

It takes effort, for we must apply the means of grace.