Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Customizing our identity and human transcendence

Almost two weeks ago I attended a very large IT conference hosted in Las Vegas called vmworld.

The conference was tailored to IT professionals, from network engineers and server administrators to help desk support agents.

The conference was made up of labs, classes and vendor expos over the course of 4 days.

And during the last general session of the conference they had several technology innovators give very insightful and inspirational presentations.

One of the presenters was Hugh Herr, head of the biomechatronic research group at MIT.

He spent a majority of is presentation demonstrating the advancements they’ve made in robotic prosthesis.

He himself had lost both of his legs from just below the knee in an ice climbing accident after being caught in a blizzard.

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Hugh had walked fluidly out onto the stage with his robotic prosthesis, demonstrating the incredible advancements his team had made in restoring appendage functionality using computer robotics.

His story is certainly amazing, because he’s now even able to rock climb at a more advanced level than before his accident.

It wasn’t until the end that his presentation took an unexpected turn.

As he concluded he displayed a very explicit image of one of his colleagues on the massive screen.

She was covered in what looked like leopard spots in an attempt to make herself look like some kind of cat.

Hugh went on to say that it’s technologies like these that will expand human transcendence, and that technologies like these will allow people to customize their identities.

He continued by saying that technologies like these will open the door for us to be able customize our children.

The crowd of 10-15K conference attendees rose to their feet to give these concluding remarks a standing ovation.

Nashville Statement

Preamble

Evangelical Christians at the dawn of the twenty-first century find themselves living in a period of historic transition.

As Western culture has become increasingly post-Christian, it has embarked upon a massive revision of what it means to be a human being.

By and large the spirit of our age no longer discerns or delights in the beauty of God’s design for human life.

Many deny that God created human beings for his glory, and that his good purposes for us include our personal and physical design as male and female.

It is common to think that human identity as male and female is not part of God’s beautiful plan, but is, rather, an expression of an individual’s autonomous preferences.

The pathway to full and lasting joy through God’s good design for his creatures is thus replaced by the path of shortsighted alternatives that, sooner or later, ruin human life and dishonor God.

This secular spirit of our age presents a great challenge to the Christian church.

Will the church of the Lord Jesus Christ lose her biblical conviction, clarity, and courage, and blend into the spirit of the age?

Or will she hold fast to the word of life, draw courage from Jesus, and unashamedly proclaim his way as the way of life?

Will she maintain her clear, counter-cultural witness to a world that seems bent on ruin?

This secular spirit of our age presents a great challenge to the Christian church.

Will the church of the Lord Jesus Christ lose her biblical conviction, clarity, and courage, and blend into the spirit of the age?

Or will she hold fast to the word of life, draw courage from Jesus, and unashamedly proclaim his way as the way of life?

Will she maintain her clear, counter-cultural witness to a world that seems bent on ruin?

We are persuaded that faithfulness in our generation means declaring once again the true story of the world and of our place in it—particularly as male and female.

Christian Scripture teaches that there is but one God who alone is Creator and Lord of all.

To him alone, every person owes glad-hearted thanksgiving, heart-felt praise, and total allegiance.

This is the path not only of glorifying God, but of knowing ourselves.

To forget our Creator is to forget who we are, for he made us for himself.

And we cannot know ourselves truly without truly knowing him who made us.

We did not make ourselves.

We are not our own.

Our true identity, as male and female persons, is given by God.

It is not only foolish, but hopeless, to try to make ourselves what God did not create us to be.

We are persuaded that faithfulness in our generation means declaring once again the true story of the world and of our place in it—particularly as male and female.

Christian Scripture teaches that there is but one God who alone is Creator and Lord of all.

To him alone, every person owes glad-hearted thanksgiving, heart-felt praise, and total allegiance.

This is the path not only of glorifying God, but of knowing ourselves.

To forget our Creator is to forget who we are, for he made us for himself.

And we cannot know ourselves truly without truly knowing him who made us.

We did not make ourselves.

We are not our own.

Our true identity, as male and female persons, is given by God.

It is not only foolish, but hopeless, to try to make ourselves what God did not create us to be.

We believe that God’s design for his creation and his way of salvation serve to bring him the greatest glory and bring us the greatest good.

God’s good plan provides us with the greatest freedom.

Jesus said he came that we might have life and have it in overflowing measure.

He is for us and not against us.

Therefore, in the hope of serving Christ’s church and witnessing publicly to the good purposes of God for human sexuality revealed in Christian Scripture, we offer the following affirmations and denials.

We believe that God’s design for his creation and his way of salvation serve to bring him the greatest glory and bring us the greatest good.

God’s good plan provides us with the greatest freedom.

Jesus said he came that we might have life and have it in overflowing measure.

He is for us and not against us.

Therefore, in the hope of serving Christ’s church and witnessing publicly to the good purposes of God for human sexuality revealed in Christian Scripture, we offer the following affirmations and denials.

God made us

”So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

God’s natural created order is instructive

God’s natural order of creating us male and female is instructive, our biological sex is an indication of God’s sexual purpose and design for our lives, whether he intends that we would be male or female, so look no further than the biological frame you posses.

To many of us this goes without saying, but the reality of our day is that this very basic understanding of who we are as men and women is being challenged, even more than that, the basic understanding that our biology corresponds to our God given gender is being attacked.

God owns us

says, “Know that the Lord Himself is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves;”

If God made us then God owns us.

If God created us then God has supreme authority over us.

We are not the makers of our own reality, God is.

Exchanging the glory of God for images resembling mortal man

We are not the masters of our own domain, we do not have the authority (let alone the ability, no matter the technological advancement) to make ourselves into the image of anything else, we are not gods.

And to reject God’s created order is to reject God himself.

He is our creator, and if he is our creator then he owns us.

We are not our own, we are God’s workmanship.

And describes man’s sinful rejection of God this way,

We are not the masters of our own domain, we do not have the authority (let alone the ability, no matter the technological advancement) to make ourselves into the image of anything else, we are not gods.

And to reject God’s created order is to reject God himself.

He is our creator, and if he is our creator then he owns us.

We are not our own, we are God’s workmanship.

describes this behavior quite candidly,

22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, 25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever!

Amen.

26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions.

For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

Objective truth

As Christians we have an external authority and an objective truth by which we live by, and we are not at liberty (nor are we even ultimately capable) of overthrowing such authority.

To deny the objective truth given to us by God is to deny the very nose on our face.

As Christians this was the kind of darkened thinking that we were mercifully saved from, and it was not of our own doing, but the grace of God.

Such were some of you...

In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthian church in chapter 6 verse 9 he writes,

9 Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

11 And such were some of you.

But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

Do not give approval to those who practice sin

Continuing in Paul writes,