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
0.06UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.06UNLIKELY
Fear
0.09UNLIKELY
Joy
0.62LIKELY
Sadness
0.63LIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.59LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.63LIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.56LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.87LIKELY
Extraversion
0.13UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.96LIKELY
Emotional Range
0.47UNLIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
We are in full swing, getting ready for Christmas!
For us, this is a super busy, exciting time of year.
There are plenty of activities for us to enjoy, and the kids bring such laughter and fun, since they are still young enough to enjoy the magic of Christmas.
I have to be honest, though.
I don’t love everything about this season.
The kids are
However, for many of us, this season isn’t much fun.
In fact, it honestly is pretty painful.
I’m not a scrooge or anything.
I really do love Christmas.
But sometimes, when we are heading in different directions as a family, stressed and sometimes short with each other, I can feel a little isolated.
Even though I am surrounded by family and friends, we are often so busy that we don’t take time to connect.
It can honestly get lonely, can’t it?
For some of us, there are even more noticeable reasons for loneliness at Christmas.
You may be an older adult, and the kids are gone and off living their own lives now, so you don’t have those joyful faces around the tree anymore.
You may be facing Christmas without your spouse, who you lost to either divorce or death.
You may be single this Christmas, wishing you had someone there to celebrate with.
Maybe you are a college student or a teenager, and you are caught in that in-between where you haven’t started a career yet, you don’t have a family of your own, and you just don’t feel like you fit anywhere.
You might be here this morning, and you are somewhere in the middle, but you are still lonely.
From the outside, your marriage and family look wonderful, you have a job, it seems like everything is together.
What no one sees, though, is the fact that you sleep back to back, as far apart as possible, because you and your spouse aren’t even in the same book, much less on the same page together.
Careers and kids have drawn you apart, and you feel isolated and alone.
s together.
What no one sees, though, is the fact that you sleep back to back because you and your spouse aren’t even in the same book, much less on the same page together.
Careers and kids have drawn you apart, and you feel isolated and alone.
By the way, men, don’t think that I am just talking about women here.
Although our friendships and relationships often look different, we still know the isolation, the pain, and the insecurity that loneliness brings, even if we won’t own it.
Christmas can be an incredibly lonely time.
I don’t want, in any way, to make light of the loneliness you feel this Christmas.
I don’t want to downplay it or overlook it at all.
However, I see a paradox here.
The very event that causes us to realize our loneliness is the very event that set events into motion to give us the answer to our problem!
You see, Christmas offers hope in the face of our deepest loneliness.
No, not the overly commercialized Christmas as seen on TV.
No, not the Hallmark Christmas where you fall in love with your old high school sweetheart, move back home, and save the town Christmas program.
It isn’t found in thousands of Christmas lights or in a Red Ryder BB gun.
For Christmas to bring you hope in the face of loneliness, you have to look back to the very beginning.
That’s what we’re going to do this morning.
If you have a Bible, open it up to .
We are going to read all these verses, but I really want to focus in on one phrase in verse 23.
If you walk out of here and only remember one thing, I want you to remember this: Christmas gives hope because God is with us.
We are going to do something unusual for us this morning.
We normally like to break one passage apart and look at in depth, but today, we are going to try to take this one phrase and see why it is so earth-shattering.
To do that, we are going to take a walk through Scripture together.
If you’re not familiar with the Bible, don’t worry; we are going to try to explain what is going on as best we can so you can leave here knowing just how incredible Christmas is.
If you are familiar with all this, I pray that the truths we cover today will help lighten the load of loneliness on your heart this Christmas as you hear again just how amazing it is that God would come to us.
Let’s start off by acknowledging a foundational truth: God is always present everywhere and always has been.
Theologians call this God’s omnipresence.
In , as soon as God finishes creating everything, we see that the Holy Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the earth.
It’s a great picture to us of God’s presence from the very beginning of the world.
He always has been present and always will be.
Perhaps the clearest statement of that is in :
No matter how high I go up into heaven or how low into hell, how far I travel to the east or to the west, God’s presence is everywhere.
In fact, God himself says he fills the heavens and the earth with his presence:
There is no place in all creation where God can’t be found.
He is present everywhere!
That is a good thing and a hard thing, isn’t it?
It’s good, because that means God never misses anything.
Nothing could ever happen to you that God doesn’t know about.
It is also challenging, because that means God never misses anything—God sees every sinful choice and every selfish thought.
He is present everywhere.
Well, if God is present everywhere, then why do we feel alone?
I want to be careful how I say this, because I don’t want to give the impression that God was somehow disconnected from his creation before Jesus, because he was still fully involved and engaged with us.
God created us to have perfect relationships with him, with each other, and even with nature itself.
He speaks, works miracles, and even appears to people throughout the Bible.
Yet, we chose to break that relationship by doing what we wanted instead of what God said.
Yet, when Jesus comes, something changes.
God told Adam and Eve that if they chose to disobey, they would die.
However, before Jesu
Keep in mind that the key concept of death is separation.
When you die physically, you are separated from life on this earth.
When God told them they would die, they didn’t realize what that meant.
They would eventually die physically, but they immediately died spiritually and relationally.
That’s why they hid from God in :
God was still present, and he was even showing his presence in a unique way by coming and visiting with them.
Now that they had sinned, they were alone and isolated, so they run and hid.
Our deepest loneliness goes back to that moment: Sin makes us spiritually dead, so we are separated from God.
That loneliness finds its way into every relationship, and the Bible shows that we have tried to soothe that ache in our hearts in all kinds of ways.
In , you have the story of Jacob, Rachel, and Leah.
Leah forgot the lessons she learned and would later try again to make her husband love her by having more children.
However, no matter how hard she tried, she always felt alone.
Years later, God delivered the nation of Israel from slavery in Egypt.
He used Moses to lead them.
Then, God called Moses up onto a mountain for 40 days, telling him what his people needed to know.
The people worried that Moses had disappeared, so they felt alone in the wilderness.
Here was their solution:
They couldn’t find Moses and felt isolated from God, so they decided to make their own.
We do the same thing.
Serving God can be challenging, so we decide instead that we want a God we can see, so we serve our jobs or our families or our appetites.
Yet, just like God rebuked the Israelites,
We want God with us, and we want him on our terms.
However, we never find him by making a god of our own.
Even David -
Israel would actually spend hundreds of years trying to work their way back to God.
Over and over again, they would get drawn away from the one true God to worshiping false Gods they could see.
It was so much easier to worship a god they could see than the God who didn’t show himself anymore.
For years, God would send them prophets, warning them to come back to him or he would bring judgement on them for their idolatry.
Finally, God did.
He pulled his hand of protection off the nation of Israel and allowed them to be carried into exile.
Jerusalem would eventually fall, and in that moment, it seemed like God had completely abandoned the nation.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9