Sermon Tone Analysis

!! Getting Real With God

!!! Angry With God?

If we believe in the sovereignty of God then we believe he could have changed things and yet he did not, and so we are angry.

One of the things that I have seen in my own life is that we have this idea of how God is supposed to act.

If we are good enough - if we do our part, if we read our Bible, if we pray, if we ask - then God is supposed to answer us and give us what we want.

The first question you ask is “God are you there?” and then the second question is “if you’re there, do you care?”

And it felt to me like God didn’t care, because if I could have stopped a war I would have.

He could have, and he didn’t.

You just exist through the silence, trying to trust but barely hanging on.

Ruth knew that God was asking her “Do you believe that I am good, no matter what you see?”

 

!!! Can God’s Will Be Painful?

 

Ruth has learned to live witht eh fact that pain and faith are not mutually exclusive.

That single understanding - to see the incredible paradox that I am able to wish the Father’s will could be different, right in the middle of obedience to that will - gave me the freedom to begin my journey back to sort out the pain issues I had denied for so long.

!!!

Is it unspiritual to experience pain?

On the contrary, some of our most profound spiritual refining can occur during the times of our greatest pain.

Christians can fall into the trap of believeing that God’s greatest desire for us is that we feel happy and good and joyful, but there’s a diference between peacefulness and happiness.

!!! Getting to the Bottom of the Problem

 

If redemption is a process, do we go on being given the same lesson over and over untiil we learn it?

“I believe that God works in layers.

And I have far more layers that need to be refined than I know about!

But in the infinite goodness and mercy of God, he starts at the top layer and he works on that.