Sermon Tone Analysis

*Mark 12:30; John 4:24*

 

/July 11, 2004/

/by// J. David Hoke/

 

      John Bisagno, former pastor of Houston’s First Baptist Church tells the story of his coming there to candidate for the position of pastor many years ago.

He said that as he entered the auditorium it was dimly lit, with just a few people huddled together.

They were singing some old slow funeral type song that was depressing.

Later that day he took a walk in downtown Houston and came upon a jewelry store.

It was some sort of grand opening and there were bright lights and a greeter at the door to welcome you in with a smile.

Inside there was a celebration going on.

There were refreshments and people having a good time talking and laughing with each other.

They welcomed him and offered him some punch.

He said that after attending both the church and the jewelry store, if the jewelry store had offered an invitation, he would have joined the jewelry store!

No wonder our churches are not making much of a real dent in the unchurched of our communities.

Vance Havner once said, “Most church members live so far below the standard, you’d have to backslide to be in fellowship.

We are so subnormal that if we were to become normal, people would think we were abnormal.”

If we show so little signs of life, people will conclude that if we are not dead yet, we are certainly getting sick.

For a church to be genuinely alive, it must be healthy.

For the church to be healthy, the Christians that compose it must be healthy.

Church health has become the real issue in our age.

Church growth has been the issue, but now people are coming to see that church growth is the result of church health.

Healthy things grow.

Healthy churches grow.

Healthy Christians grow.

But what are the characteristics of a healthy Christian life?

When you go to the doctor for a check-up, various tests are run which indicate a basic level of health.

If your temperature is normal, and your blood pressure falls within a certain range, and your blood work shows the right levels of those things that are supposed to be there and those things that are supposed to be absent, the doctor knows that these characteristics indicate a normally healthy individual.

In other words, there are characteristics or indicators of health in the human body.

And there are those indicators in the spiritual body as well.

Today we begin a three-week series that will examine six of those characteristics of spiritual health.[1]

The first two essential quality characteristics of a healthy Christian life are passionate spirituality and inspiring worship.

We have summed these up as */developing a heart for God/*.

There are at least two indicators that we have a heart for God.

If we have a heart for God, we will love Him passionately and worship Him enthusiastically.

!

*Loving God Passionately*

      How do I love God passionately?

Jesus gives us four ways to love God.

It is found in His reply to the question of someone asking Him to give him the greatest commandments in Scripture.

We call Jesus answer the Great Commandment: *Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

(Mark 12:30 NIV)*

      He tells us first that you must *love the Lord your God with all your heart.*

To love the Lord with all your heart means to love Him with /pure devotion/.

It’s not enough to give Christ a place in our hearts.

We are called to love Him with all of our heart.

We are all familiar with how it was when we met that one who captured our heart.

We’ve all seen two dreamy-eyed young people looking longingly at one another.

We’ve all heard of the “look of love.”

When you love someone with all of your heart, you think about them almost all of the time.

You long to be with them.

They are the priority in your life.

We call this being “in love” and it is wonderful.

Being in love is a genuinely thrilling experience.

It is so exciting that many people are overwhelmed by it.

And to love God with all your heart is much like that.

It means that your heart is devoted to Him.

It means that you are faithful to Him.

He becomes the most important thing in your life. A. W. Tozer once said that, “We are called to an everlasting preoccupation with God.”

But the love we are to have for God has another characteristic.

You are not only to love God with all your heart; you are to love Him *with all your soul*.

The soul speaks of our emotions.

To love God with all our soul means that our love for God ought to be /full of passion/.

Indeed, when we think of a love affair, we think of passion.

And we are all people of passion.

While we may try to deny our emotions, our emotions have a way of rising to the surface in spite of all our efforts to hide them.

Now, emotions are good.

God created them.

And we need to say that it’s OK to express them, especially as we express them in love for God.

We ought to be emotional about our love for God.

Unfortunately, our culture is growing more cynical every day.

People are disillusioned and have become apathetic.

The word apathetic literally means “without passion.”

I remember a Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown was talking to Lucy.

He remarked about the tragedy of so much apathy in the world today.

Lucy responded, “Yeah, it’s terrible.

But who cares?”

We cannot afford to be apathetic about our love for God.

We must be excited about our relationship with Jesus.

We must be passionate.

In the Song of Solomon, we hear about the passionate kind of love we ought to have for God.

It is likened to the love between a man and a woman.

*/“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth— for your love is more delightful than wine.”/*/(Song of Solomon 1:2)/ Again, we hear: */“Show me your face, let me hear your voice.”/*

/(Song of Solomon 2:14)/ And again, */“You have stolen my heart with one glance of your eyes.”/*

/(Song of Solomon 4:9)/

      Real love is passionate love.

To love God with all our soul means that we must be involved with all our emotions in our relationship to Him.

And when you’ve really given Jesus all of your heart, then it’s easy to become excited about following Him.

Our love for Christ begins with a pure devotion and expresses itself by being full of passion, but there is yet another element.

Jesus says that you are to love the Lord your God *with all your mind*.

This is a love that is /thoroughly considered/.

Loving Jesus doesn’t simply mean turning cartwheels in the aisle.

While we ought to be excited about Him and express our emotions, we are not talking about an emotional expression that bypasses the mind.

There is a certain brand of Christian teaching that contends that the mind can get in the way of your relationship with God.

Now, it is true that when people rely on their own intellectual capacity to figure out God, they always come up short.

God cannot be figured out by human minds.

And if you wait until you’ve figured it out, you may not get in on the blessing in the process.

Our minds can be a hindrance.

But our minds can also be a help.

It is clear from the Scripture that God fully intends for our minds to be involved in our love for Him.

In Romans 12, we are told that our minds need to be renewed.

In 1 Peter we are told to prepare our minds for work.

And here, we are told to love God with our entire mind.