Sermon Tone Analysis

7-24~/25-04

*THE GRACIOUS CHURCH*

While everyone is still standing, turn to the person next to you and say something encouraging or affirming to them.

Whether or not you know the person, you could at least say, “I think you made a wise decision to go to church today.”

It might be awkward to do this, but shouldn’t the church be a place where we affirm and encourage each other?

A lot of what I have to say today comes from the book, “What’s So Amazing About Grace” by Phillip Yancy.

In it he relates this true story he heard from a friend who works with the down and out in Chicago.

His friend said...

 

A prostitute came to me in wretched straits, homeless, sick, unable to buy food for her two year old daughter.

Through sobs and tears, she told me she had been renting out her daughter--two years old!--to men interested in kinky sex.

She made more money renting out her daughter for an hour than she could earn on her own in a whole night.

She had to do it, she said, to support her own drug habit.

I could hardly bear hearing her sordid story.

For one thing, it made me legally liable--I’m required to report cases of child abuse.

I had no idea what to say to this woman.

At last I asked if she had ever thought of going to a church for help.

I will never forget the look of pure, naive shock that crossed her face, ‘Church!’

She cried.

‘Why would I ever go there?

I was already feeling terrible about myself.

They’d just make me feel worse.’”

It’s alarming to realize this is the reputation the church has in the world, but by no means is it an isolated incident.

In an interview with 12 evangelical Christians then President Bill Clinton said, “I’ve been in politics long enough to expect criticism and hostility, but I was unprepared for the hatred I get from Christians.

Why do Christians hate so much?”

When PhilipYancy wrote an article for Christianity Today about that meeting with President Clinton,  he received bags and bags of angry letters from Christian people in response.

Less than ten percent had anything positive to say and most were filled with vicious personal attacks.

Why are Christian people like this?

Why does so much of the world experience the church’s condemnation rather than it’s salvation?

God wants us to reach our world and He wants us to do so redemptively.

The church God uses to reach our world will be a gracious church.

“All too often the church holds up a mirror reflecting back the society around it, rather than a window revealing a different way.”

The world doesn’t need to see how bad it is.

They already know that.

The world needs to see through a window to a different life.

The world needs a church full of grace.

In order to reach our world the way God wants us to we must...

 

*Deal In God’s Forgiveness With Humility*

As much as we like to say, “the church is a hospital for sinners not a museum for saints,” it hasn’t seemed to make a great deal of difference.

Most people who aren’t doing well with their lives don’t have it on their minds to seek out a church to get help.

They don’t have that kind of impression of the church.

Many people who might think about going to church say, “I’ll turn to God and I’ll go to church when I get my stuff straightened out.”

This kind of thinking mistakenly separates people into two categories--the good people and the bad people, the people who do well and the people who mess up, the people who go to church and the people who don’t--the guilty and the righteous, but that’s all wrong.

We’re all guilty ones and is doesn’t help anything to act as if we weren’t.

As the Bible says, “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”

Some people have said, “There but for the grace of God go I,” when the only true thing Christians can say in that situation is:  “There but /with/ the grace of God go I.” 

 

The 17th century Christian philosopher and scientist, Blaise Pascal said, “Truly it is an evil to be full of faults, but it is a still greater evil to be full of them, and to be unwilling to recognize them.”

People outside of the church may be full of faults, but people inside the church are just as full of faults and they sometimes appear to be unaware of it.

These two viewpoints are represented in a scene recorded in John 8.  The incident takes place in the temple courts, where Jesus is teaching.

A group of Pharisees and teachers of the law interrupt this “church service” by dragging in a woman caught in adultery.

Following the custom, she is stripped to the waist as a token of her shame.

Terrified, defenseless and publicly humiliated, the woman trembles before Jesus, her arms covering her bare breasts.

At that moment Jesus bends down and writes on the ground with his finger.

This is the only scene from the Gospels that shows Jesus writing.

John does not tell us what Jesus wrote in the sand.

People have speculated that he spelled out the names of various sins: Adultery, Murder, Pride, Greed, Lust, and each time Jesus wrote a word, a few more Pharisees filed away.

The people watching probably thought there were two categories of people there that day: the guilty woman, caught red-handed, and the "righteous" accusers who were, after all, religious professionals.

When Jesus finally spoke, he shattered that kind of thinking.

“If any one of you is without sin,” he says, “let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”

There were simply 2 categories of sinners there--one who knew her guilt and those who failed to acknowledge any.

Again he stoops to write, and one by one all the accusers slink away.

Next, Jesus straightens up to address the woman left alone before him.

“Woman, where are they?

Has no one condemned you?” “No one, sir,” she says.

And to this woman, dragged in terror to her expected execution, Jesus grants forgiveness; “Then neither do I condemn you.... Go now and leave your life of sin.”

The world longs to hear such liberating words and God seeks to speak these words rather than words of condemnation.

“For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.”

[John 3:17]

 

But the world don’t always hear this message from God’s people.

People in churches are still too often acting like the religious leaders of Jesus’ day.

It is only the open spirit of the woman caught red-handed, not the haughty spirit of the Pharisees that deals in forgiveness.

But this scene challenges me because I identify more with the accusers than with the accused.

I cover up far more than I confess.

I hide my inner self under a layer of respectability.

Yet if I understand this story correctly, the sinful woman is the one nearest the kingdom of God.

The truth is I can only experience what God has for me if I become like that woman: trembling, humbled, without excuse, my palms open to receive God's grace.

The church today like the Pharisees who denied or repressed their guilt also needs hands empty for grace it can give away.

Jesus said...

 

“I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.”  [Luke 5:32]

 

“St.

Augustine says ‘God gives where He finds empty hands.’

A man whose hands are full of parcels can’t receive a gift...A man who admits no guilt can accept no forgiveness.”

We must go to God like the old hymn says:  Nothing in my hand I bring, simply to Your cross I cling.

“This is God’s gift to you, and not anything you have done on your own.”  [Ephesians 2:8b, Contemporary English Version]

 

If the church is going to be God’s dealers in grace, we are going to have to be humble because...

 

“God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble.”

[James 4:6]

 

God clearly tells us how to minister to people in spiritual trouble.

* *

“If someone falls into sin, forgivingly restore him, saving your critical comments for yourself.”

[Galatians 6:1, the Message]

* *

Not enough people are getting this message well enough.*

*We’ve got to live it and give it.

God wants us to reach our world dealing out Forgiveness with Humility.

And the Gracious Church must also...

* *

*Give Up Condemnation*

Whenever we say to someone:  ‘Something’s wrong with you,’ that is a condemnation and the church has been called into existence to eliminate all that.

Condemnation was the effect of the OT law.

In order for people to understand what God required, He first gave His people a specific code of conduct to follow.

This code specifically designated some animals as fit to eat and others as unclean and not to be eaten.

The word ‘kosher’ for these kosher foods means ‘fit.’

Close study of clean and unclean animals suggests that God forbids animals that don’t fit their kind.

They show an anomaly from other kinds like them.