Sermon Tone Analysis

In 313 AD, the Roman Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, where he announced that Christianity was to be a tolerated and protected religion under the Roman government.

Prior to this date, for the first 300 years of the church, Christians were largely outcasts at best, and persecuted at worst.

It was not a convenient time to be a Christian, and converting to Christianity often meant that you would be giving up your family, maybe your job, your way of life, your community, all to follow this crucified carpenter from Nazareth.

During these first few hundred years of the church, people often converted to Christianity not only because of the gospel message that they heard with their ears, but also the gospel mercy and compassion that they saw in the church communities all around them.

Christians are known to have cared for orphans when no one else would, to have taken in widows when Roman society said those women were no longer of use, and to have taken babies that were discarded in the trash heaps home and raised them as their own children.

They pushed back against the immorality of their day not through boycotts and public protest, but by displaying a positive Christian ethic in their homes and communities.

For example, sexual slavery and prostitution was at the center of ancient Greco-Roman culture.

One church historian says that the most reliable way to tell when a local region had become Christianized is when they decided that sexual slavery was unjust.

Christianity was at its best when it showed people a better way to find satisfaction, by turning from their idols and following Jesus.

In these first few hundred years of the church, at least two major epidemics claimed up to a third of the population of the Roman empire.

In the face of these terrible conditions, the pagan elites and the pagan priests from the cult temples fled the cities.

They abandoned the people.

The only functioning social network left behind was the church, which provided physical care to Christians and non-Christians alike, risking their lives to care for those who were facing death.

In the midst of their illnesses, these early Christians communicated by both word and deed a hope that looked beyond death and toward eternal life in Jesus.

One early church pastor wrote this, “Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead.

The best of our brothers and sisters lost their lives in this manner.”

The result was that after these epidemics had swept through the city, most of the people remaining would either have been Christians, or non-Christians who had been nursed through their sickness by Christians.

It is no wonder that many of these non-Christians converted to the Christian faith.

The church grew not only because of their gospel proclamation but also because their preaching was attached to their compassion to the sick and dying, a willingness to care for others even at the risk of death.

It was incredibly unpopular to be a Christian, and yet the church not only grew, it exploded and thrived until eventually, shortly after the Edict of Milan, it became the state religion of Rome.

The times that we are living in are becoming more and more like the culture that Christianity was born into in its infancy.

The morals and values of our culture today nearly parallel those of the Greco-Roman world, and it is becoming less and less popular or convenient to be a Christian.

Your generation is the future of the church.

Sitting in front of me are the future men and women who will lead the church and pass on the faith to your children, and to your children’s children.

In light of all the cultural challenges facing you, what is your response going to be?

Will you retreat from the culture, and build a little bubble to protect yourself from the outside world?

Will you become apathetic and lazy about your faith by giving in to the culture and losing everything that makes Christians unique and distinct from the world?

Or will you be strengthened with courage and the faith needed to shape the church to compassionately and intentionally engage the culture and the world around us?

This evening I want to encourage you and motivate you to take the difficult path, the road less traveled, and to take up the call as the future of the church to bring Christ to bear on the culture.

So there’s three lessons I want us to learn from our texts this evening: 1) Watch your conduct.

2) Be a family, 3) Stay Salty

Watch Your Conduct ()

I’m looking at our text from here, and I want you to understand now how verses 11-12 are so counter-cultural to the times that they were written in.

Remember how we said that the culture when the New Testament was written in had a very low view of the body, to the point that it didn’t matter what you did with your body.

This is why sexual immorality was so widely accepted and normal, because your body was made up of matter, matter is less spiritual and therefore it isn’t important.

Do what you will with it.

So in verse 11, what the author is saying here is very similar to what Paul said in last night.

You’re a sojourner and an exile.

In other words, you’re a traveler, living in a place that is not your home.

Why?

Because if you’re a follower of Jesus, that means you’re a citizen of the kingdom now.

So live like it.

After reminding the audience of their new identity, the author says, therefore you must abstain from the passions of the flesh which wage war against your soul.

Wage war against sin, learn to control your what you do with your bodies, because it matters.

What you do with your body matters to your soul.

So think about how radical this was for the first century Greco-Roman audience.

Men in particular could do whatever they wanted to their wives, or to sex slaves.

But what does Peter say? Nope.

You can’t do that anymore.

Control the passions of your flesh.

Which for men, that meant, Sex belongs in marriage, and your body belongs to your wife now.

Christianity put the sexual genie back in the bottle of marriage.

Treat your wife with honor and respect, and devote yourself to her.

Imagine how attractive Christianity was to women in the first century.

They were so used to being ignored by their husbands, being treated as objects.

Along comes the Apostle Peter and says, you belong to a new kingdom now.

Control your passions.

Devote yourselves in love and service to your wife.

This was a message which honored women and totally revolutionized how mean learned to see their wives.

But Peter doesn’t stop here.

Peter says there is a purpose of our obedience to God, beyond just our relationship with God.

Our obedience and our good deeds will be observed by others.

Our good deeds and obedience back up our gospel message which, Peter says, will lead to many people becoming followers of Jesus and glorifying God.

The point is this, if the church is going to engage the culture, then we must not only talk the talk, but walk the walk.

Why should people trust us about the gospel, if our lives don’t have any marked change in the way we live from the people all around us?

This is something that every generation of the church has had to struggle with.

There will always be those who claim to follow Jesus, but whose lives show no real change, and thus they become a poor witness to the truth of our faith.

It’s kind of like this.

Imagine going to a doctor because your right knee hurts.

You show up in the office, describe your pain to her, and after you tell her all the symptoms of your pain, she starts examining your elbow.

You’d be a little confused right?

So you tell her, uh, doc, its my knee that hurts.

And she looks at you and says, “I’m a doctor, don’t you think I know what a knee is?”

This would be a doctor who is not to be trusted!

In the same way, when we invite other people to follow Jesus, but show no evidence that we ourselves are following him, why should we be trusted?

Here’s an example of this.

According to all the studies, Christian men and women watch pornography at the same rate as those who do not claim to be Christian.

If this is the case, if people in our churches do not have a sexual ethic that is different from those outside the church, then why should we be trusted when we try to engage the culture on issues of sex and sexuality?

You see?

So the urgency of our obedience and conduct goes beyond just our personal relationship with God, but it also has a huge impact on the public witness of the church in culture.

Or, another example, thinking about the issues surrounding life and abortion.

If we want to be trusted on the value of life in the womb, then we have to go beyond our votes and actually tackle the issues in our society which cause so many people to turn to abortion.

Our churches must become places that labor hard in our communities to alleviate needs that single mothers and lower-income families have.

We need to seek out women who are pregnant and fleeing abusive relationships or situations and pledge ourselves to them, to assist them in keeping and caring for their child.

We should labor hard in our churches to create a culture of adoption, where families are eager to adopt, and know they will be supported by other members in the church.

Why should anyone trust us on the issue of being pro-life if we aren’t sacrificing ourselves to make life possible for others?

So, watch your conduct, because people are watching you.

Will they be attracted to Jesus by your conduct, or turned away from him?

Be a Family

The church is a family, and that means all of you are brothers and sisters.

The Bible speaks over and over again about this, and calls us to commit our lives to each other just as if we were biological brothers and sisters living under the same roof.

How we live together is of immense importance.

Not only because God commanded it, not only because we need each other’s love and care, not only because we are necessary to help each other grow to become more like Christ.

Jesus takes this one step further, because he promises to all those who follow him that they will receive a family.

It’s important for us to be a family so that we can be the gift Jesus promises to all those who follow him.

Look at what Jesus says in .

Anyone who leaves everything to follow him – even if that means leaving their family – will receive a hundredfold more now from him – mothers, houses, children.

They’ll receive a new family, and a better family.

Jesus promises a new family to those who follow him.

Therefore, we must labor to become the family that Jesus promises.