Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction:

We live in a broken world.

Bad things happen all the time.

We often wonder why bad things happen to us.

While life is not a walk in the park for any of us, there is a way to make life more tolerable.

We call this good news, the gospel.

This is what separates Christianity from all other world religions.

Most all other religions base their system of beliefs on a system of works that rely on a person to do the good work in order for said person to achieve a state of salvation.

What makes Christianity different is that we believe that true joy and peace reside in the gospel.

It is a way for us to break free from a broken and corrupted system that will not help people get any better.

The gospel is life change waiting to happen.

While we must understand this, we also must understand that there is a way out, and when we look at scripture, we can see how to take advantage of that way.

Ephesians 2.4-10

God’s Character (2.4)

The first thing we see here is the character of God.

Verse four states that He is rich and mercy, and that mercy comes from the great love that He has for us.

This is important to understand about God, but we must also understand that God is Holy, righteous and just.

He is holy in the aspect that He is pure and free from any faults (what we call sin, imperfections, etc.)

He is righteous, meaning He is morally right by definition, and He is just.

Just meaning fair and impartial.

With God’s character, things are black and white, there is no gray area.

God’s Holy character demands purity.

This has never changed.

We see this from the very beginning.

We can go all the way back to the story of creation when Adam and Eve first disobeyed God’s command, and they were separated from God.

We read the story of Noah where God found only one man that was upright enough to receive His grace, and the rest of the world was judged by a cataclysmic flood.

Moving forward, we read of the Ark of the Covenant and the Holy of Holies which was the dwelling place of God and a normal man could not enter into that place and touch the ark or they would die.

The high priest that was the only person to be able to enter into the Holy of Holies had to go through a long process that was meant to cleans him from his imperfections long enough to make sacrifices on behalf of other people.

says, “you who are of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong,” and says he will “by no means clear the guilty.”

God’s character demands that those that violate His character be judged accordingly.

Now, we have to backtrack for just a moment to verse 3 to understand how things fit together in line with God’s character:

There is one phrase that stand out here, and that is “the children of wrath.”

Humanity became the object of God’s wrath because there was a violation of God’s character, and according to God’s character, with Him being just, that violation must be dealt with, and that is where verse four really has an impact, “but God, being rich in mercy...” That’s an amazing transition right there.

It changes the scope of everything.

In just one transition, humanity goes from being the children of wrath to the recipient of God’s love and affection.

God’s character is Holy, just, and righteous, but it is also full of love, and motivated to mercy by that love.

This doesn’t mean that the character of God changes when it comes to mercy.

It just means that God’s wrath has to be settled by someone other than ourselves.

Because of God’s character, His wrath doesn’t go away, it remains; His mercy is displayed fully, and His wrath becomes satisfied, and that mercy is demonstrated in the person of Jesus Christ, and we will talk about that in just a moment, but here is the catch, we must first understand our separation from God and our need for a savior in order to even begin to learn what God is about.

Offense of Sin (2.5)

Our separation from God is total.

There is no way around this.

We can look around us, and if you watch the news or stay on Facebook for any length of time, you can see just how depraved society is.

Verse 5 reinforces this fact: “even when we were dead in our trespasses.”

Let’s back up just a moment to verses 1-3:

Humankind is depraved.

That’s just the way of it.

We are completely and totally separated from a holy and just God.

Every single person in this world has some sort of sin in their life, and by nature, we offend a holy God.

All of us regardless of where we come from, even if we have grown up in church all of our lives, are spiritually dark, and spiritually dead.

Here is where we come to terms with the fact that it is our sinful nature that separates us from God, and our need for a savior.

In 2010, a mine collapsed in Copiapo, Chile.

When this mine collapsed, there were 33 miners that were trapped 2,300 feet underground three miles away from the entrance to the tunnel.

For 17 days they were cut off from everything.

No lights, no air, no food, no water.

For all practical purposes, they were dead.

There was absolutely no way they could get out on their own.

When the drill bit finally reached where they were, they sent a note back to the top that said, “we are still alive.”

The story is that almost all of them converted to Christ while they were trapped in that mine, but the point is, they needed help to get them out of that seemingly impossible situation of facing certain death.

The same applies to us, when we come to the realization that we are dark and dead, we look for a savior, and that brings us to Christ.

Sufficiency of Christ (2.5-6)

Here is where Christianity starts to lose people, but I want you to stay with me for just a few more moments.

Today’s society doesn’t deal well with absolutes, yet when we talk about getting to God, there is only one way for us to achieve peace with God, and that is through Jesus Christ (verses 5b-6).

I have an illustration that was given to me by Dr. John Meador from First Euless, and he calls it “The Record Book of Sin,” and I hope if you are reading this you can follow along with me:

Picture your left hand being you.

Now, take a book (any book) and place it on your hand.

In that book, is every moment of your life recorded.

We all have one of those books.

Take ho many years you have walked this earth, multiply that by 365 (the days in a year), then multiply that by 24 (hours in a day), and again multiply that by 60 (minutes in an hour), and one more time by 60 (second in each minute).

Every moment you have had to do and say the right thing has been recorded.

Now, there are some parts of my book that I would really rather you not read, and I am sure you have moments that you would rather no one else reads, but God has complete and total access to every moment of your life.

This is our life (for better or worse).

Now take your empty hand and hold it above your head and let that represent God.

God is holy, just, and righteous and that book in my hand weighs me down and I will never be able to rise above that.

That is what our sin does in our lives.

It weighs us down and separates us from God.

But, God is also loving and merciful, and He knows that we will never be able to rise to His level, so He sent Jesus (His one and only son).

So now the hand above our head comes down to an equal level with us, and Jesus becomes fully God and fully man.

Jesus lived a perfect life, and He allowed Himself to be executed and placed on a cross from something He never did.

Now look what happens as Jesus is on the cross: says, “He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

He took on that sin that we had, and that book that holds us down becomes transferred to the empty, sinless hand that represents Jesus, and according to , “All of us like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; but the Lord has caused the iniquity of us all to fall on Him.”

That book now goes on to Jesus, and when he died, he was buried, and he rose again to prove that He (as God) had power of death and that sin that holds us back, and He now sits at the right hand of God.

This was an act of God on our behalf.

This was an act of mercy, and act of love, and an act of justice, and that requires a personal response from us.

Personal Response (2.5, 8-9)

I want you to look at verse 5 for a moment, and notice a parenthetical passage: “by grace you have been saved” and then again in verses 8 and 9, Paul comes back to more fully explain what grace is.

It is that grace and the response by faith lets us know that we must make a personal response to what Jesus Christ has accomplished on our behalf on the cross, and here in just a few moments, I am going to ask each of you to respond to this.

Once we come to this point, we should be asking the question, “what must I do to be saved?”

The first thing we must address in all of this is, “What is grace?”

The dictionary defines it as, “the free unmerited favor of God, as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings.”

I don’t think that definition does it justice, so I would like to share with you a quote that I heard from a pastor friend of mine: “grace is God providing for those that could not provide for themselves.”

This is where verses 8 & 9 come in.

It is “not of works, it is the free gift of God,” and this is where the personal response comes in.

The affirmative response is repentance.

Let’s look at what repentance and faith look like:

1 Thessalonians

Our act faith and repentance is ONE ACT with TWO RESULTS.

I want you to understand this very clearly.

If I am on a set path and heading one direction, and when I repent (which literally means to turn around), I turn FROM something TO something else, and in this case, turning FROM sin TO God.

This is not a side glance and keeping on the same path, it is moving to a completely different path.