Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
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Emotion Tone
Anger
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Analytical
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Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Tone of specific sentences
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Anger
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Today we continue in our trek through Genesis.
Today we will be in , and specifically .
Go ahead and open up your Bibles to this great text and let’s look at it together.
Read Genesis 28:10-22.
There’s a movie plot line that drives me crazy.
It’s overused, trite, cliche - it just bugs me.
It’s the plot where someone makes one bad mistake, then makes a series of bad mistakes trying to fix that first problem.
It’s often a comedic plotline.
The dad is trying to have the perfect Christmas for the family.
Nothing works.
He ends up losing his temper.
Pulling out a chainsaw.
Chopping down a tree in the neighbor’s front yard and putting it up in the living room as the tree.
A person takes an ordinary person, and tries to pass her off as part of the sophisticated and elite crowd.
In the process, he falls in love with his little social experiment.
Only for her to find out about the experiment.
Her heart is broken, because she was deceived.
His is heart is broken, because he cared.
I hate watching the story line of things going from bad to worse.
I cringe when I watch it.
Today’s sermon begins with a bad situation.
If you remember from last week it might not have seemed like a bad situation.
Last week, we met Jacob.
Jacob swindled his brother out of his birthright.
Then later, with the help of his mom, deceived his dad into blessing him, instead of his older brother, Esau.
At end of the passage, you would think everything was good for Jacob.
He’s going to inherit his father’s fortune.
He’s been blessed and told that he will rule over his brother.
You’d think things are good.
You’d think this is happily ever after.
Unfortunately, there are consequences to sin.
Jacob may have gotten what he wanted, but his brother was pretty angry at him.
His brother was out to kill him.
He is forced to flee his family.
He leaves his family to save his own life.
He heads towards his mom’s hometown in an effort to not just live, but also to find a wife.
So see where he is now.
His brother wants to kill him.
He’s traveling through the desert alone.
Night comes on him.
He evidently doesn’t have cover, because he lays down on the ground to sleep, and uses a rock as a pillow.
How bad do things have to be to use a rock as a pillow?
This isn’t where Jacob wanted to be.
He had a birthright.
He was blessed.
It’s Esau who should have been on the run.
Yet, this is the consequence for his sin.
He lied.
He deceived.
He wasn’t innocent.
How do you fix this situation?
He’s sinned.
He’s on the run.
Nothing is going right.
What is the solution?
This is where that overused movie plot comes in.
Most attempts would only make the situation worse.
Let’s go back in our minds to earlier in Genesis.
In , God unleashed a flood upon the earth.
The sin of man was so great, that God said He wouldn’t put up with it anymore.
He opened the hidden storehouses of water under the earth and above the earth, and flooded the whole earth.
All life, except for those 8 humans and the animals on the ark were killed.
Unfortunately, the flood didn’t change condition, the problem within man.
Yet, the pride of man was not destroyed.
Because even after the flood, and after Noah and his family had left the ark, man’s condition remained the same.
says, “… the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth.”
Man had experienced the wrath of God.
Unfortunately, man didn’t fear God.
There’s a difference between knowing God’s wrath and fearing God.
They knew His wrath, because it killed all mankind.
Man didn’t fear God.
So here is where they made a bad situation worse, by the time we get to , they decided they didn’t like God being the one who acted as God over the earth.
And they decided to build a tower that stretched up into the heavens.
Man wanted to establish himself as a force that God needed to reckon with.
You can see how things are upside down.
Mankind decided they would do something great.
They built a tower that would stretch into the heavens.
And you remember what happened to that tower and man’s great knowledge and might?
God came down.
He destroyed the tower.
He dispersed the people all over the globe.
He confused their languages.
And who knows what technology and great secrets were lost in that awful event.
That’s the wrong way to try and reconcile yourself to God.
You don’t go to God and say “Let’s make a deal.
God here are my terms.”
How do you fix this situation?
You have sinned against God.
How do you fix it?
How do you reconcile yourself with God?
This question is something that every religion wrestles with.
Some religions ignore the nature of the question all together.
They have imagined a god that has zero standards.
Who doesn’t punish sin.
And has no justice.
But for the vast majority of religions, they answer this question the way those in Babel did.
They try and fix it themselves.
They arm wrestle God into a position where they think He needs them.
They do this by works.
Do enough good deeds and God will let you into heaven.
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