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.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
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Disgust
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Fear
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Joy
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Sadness
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Language Tone
Analytical
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Confident
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Tentative
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Social Tone
Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Agreeableness
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Emotional Range
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Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
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Claim (of the passage): God will spread his grace through his people however reluctant they are.
Focus (of the sermon): Running from God’s call to evangelism is only going to make our lives harder.
Function (for the congregation): To be enthralled by the unrelenting grace of God so we are ready to accept the call to evangelism.
PRAY
Once upon a time there was a man called Jonah, son of Amittai.
He lived around the time of 800BC, and the Word of the Lord came to him:
jon 1 w-
Well, Jonah ‘s not exactly your typical OT prophet hero!
Bit of a muppet - running from God like that.
He calls himself a worshiper of God in v9 - yeah right.
I’ve known goldfish to show more loyalty to their masters than him!
He’s laughable.
There he is making his bed having got up and enjoyed a cup of tea, when...
“Jonah! - Go tell some people in Nineveh that they are doing wrong and need to repent!”
BANG - he’s out the front....
“no, no, no, no.
no - this is worse than jury service!
I have to act on my beliefs!
I have to do something hard, awkard, potenitally dangerous, for God!
And What will they think of me if I tell them to repent!”
“you’ve got to be kidding, not me, not them,
...come on think, think, where’s the furthest place from God I can think of.....
yes, Tarshish, that’s it, come on,
this is what those Pilates classes were for,
so I can run like mad all the way to Joppa and get the first boat out of here.”
What a muppet,
what a coward,
what a terrible example
what a self-centred plonker..
We find out later in chapter 4,
that he basically didn’t want to tell the Ninevites about God
becasue of how it would make him look.
They might think he is laughable, stupid, mistaken.
You see Jonah didn’t like..
1 - The unacceptable grace of God
And that is what we’re calling this series in the book of Jonah.
And right out the starting gates - God’s grace is unacceptable to Jonah.
You’ve got them wrong God - don’t send me there.
They don’t deserve grace.
I don’t deserve to be ridiculed or made a fool of.
I do not want to have the inconvenience of this!
Once upon a time there was a man called Jonah.... and he was a terrible example to us.
He was as useless as a helicopter ejector seat,
Diet water
See through curtains
or the
The M6 Toll road.
PAUSE
Once upon a time, there was a man, or woman, called Christian.
And the word of the Lord came to Christian by way of the bible in Mark 16v15.
But Christian ran away from that responsibility.
Citing all sorts of excuses.
Christian ran away towards the 'City of comfort’.
It was the furthest place they knew from God.
With the benefit of their keep fit regime -
They ran all the way to the port of Pride,
and found a ship heading for ‘comfort’ and boarded it.
What luck, the hull of the boat was full of sand,
so when trouble and storms came,
Christian could just bury his or her head in the sand, and pretend the problem wasn’t there!
The unacceptable grace of God.
Do we really have to tell others about Jesus?
Does God really want to save even the worst of people.
What about murders or rapists.
What about Muslims.
Or traffic wardens.
What about my colleagues,
family,
neighbours.
Does God really want me to tell them about Jesus.
They’ll laugh at me,
ridicule me,
The unacceptable grace of God.
I think I prefer the far away city of ‘comfort’.
---
Let me park that thought with you for a moment.
We’re going to play a quick word association game.
I call out a word, and you respond instantly with the first thing that comes into your head.
So, if I say ‘Pizza’ you might say ‘pepperoni’
Here we go...
‘dead’
‘car’
beach
Jonah
Everybody knows something about Jonah!
He’s that guy who was supposedly swallowed by a huge fish!
“Men have been looking so hard at the great fish that they have failed to see the great God.”
But that is not the most important thing we are going to learn about from this book.
In fact, the bit about the fish takes up just 2 verses in the whole book
.
This book is also not, believe it or not, about Jonah as such.
Of course he is the main character we follow.
And he will make plenty of mistakes for us to learn from.
We’ll be able to relate ourselves to him all too easily,
and that will be helpful.
But i want to put it to you, that the book of Jonah is actually all about God’s grace.
You see Jonah didn’t like the idea of God’s grace.
The Unacceptable Grace of God.
It was unacceptable to him,
that God would extend his grace in a way that put him out.
Make his life hard, or embarrassed him.
I don’t know exactly what it is that stops you from telling other’s about Jesus.
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