Sermon Tone Analysis

Outline:

1.

Three strikes : John 6.29-36

2. Satisfaction in Jesus and saving faith: John 6:35

3. God’s Sovereign Work: John 6.37-40

1.

Three strikes v.29-36

Strike 1 is in verse 32.

Saving Faith: Satisfaction in Jesus

Not Moses but God the Father gave the bread.

Strike 2

john 6.33

You are seeing but you don’t see

You are seeing but you don’t see

You are looking at the bread from heaven but you cannot see it.

It is right in front of you.

The truth of God is right in front of us when we wake each day and see the sun shine through our windows, hear the birds in the trees, watch our children growing into adults.

These are all echoes of God’s glorious creation.

We see them daily but do we?

Strike 3

john 6.36

Seeing isn’t believing in the spiritual realm it seems.

This swing and miss is equivalent to having to pick yourself up out of the batters box after swinging right through and whiffing completely.

You can see the bread of life standing in front of you but do not believe.

Why?

Why do they not believe?

2. Satisfaction in Jesus and saving faith v.35

I believe sheds light on this question both for them and us.

Does Jesus really satisfy?

I still feel unsatisfied often maybe most the time.

Faith: Satisfaction in Jesus

Faith: Satisfaction in Jesus

What does spiritual Hunger and spiritual thirst feel or look like in this physical world?

Spiritual Hunger and thirst are revealed in the places we find our satisfaction, worth, value, joy, comfort, peace.

These desires are God given.

Built into the fabric of the world and human beings.

So spiritual hunger and thirst looks like desires.

Longings.

We have routes we take to find joy and meaning.

They are like unconscious strategies to bypass dependance on our creator alone and find independant meaning, happiness, satisfaction a part from Him.

They are our means of trying to maintain, in some measure, the control of our own lives which we are so reluctant to turn over to God and rest in His care.

If we don’t find Christ of supreme value, if he is not our supreme satisfaction, something else will be.

As a result, we will be drawn away from the Christian faith.

Our hearts will not rest until they find contentment in something.

Our hearts are a desire factory, and if we think that we just fall into delight in God or satisfaction in God without any pursuit of it or conscious maintenance of that flame, we’re kidding ourselves.

Our hearts will not rest until they find contentment in something.

Our hearts are a desire factory, and if we think that we just fall into delight in God or satisfaction in God without any pursuit of it or conscious maintenance of that flame, we’re kidding ourselves.

Illustrate:

Why is that?

Because we do not want to lose what we think we need for our happiness.

We desperately cling to that which cannot fulfill our lives even though it means being eventually caught in the trap of our own making.

Illustrate:

A Strange Melancholy After the global economic crisis began in mid 2008, there followed a tragic string of suicides of formerly wealthy and well-connected individuals.

The acting chief financial officer of Freddie Mac, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, hanged himself in his basement.

The chief executive of Sheldon Good, a leading U.S. real estate auction firm, shot himself in the head behind the wheel of his red Jaguar.

A French money manager who invested the wealth of many of Europe’s royal and leading families, and who had lost $1.4 billion of his clients’ money in Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, slit his wrists and died in his Madison Avenue office.

A Danish senior executive with HSBC Bank hanged himself in the wardrobe of his £500-a-night suite in Knightsbridge, London.

When a Bear Stearns executive learned that he would not be hired by JPMorgan Chase, which had bought his collapsed firm, he took a drug overdose and leapt from the twenty-ninth floor of his office building.

A friend said, “This Bear Stearns thing . . .

broke his spirit.”

Taken from Counterfeit Gods by Timothy Keller

My friends, it is imperative that we evaluate and recognize the source and nature of our strategies by which we seek to make our lives work, our routes for joy, security, and significance.

As to their nature they represent our greedy self-centeredness and self-indulgence by which we seek like mad to find happiness and satisfaction (cf.

).

But what’s the source of our greedy selfishness, our self-centeredness, our self-indulgence?

These things have their roots not from our basic needs or our deepest longings, but in a spirit of independence.

They stem from our determined commitment to act independently of God in our pursuit of significance, security, and satisfaction.

Online Bible.org

Faith: Satisfaction in Jesus

this verse shows us the nature of saving faith.

Notice the parallel between coming to Jesus to be satisfied and believing on Jesus.

“I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger.”

That’s the first statement.

We come to Jesus to have our hunger stilled.

this verse shows us the nature of saving faith.

Notice the parallel between coming to Jesus to be satisfied and believing on Jesus.

“I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger.”

That’s the first statement.

We come to Jesus to have our hunger stilled.

Now parallel to that, and repeating the meaning, is the next statement: “And whoever believes in me shall never thirst.”

Coming to Jesus to be satisfied in him and believing on him so as not to thirst are the same.

So saving faith is being satisfied with all that God is for us in Jesus.

So the implications are if we are not being satisfied in and through Christ we are not really His.

When we die we will perish in Hell.

True belief is a all satisfying belief.

In a world hot in pursuit of quenching its thirst with everything but God, Tozer wrote:

What does spiritual Hunger and spiritual thirst feel or look like in a physical world?

We have routes we take to find joy and meaning.

They are like unconscious strategies to bypass dependance on our creator alone and find independant meaning, happiness, satisfaction a part from Him.

They are our means of trying to maintain, in some measure, the control of our own lives which we are so reluctant to turn over to God and rest in His care.

But second, because all other routes to joy and meaning represent strategies for living that bypass dependence on the Lord alone.

Why is that?

Because we do not want to lose what we think we need for our happiness.

We desperately cling to that which cannot fulfill our lives even though it means being eventually caught in the trap of our own making.

My friends, it is imperative that we evaluate and recognize the source and nature of our strategies by which we seek to make our lives work, our routes for joy, security, and significance.

As to their nature they represent our greedy self-centeredness and self-indulgence by which we seek like mad to find happiness and satisfaction (cf.

).

But what’s the source of our greedy selfishness, our self-centeredness, our self-indulgence?

These things have their roots not from our basic needs or our deepest longings, but in a spirit of independence.

They stem from our determined commitment to act independently of God in our pursuit of significance, security, and satisfaction.

Online Bible.org

In a world hot in pursuit of quenching its thirst with everything but God, Tozer wrote:

In the midst of this great coldness toward God there are some, I rejoice to acknowledge, who will not be content with shallow logic.

They will admit the force of the argument, and then turn away with tears to hunt some lonely place and pray, “O God, show me thy glory.”