Sermon Tone Analysis

Imagine you have a vision of heaven.

Jesus meets you, and takes you through different wings of his royal palace.

He walks you past a room with huge, open doors.

Inside you see people singing and dancing and having a grand old time.

You ask him who those people are.

He says, “Those are my charismatic brothers and sisters.

Yeah, they know how to have fun.”

You keep walking, and you pass another room, with the same tall, open doors.

But this room is a library, and it’s quiet.

There’s some singing, but nothing that could be considered loud or fun.

Jesus says, “Those are my more reserved brothers and sisters—Methodists, Anglicans, and a few Baptists are in there too.”

Lastly, you walk by a room with the same huge doors, but these doors are closed.

So you ask him, “What’s in that room?

Jesus says, “Oh, those are the Calvinists.

They think they’re the only ones here, and I don’t want to disappoint them.”

Obviously heaven will not be like that; but I hope you’ll see the point of that joke as we move along.

But we always take a break before the summer to do a short series on those subjects which have been weighing most heavily on the life of the church over the past year.

Every year we take a break before the summer to do a short series on whatever topics have been weighing most heavily on the church over the past year.

This year, based on discussions we’ve had with a good number of new people in the church, and particularly those who have gone through our members’ class, we’ve decided to take the month of June to go through our church’s theological distinctives.

What do we mean by that phrase?

(My lovely wife was kind enough to point out this week that “distinctive” is not a noun, which had never occurred to me; so I thought some clarification may be helpful.)

“Yeah, of course,” I said.

“No, but…it’s not a noun.

You can’t say ‘a distinctive.’”

I opened my mouth to object, and realized she was right.

We’ve been using this term for five years, and it never occurred to me to think of the grammar of it.

So just in case any of you sticklers (like my wife) are wondering, what we mean by “theological distinctives” is: the distinctive (as opposed to universal) points of doctrine to which the church holds.

There are some subjects which are pretty much universal for Christians—doctrines like the divinity of Christ, or justification by faith alone.

But it didn’t seem sufficient to stop there, because there are a handful of topics which are of secondary importance, but which nevertheless have a massive impact on our understanding of the gospel, on our ecclesiology (the way we set up and practice the life of the church), on the way we will live the gospel out in the context of the church.

And then there are doctrines which are of secondary importance.

These topics aren’t reasons for division—you can be a faithful, biblical Christian and not agree with these things.

But they do nevertheless have a massive impact on our understanding of the gospel, on our ecclesiology (the way we set up and practice the life of the church), and on the way we will live the gospel out in the context of the church.

That’s why we have (so far) called them theological distinctives—they are subjects which distinctively shape the teaching and the life of our church.

If you were here in the first years of our church, you heard us speak about these things a lot.

We were still in the beginning stages of planting the church, and we wanted to be very clear about where we landed and how we wanted to do things.

But if you’ve only come in the last two years or so, you may not have heard us speak quite so often about these, because we’ve been in the gospel of Luke since 2017, and Luke doesn’t directly address most of these topics; he has a different goal in mind.

You don’t have to agree with them to be a member here, but you do have to know that this is where we land, and this is what we’ll preach and teach, because we believe that they are biblically faithful, and we believe that they are very important.

So real quickly, let me just read our list of theological distinctives—there are five of them.

(Incidentally, we share these distinctives with Acts 29, the church planting network we’re a part of.)

They are:

The absolute sovereignty of God;

The complementary roles of men and women in the church and at home;

Our dependance on the Holy Spirit for every aspect of life and ministry;

The baptism of believers;

The relationship between the glory of God and the joy of man.

I understand that some of these subjects are going to make some people uncomfortable, but I hope you’ll hear our intention, and God’s intention, behind them as we go.

(If you’re one of those latter people, who are uncomfortable with these things, I’ll just ask that you hold your tomatoes until the end.

We’re going to try to show not only this church’s heart behind these things, and mine; but God’s.

So even if you still have a hard time with these things at the end, at the very least you should be able to see where we’re coming from.)

So we’re going to hit the ground running, and talk this week about the first distinctive doctrine on our list: the absolute sovereignty of God.

Now I know what some of you are probably saying.

“Calvinism again?! We talk about this all the time, why do we have to talk about it again?”

First of all, we can’t assume everyone knows this stuff.

But that’s not the main issue.

The main issue is that for all we’ve said right about the subject, my fear is that some of us have inadverently applied it in wrong ways.

This is an incredibly divisive subject, because it runs counter to the way most people naturally want to think about God, and because those Christians who hold to it (often called Calvinists) haven’t historically been the most charitable of our lot.

I’m afraid, as Jeff Medders wrote, that we may have unwittingly been guilty of loving Calvinism rather than being loving Calvinists; that we’ve studied the doctrines of grace but forgotten the grace of God.

(There’s a joke Jeff Medders tells about a guy who goes to heaven and gets a guided tour from Jesus of his palace.

In the palace Jesus shows him a bunch of rooms with open doors, with several different camps of Christians inside: the fun charismatics in one room, the quieter Methodists and Anglicans in another.

Then they come to a room with the doors closed, and the man asks, “Why are the doors closed?”

Jesus responds, “Oh, the Calvinists are in there.

They think they’re the only ones here, and I just can’t bear to disappoint them.”)

So get your Bibles, and turn to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians; we’re going to start at the very beginning.

To do this, I’ll invite you to get your Bibles, and turn to Paul’s letter to the Ephesians; we’re going to start at the very beginning.

The basic goal of Paul’s letter to the Ephesians is to show the church in Ephesus (which he knew well, because he planted it) how God saves us, and what impact that knowledge should have on the life of the church.

And he lays out the foundation for that in the first couple chapters

We’re going to see that God cho

God Chooses (v.

1-6)

Distinctifs (1) : La souveraineté de Dieu

How God Saves Us (, )

Okay, so here’s what we’re going to do.

We’re going to read .

And as we read it I’d like you to imagine you’re reading it for the first time.

(That may well be the case.)

(Ephésiens 1.1-14, 2.1-5)

Imagine that you’ve heard a few things about Christianity, about how “Jesus died for our sins,” but you don’t know much more than that, and you’ve never actually read the Bible.

Try to think of how this text would hit you if you were in that position.

(Or, if you are in that position, just let it hit you!)

1 Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,

REWRITE THIS.

Okay, so two words always jump out at people if they’re reading this for the first time.

Those two words are “chose” and “predestined”.

Our first thought is always, “No, that can’t be what he means.”

But as we keep digging in Scripture, we start to see this fact all over the Bible: God’s people don’t choose him; God chooses his people.

Down to the last individual.

This really bothers us, because it starts to bring up questions of free will and responsibility.

We’ll get to those questions in a minute.

But before we get there, we need to take a moment to consider what he’s saying here.

He’s saying that God is a much bigger God, who is much more involved in his creation, than we initially thought.

Many of us naturally think of God as the one who created everything, told his creatures what to do, and then got out of the way to see if they would do it.

Like God is sitting up in heaven going, “Oh please, please come to me!

I don’t know what I’ll do if I can’t have you here with me!”

When I was a teenager, my dad would often express his concern for me, that I might not come to faith, or that I would leave the faith.

And now that I have kids of my own, I understand a little better the worry that my dad must have felt for me and my brothers—this intense desire to see us come to Christ, with no real certainty that it would happen.

We often imagine God kind of like that.

Most of us naturally think of God as the one who created everything, told his creatures what to do, and then got out of the way to see if they would do it.

Like he wants to just yank us out of death and bring us where he is, but he just doesn’t want to step on our free will.

Now, it’s true that God loves his children with a love that is intense and passionate and stronger than any love you or I have ever felt.

But he’s God.

He’s constrained by nothing.