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
0.12UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.1UNLIKELY
Fear
0.12UNLIKELY
Joy
0.59LIKELY
Sadness
0.53LIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.73LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.65LIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.79LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.8LIKELY
Extraversion
0.2UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.85LIKELY
Emotional Range
0.65LIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
Introduction
Jesus answered, “Come follow me and I will make you fishers of men.”
How many people here have ever caught an honest to goodness Muskie?
I am not talking about their close cousin, a Northern Pike, everyone catches those I mean a Muskellunge or Muskie.
They are one of rarest and most sought after fish up here in the northern lakes.
The reason that these fish are such a rare catch is that they sit on the top of the food chain.
They are so “fast and fierce” that they can eat anything under or on the water and nothing can eat them.
Except perhaps an even bigger muskie.
In fact, they call the Muskie the “Fish of 10,000 casts” because that is about how many casts it sometimes takes to catch one.
And we are not talking about a light weight rod with a little worm hanging off the end of a bobber.
You have to wield one of these monster Muskie rods and cast out these heavy “Muskie baits”.
10,000 times!
That is a lot of work, not to mention a lot of money.
These rods and lures are crazy expensive.
True Muskie hunters understand all this, and often this so called “hobby” become more of an obsession.
They go out fishing day after day, week after week and most every night they go home without ever seeing a single Muskie.
But they keep after it, hoping that someday they will be able to take a picture like this one:
True Muskie hunters understand this.
They go days and weeks without ever seeing a Muskie, but they keep after it.
They have these huge heavy rods with crazy thick fishing line and lures bigger than many of the pan fish that we clean for dinner.
When it comes to the Northern lakes, these fish are at the top of the food chain.
They are fast and fierce so they don’t need to go after the slowest things in the water.
This makes catching any Muskie a rare occasion, let alone catching one of a great size.
Imagine then if you were to pull a monster like this one into your boat!
This is Gary Gilbert of Becker, Minnesota hoisting up a 59 1/2-inch muskie that he got on Lake Mille Lacs June 17, 2017.
Almost three inches longer than the state record at the time.
This is what Muskie fishermen are all about.
This is what they spend day after day, dollar after dollar, cast after cast to have.
An opportunity to pull in a fish like this.
This would be the centerpiece to their trophy room.
This would put their name in the record books of the greats.
This would be proof that it was all worth it.
You know what Gary did with the fish?
He threw it away.
Trashed it.
Treated it like rubbish.
Like it didn’t even matter.
Like it didn’t even count.
He just threw it all away.
To the gasp of every Muskie fisherman that he showed this picture to “Gary, what where you thinking?”
When he showed the picture to his Muskie hunting friends they are all jealous.
They wish that they would have had a shot at a rare and beautiful fish like this.
They imagined themselves in the picture and even made mental notes of which taxidermist they would have called to oder their proud fish mount.
It would be the centerpiece of their trophy room, and they would finally have proof that every sacrifice, every day, every dollar, every one of those 10,000 casts was worth it.
You see Gary knew something about this fish that anyone else looking at the picture wouldn’t know.
It didn’t count for anything.
But you know what Gary did with the fish?
He threw it away.
Trashed it.
Treated it like rubbish.
Like it didn’t even matter.
Like it didn’t even count.
He just threw it all away.
You see Gary knew something about this fish that anyone else looking at the picture wouldn’t know.
The fish
Despite the story that you and I might imagine from the picture, Gary actually found the fish dead and floating belly up in the water.
He didn’t cast out a lure.
He didn’t catch the fish.
He didn’t fight the fish for hours until it was so tired it just gave in to the heavy line on Gary’s expensive rod and reel.
In the end it didn’t count.
It didn’t matter.
Every true Muskie hunter
“After I held it up for a photo, I just dropped it back in,” he said.
“I figured that was the way to show some respect for the fish.
It still smelled up my boat for two weeks.”
- “rubbish”?
Joy
We have handled “Partnership” and we always handle Gospel - lets look at “Rejoice”
Contrased to the Dogs of asceticism - mutilators of the flesh.
He just pulled his boat up to the smelly dead carcass and dragged this fish out of the water to take a picture, threw the fish away and then spent the next several weeks trying to wash the stink out of his boat.
True story.
Tension
Now why would I tell you that story?
I am not trying to be hard on Gary, I would probably have done the same thing because you just don’t see fish like that.
No, I tell you that story to demonstrate that we can fooled into thinking that some things belong as the centerpiece of our trophy room, when in fact they don’t count at all.
This is the message that Paul is sharing with the Church of Philippi in our text today.
In our Summer series we are in the book of Philippians where Paul says that a healthy Church is a “Joyful Gospel Partnership” but not all the teachers in Paul’s day agreed.
Some of the teachers in Paul’s day were teaching that the foundation of a healthy Church was in being faithful in particular religious practices.
To them a Christian was not just someone who trusted in Jesus, but someone who first showed themselves worthy of Jesus by religious rights and practices.
In particular they said that you had to do everything needed to first becoming Jewish, then after you proved yourself to be a good Jew, then you could be considered a follower of Jesus.
To them, the foundation of a healthy Church was in being faithful in particular religious practices.
To them a Christian was not just someone who trusted in Jesus, but someone who first showed themselves worthy of Jesus by first becoming Jewish.
Then after you proved yourself to be a good Jew, then you could be considered a follower of Jesus.
Paul calls that thinking “Rubbish”.
It might seem like something to be proud of, after all Jesus was Jewish, but in the end it stinks as bad a big dead fish.
And Paul should know, because at one time he had everything they are talking about... and even more…but he still calls it trash.
It doesn’t count for anything.
There is only one thing that counts, and you cannot have a healthy Church built around anything else.
Paul says that all
This is the message that Paul is sharing with the Church of Philippi in our text today.
In our Summer series we are discovering that a healthy Church is a “Joyful Gospel Partnership” but there were teachers in Paul’s day that were not teaching this truth.
Instead they were teaching that a right relationship with God is only found through being faithful in particular religious practices.
They were teaching that in order to truly be saved you must spend day after day, dollar after dollar, decision after decision on the right religious practices.
In other words,
only one thing worth building a Church around, one thing and we are going to take a look at that this morning.
that Paul says don’t count.
They are rubbish.
They are garbage.
And if live your life going after those things, you are going to spend a long time trying to wash that stink out of your life.
So open up your Bibles to , p. 981 in the Bibles in the chairs, I’ll pray and we will get started in the text together.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9