Sermon Tone Analysis

Title Slide - If you recall the 2 messages we discussed before I went away last week for some rest and family time....we discussed this God phenomena of Revival - where there are times and places where we see God’s outpouring of the Holy Spirit in a special and powerful way....and we also discussed personal renewal and we recognized that often, a time of Revival is often preceded by a time or season of individual spiritual renewal....

...and I also confessed to you that I had not plan to bring u those two messages....in fact My design for the balance of the summer had been to bring you this series of messages that as you will see are going to be closely aligned to some of the themes we touched on during the two messages we discussed around revival....I’ve had today’s message anded the four that will follow it prepared for quite some time....but I felt a very strong calling from the Lord to pause and speak on Revival first....and so that’s what we did....

Charles Finney - “A revival is nothing else than a new beginning of obedience to God.”

“A revival is nothing else than a new beginning of obedience to God.”

I felt that we needed to be obedient in that....

I felt that we needed to be obedient in that....

....and so for the next 5 weeks, including this morning, what I’d like us to focus on is a drilling down into some practical aspects of our personal spiritual renewal

I’ve titled this series of messages, The Power of RE...

So what do I mean by RE ?

Slide - re- WORD ORIGIN.

a prefix, occurring originally in Latin, used with the meaning “again” or “again and again” to indicate repetition,

Eg.

REstart-race, REposition-something that gets moved, Revitalize-family vacation

If we use this theme of RE and apply it to areas that we know we should be addressing during a season of personal spiritual renewal, then:

Slide - Bible - REngage

Pray - REframe

Spirituality - REveal

Purpose - REvisualize

Fear - REsist

Expand briefly on each...

Bible - REngage - for some of us it might be time ...this morning

Pray - REframe - for some of us...assess and reframe our conversation

Spirituality - REveal - mystery - western church - Africa

Purpose - REvisualize - Golf visualizing is important, so for life

Fear - REsist - Anxiety and fear are all to real for too many of us - there is a way to resist...

Slide - Bible - REngage

So that’s where we are going for the balance of the summer - to look at these key areas or our own personal spiritual renewal......

Now, In any discussion of revival or growth through spritual renewal, the Word of God needs to play a central part in our desire to grow....

We have talked a great deal about that this year together - Back in June when we started our month of focusing on mission we said any missional initiative needs to have at it’s core - a focus on scripture....we agreed that the same is true with a Church or Community experiencing revival and a couple weeks ago we said the same of our own personal spiritual revival....

So let me ask you something: do you ever feel like you truly want to know God but don’t really know how?

Or feel like you might need to refocus or refresh your relationship with Jesus.... Getting to know God can seem so complicated sometimes but it doesn’t have to be.

Man - Woman, we are not an independent entity, the Bible calls us vessels.

Vessels are designed to be filled with something.

We were designed to fill ourselves with God but we sometimes stray from that design..... Sin is essentially when we fill our lives with something other than God.

What we put into our lives effects what we get out of them.

We were designed to be filled with God.

So then it is important for us to learn how to do that.

How do we fill ourselves with God?

If we want to fill our lives with God we need to invest ourselves in to making that a priority in our lives - essentially, that’s the basis of our discussion for the next few weeks....these key aspects of a Christian life that we should invest our lives in.

Our lives need more God and less us.

When we follow Him, act like He acts, and obey His commands, we open the door for Him to fill our lives that we may become vessels of God.

If we want to know God we have to be filled with Him and that takes more than one day a week.

We cannot be filled with God simply by attending church on Sunday morning and doing nothing else.

If the only dose of Him we get is on Sunday mornings then we cannot hope to be filled with Him.

Consider your eating habits.

Some people prefer to eat a few big meals a day while others are ‘snackers’ and will eat a little bit all throughout the day.

Most people however, are not comfortable eating once or twice a week.

Physically you probably wouldn’t starve to death if you ate once or twice a week but you would be able to really accomplish anything because you wouldn’t have the energy for it.

The same is true in our Spiritual lives.

When we are content being Spiritual fed once or twice a week we may not die but we are not healthy.

By investing in our relationship with God, we enable ourselves to be filled with God by taking in the nature God.

In order to know God we need to know his WORD.

So here’s what I want to do this morning - and this will be a little different than some of the other messages I’ve brought to you - I hope and have prayed that you might find this series to be very practical, to give you some simple but essential ways to invest in your relationship with God....

One of the most important ways to know God comes from investing ourselves in the training manual that He gave us in His word.

Bible study is perhaps most important Spiritual discipline.

Honestly if we truly want to know God where better to start than with the love letter He wrote us.

The Bible is one of the key elements we must have to fill ourselves with God so that we may become His vessels.

The Research

Slide - The phrase “bible study how to” receives 538,541 unique monthly searches on YouTube in America – according to KeywordTool.io

The phrase “bible study how to” receives 60,500 unique monthly searches on Google in America – according to KeywordTool.io

More than half of all American adults (58%) wish they read the Bible more often

Slide- The Barna group did a survey on Bible study and its results weren’t very encouraging in this area:

Only 18% of born again Christians claim to read the Bible every day.

That is less than 1 out of 5.

23%, almost 1 in every 4 Christians admits to never reading the word of God.

This is a serious problem.

Effectively what these statistics tell us is that only 18% of born again Christian are even close to a healthy relationship with Christ and are getting their daily bread.

We know Christianity is not about a religion or rules but a relationship.

This is not say that these people who aren’t reading their Bibles cannot be saved or that they don’t have a relationship with God but the Bible is God’s primary way of communicating with us.

What this shows us is that one of primary ways we can get to know God so that we can be filled with Him is being pretty commonly neglected.

Slide - some results from a Bible knowledge test published by the Vancouver Sun.

Here are some of the answers given by people who said they knew the Bible.

1. Noah’s wife was Joan of Ark.

2. The seventh commandment is “Thou shalt not admit

adultery.”

3. The epistles were wives of the apostles.

4. A Christian should have only one wife.

This is

called monotony.

5. Lot’s wife was a pillar of salt by day and a ball

of fire by night.

(In an article entitled “Bible Study at an All Time High” taken from Ann Landers column.

It was first printed in the Vancouver Sun.

My source was http://www.7t.net/BusinessMatters/trans/991004-trans-bible_ignorance.html

accessed 4-28-05.)

In all seriousness folks....Every month, more than half a million Americans search in YouTube “bible study how to”

The Bible is the most widely distributed and best-selling book of all time.

- But it can be confounding.

But it can be confounding.

The translations.

The language.

The history.

The context.

The contradictions.

Slide - “Such is the depth of the Christian Scriptures, that even if I were attempting to study them and nothing else from early boyhood to decrepit old age, with the utmost leisure, the most unwearied zeal, and talents greater than I have, I would be still daily making progress in discovering their treasures.”

Augustine of Hippo

The study of God’s word is one of the most important parts of any personal spiritual renewal.

We must know the truth.

If we don’t, we can’t live it.

Slide - The Apostle Paul knew this -