Sermon Tone Analysis

BASH GMJR

Introduction

Name and role; greet everyone

Creator

: God’s Presence Defines His People

Give brief introduction to BASH; many of you have been a part of this thing for years in the past, so you know how this works, but some of you haven’t.

Either way, I want to kind of put it all out there so you can know what to expect and know exactly what we are about here at First Baptist Puxico and the purpose of us coming together on Wednesday nights during the school year.

Simply put, our purpose here is to glorify God by knowing him and enjoying him…thats it.

Now how we intend for that to happen, and more importantly how God intends for that to happen, is through his Word, the Bible.

Holy

He has revealed himself to us by this Word, so then what we want to do hear is simply teach this Word.

Now, I hope, I pray that you guys will listen to what I am saying, but I also want you to notice what I am not saying.

I am NOT saying that our purpose is to try and make you “better people”

I am NOT saying that our purpose is to make you better students

I am even NOT saying that our purpose is to create for you a good group of friends

All of those things usually do surface in some form or fashion when the gospel takes root in a person’s life, but those results are not our purpose

We are passionate about taking this book and telling you what it says because we believe it; it isn’t just a set of do’s and don’t’s; it is God’s revelation of himself to you and me.

Here is why that matters; the Bible says that God is good.

It also says that we are not; we are all sinners.

And since God is good, that means he has to do what is right.

In fact, he is passionate about doing what is right, which means that he has to punish sin; your sin and my sin, everything that falls short of his perfect standard.

That is bad news for us...

But the underlying theme of the Bible is this; God made a way of salvation from that punishment by sending his Son Jesus Christ to endure the punishment of sinners in their place so that all who put their faith in him will be saved.

That is great news for us...

All of you are either at a place in your life, or getting to a place in your life, where you have to start thinking about your future; what do I want to do? what am I going to be? how am I going to live my life?

These are important things to think about, but I want to be blatantly honest with you; none of it matters if you do not personally know this Jesus whom the Bible proclaims as Lord and Savior.

We are sinners, so all other things being equal, we are headed toward eternal punishment for our sins.

We are like a blind man running toward a cliff; unless he changes his course, he is going to run right to his death.

In the same way, unless our eyes are opened to the truth of who Jesus is, we work, toil, we accumulate stuff, and run right toward a guaranteed death.

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and this book tells us how, and we want to tell it to you

Overview

So here is how we are going to do that; brother Allen and I will be sharing the teaching duties here.

You’ll hear from me more, but we are both going to be involved with this part.

And as far as content, what’s the plan, what are we going to be talking about each week, I’m glad you asked...

As a church we use an acronym to sort of summarize the whole story of the Bible in a clear and concise way.

Some of you are probably familiar with it and it is this: G.M.J.R.

God is holy

Man is sinner

Jesus is Savior

Response required

That sums up the message of the Bible.

What we want to do is examine all of those truths from the Bible in order to understand what it teaches.

So from now until Thanksgiving we are going to look at a different letter of the acronym GMJR each week.

We are going to start in ,, and 3, beginning with G, God, next week, then M, man, the next, and so on.

Once we go through that, we will move to another section of Scripture, specifically , and go through the four truths again as they are shown in that text.

And what you will find as we do this is that the Bible tells one unified story…of course there are many details to it that come up in each book, but it is a single story that is far too important to not be told.

GMJR

So what I want to do this week with the time we have left is simply give you guys an overview of this GMJR thing, which in a word, is the gospel, alright?

God

So G, God.

God is first in this acronym because he is most important.

And that is probably the understatement of the century.

Words cannot do justice to this truth, but God comes first.

I’m sure you have heard the expression that you don’t want to but the cart before the horse.

That’s what we say when someone is getting ahead of themselves.

And we say that because order is important.

To use a biblical illustration, think about someone who is building a house.

If you spend all the money to build a house, you want it to last.

You don’t want to pay all that money and have it fall down in 6 months.

So what is the first step to making sure that that doesn’t happen?

Make sure it has a solid foundation.

You can use the best tools and materials in the world to build the house, but if its foundation is no good, then the whole thing is no good because its going to come tumbling down.

In the same way, God is the foundation of all things; all creation, all knowledge, all truth, everything.

And the reason that this is the case is because God is holy.

That is what points to.

Moses asks God his name, and he’s not asking just so he can know what to call God…he’s asking “who are you?

what are you like? how can I explain you as God?”

But God has nobody and nothing else he can compare himself to.

Its like this: if I ask you “what are you like?” and you know that I am friends with this brother right here, you can say, “well, I am like him, but maybe I am a little more outgoing.”

You can compare yourself.

But God can’t do that because he is not like any created thing.

He has no beginning and no end.

He was not created, nor does he depend on anyone or anything to keep on existing…he is completely other, separate from all that is created.

That is what it means to say that God is holy…so to describe himself in a way we can understand, God can only say “I am who I am.”

Simply put, he just is.

So then, that means that everything you see is created by God.

Everything has God as it’s source; the sun, the moon, the trees, the animals, and you and me…all of it depends on God for its existence, whether we acknowledge him or not.

So I hope you are starting to see the point; since everything proceeds from God, that means two things

1) the standard for truth, for right and for wrong, is God himself; you can’t just randomly decide something is good or bad, because those are relative terms.

Something can only be good or bad in comparison to a known standard.

2) Salvation, worship, church, this life and the next…have at their center God, not man.

You get those two flipped around, then you’ve got it all wrong.

He does not exist for us; we exist for him, specifically to glorify him.

And the beautiful thing about it is that when we come to know him as he intended at creation, we find our greatest enjoyment...

That leads us to M, Man is sinner...

Man

This here is the very root of our problem…but remember the order of how things work; God comes first.

So the primary reason our sin is a big problem is not because it has terrible results for us—though it does—the primary reason our sin is a big problem is because it is an all out attack on the glory of God.

To understand that, you have to look at the beginning of the Book of Genesis which tells the story of how God created everything.

Thats where we are going to spend our time in the coming weeks, for this reason, that it lays the foundation for understanding God, man, Jesus, and the call for a response.

Genesis begins with God as Creator, and he creates everything you see and that you don’t see.

It all has its source in him.

But the final and most important part of his creation was man.

Nothing else in all of creation was made to bear the image of God.

Those of you who were in the small group over the summer should remember what this means because we talked about it a lot.

To bear God’s image means we represent him on the earth.

That’s the charge given in the verses we just read; God was basically saying “I have given you attributes that reflect my attributes.

I have made you my representatives.

So as my representatives, rule over the earth.”

That is an amazing, really unthinkable privilege.