Sermon Tone Analysis

The Beginning

With today being a special day :

The beginning of two AM services

The beginning of new classes and schedules on Sunday Evening

It id a great time to talk about the beginnings

The beginning of a matter is significant to the whole.

Where one begins greatly influences where one ends.

What we determine as truth about our beginnings colors the rest of the details of our life.

God understood this and faithfully provided His eyewitness account of our beginnings.

He chose His servant Moses to record them for us so that even thousands of years later we retain a reliable account of earth’s history; including the history of man.

Jesus used this as a witness for the truth of who He is.

He appealed to the words of Moses as He spoke to the Jewish religious leaders

I had a beginning at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta Georgia, March 25,1960.

My Father was Fred Ayers

My Mother was Patricia McCray Ayers

This was true and identified me ....

Background!

According to the majority of Biblical scholars John wrote his Gospel as an old man, perhaps in his eighty's, around the year 90 AD.

John had become a disciple of Jesus when he had been in his youth, perhaps not even 20 years old.

So the Gospel of John is a long look back on what how Jesus had changed the direction and shape of his life.

What could you write about how Jesus has Changed you life?

The moment we pick up John’s gospel we are aware that it is different from the others.

There is no genealogy, no manger scene, no boyhood, no baptism, no temptation, no mount or transfiguration, no Gethsemane.

There are only a few special miracles chosen by John as “signs.”

We have the famous I AM sayings of Jesus and many discourses found nowhere else.

There are no scribes, no lepers, no publicans, and no demoniacs.

There are no parables.

It would almost seem, as others have pointed out, that John sits with a copy of Luke’s gospel open before him, deliberately leaving out things Luke puts in and putting in things Luke leaves out (W. Graham Scroggie, A Guide to the Gospels, London: Pickering and Inglis, 1962).

Luke had written to show that Jesus was the Son of man; John is writing to show that Jesus is the Son of God.[1]

To get started right John must show that Jesus is God

We call that the deity of Christ

To be God he had to be there at creation

I Jesus the Beginning

John decides to go back to the beginning of all beginnings, to what he calls the ''arche''.

It's the Greek word from which we get our English word, archeology, which is the study of earlier beginnings.

After becoming one of the Lord’s disciples, John knew that Jesus of Nazareth was God.

He simply tells what he knows.

No turn-of-the-first-century liberal or cultist was in a position to deny the statements John makes in his opening sentences.

All John has to do is bear witness to the truth.

He knew what the truth was and he contented himself with that.[1]

Word: Jesus

First, we focus on the term word.

“In the beginning was the Word.”

The most important thing to know about this Word is found in verse 14:

The Word refers to Jesus Christ.

we are not going to get into the entomology of the word - Just remember the Word is Christ

John knows what he’s about to write in these 21 chapters.

He is going to tell us the story of what Jesus Christ did and what he taught.

This is a book about the life and work of the man Jesus Christ — the man that John knew and saw and heard and touched with his hands (1 John 1:1).

He had flesh and blood.

He was not a ghost or an apparition appearing and vanishing.

He ate and drank and got tired, and John knew him very closely.

Jesus’s mother lived with John in the last part of her life (John 19:26).

Therefore, what John is doing in John 1:1–3 is telling us the most ultimate things about Jesus that he can.

We find at the end of the age Just is also referenced as the Word

It took John more than three years to figure out the fullness of who Jesus was.

But he does not want his readers to take more than three verses to find out what took him so long to know.

He wants us to have in our minds, fixed and clear, from the beginning of his Gospel, the eternal majesty and deity and Creator rights of Jesus Christ.

Ladies from these first three verses we can discern that Jesus is God was at creation

Illustration - i was in freshman Physics class at Auburn University in fall 1978.

The first day at the first class my professor said lets get something straight from the beginning:

Not high school no one is going to make you study or go top class

Physics is hard and requires work

Most in this class will fail not because they are not capable but because they did not understand #1 and #2 above

from the beginning a large portion dropped out of the class for another major.

I want you to know you must accept the beginnings of this book to become a Christian

The Word, Jesus Christ was with God, and he was God.

He is God, and he has a relationship with God.

He is God, and he is the image of God, perfectly reflecting all that God is and standing forth from all eternity as the fullness of deity in a distinct Person.

There is one divine essence and three persons.

Two of them are mentioned here.

The Father and the Son.

We learn those names later on in the book.

The Holy Spirit will be introduced later.

Beginnings matter.

Once a cornerstone is laid, the geometrical lines of the rest of the structure, no matter how large, are determined.

The first scene of a movie sets the tone for the rest of the script.

The conception of a baby provides its DNA and the rest of that child's life will be the outworking of that genetic structure.

Beginnings matter.

Right out of the gate - Jesus was at the beginning all things were made by him and he God!

That ends the debate with all other religions

Illustration - Chemistry 101 Auburn University - settle it right now if you can not balance chemical equations then the rest of the course make no sence

If you can not put bait on a hook - no fish

If you can not hit a baseball you will not score

If you can not pass the drives test you can not drive \

Thus - if you can not accept the fact that Jesus is God then you can not be forgiven for your sins.

II Jesus the Brightness

But not everyone is blessed with a good beginning.

Children are not always loved and nurtured.

Many children are left unprotected from people and influences which harm them.

There are children who grow up with little or no encouragement.

Some families fracture.

Sometimes a mother or father is taken away by an addiction, or an accident, or by death.

Don't think that your deficits make you deficient forever.

If your beginning wasn't all it should have been, you can have a new beginning.

The Bible is full of potential beginnings for us to claim as our own.

we all must have a new beginning with a new birth .....

When you are facing storms, go back and take your place on the boat with the disciples when they thought a storm was about to toss them to drown in the sea.

Hear Jesus say''Peace, be still'' and take courage.

It's yours if you will receive it.