Sermon Tone Analysis

!! God's Living, Powerful Word

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For the word of God is living and active.

Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight.

Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.

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Hebrews 4:12-13

Bill Bentley moved to the mountains of southern Mexico near Guatemala in 1938.

He went there to translate the Bible into the language of a remote tribe in those mountains, the Tzeltals.

His fiancée, Marianna, was serving a neighboring tribe.

They went back to Pennsylvania to be married, but six days before the wedding Bill died of a heart attack.

Marianna was crushed.

God had called her to go to the Tzeltals with Bill.

Now, even without him she would go back.

The journey took ten days, five on foot and five on horseback.

The Tzeltals lived an awful existence.

Poverty, alcoholism, violence, disease, and hopelessness darkened the entire region.

After spending six years there alone, learning the language, Marianna was joined by Florence, a missionary nurse.

For the first eight years their work met with suspicion, rejection, and hostility from the Tzeltals; the missionaries were unwanted and misunderstood.

But they stuck it out.

By 1965, after more than twenty years, they had completed the translation of the New Testament into two dialects.

Then a miracle took place.

More than seventy congregations of Christians grew from the seed they planted.

Suspicion became faith, rejection became acceptance, hostility became Christian love.

The Tzeltals call God's word "good seed"; it had taken root.

Twenty-one years of life by two single women and the Word of God grew.

They looked forward to spending the rest of their lives translating the Old Testament.

But then Cameron Townsend came.

He told the Tzeltal people about the Paez people in the Andes Mountains in southwestern Colombia.

They did not have the Word of God.

He asked the two women to go and start the entire process over again.

Marianna and Florence said yes, and the Tzeltal people became the sponsor for the two ladies to go to Colombia.

For the third time Marianna learned a strange language, and for another twenty-one years she and Florence translated the New Testament.

Then Marianna and Florence went back to the sponsor church in southern Mexico with some of the Paez people.

What a reunion that was! Thousands of Tzeltal people lined the way to greet them.

In the twenty-one years since they had left, the seventy-two congregations they founded had become 322.

When they had left there were six thousand believers.

When they returned there were forty-four thousand.

One-third of the Tzeltals were practicing Christians.

Hallelujah for the Word of God!

What other book could do that?

If you left a physics text, a biography of a great man, a collection of short stories, a folio of poetry—could any of those books have done what the Bible did for the Tzeltals?

No! Only the Word of God can do that.

"For the word of God is living and active . .

." (Heb.

4:12).

Our text speaks of the Word of God.

Great theologians have debated whether this means the Person of the Son of God or the written Book of God.

Learned men have examined the question endlessly.

I relish this debate, because it means that the living Word of God, Jesus, and the written Word of God, the Bible, are so closely joined together that the greatest scholars cannot tell whether our text speaks of one or the other.

God incarnated Himself in Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ incarnates Himself in this written revelation.

God has so joined together the written Word and the embodied Word that it is impossible to divide them.

When you come back to God, the primary instrument for that reunion is the Word of God.

The Bible is your road map back home.

!!! God's Word Lives

In the Greek, the first and most emphatic word of our text is the word "living"—/living /is the Word of God.

Vibrant, vital, vivacious, moving, multiplying, enlivened, energetic—living!

God's Word is living because it is the Word of the living God—the living Christ.

He lives, and therefore this Word lives.

Just as my hand lives because it is connected with the source of life in my chest, so the Book lives because it is drenched with the life of the One who makes it live.

When Peter confessed Christ, he confessed Him as the Son of the Living God.

Around Peter at Caesarea Philippi were the fetishes and remnants of dead gods.

When the others began to forsake Jesus, Peter cried out to Him, "Lord, to whom shall we go?

You have the words of eternal life" (John 6:68).

Like a man clinging to something for his very life, Peter recognized in the words of Jesus Christ the vehicles of life that would last forever.

Jesus said, "The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life" (John 6:63).

This Book vibrates with life because it is inseparably connected with the life of God Himself.

It never decays, decomposes, or disintegrates, because it is alive.

We have in our family the Bible of my paternal greatgrandfather, a Texas farmer and Baptist preacher in the nineteenth century.

It is tattered with time, burned from a fire, soaked with grease from an accident, and stained by the rains of a storm.

But I pick it up to read, and immediately it impacts me with the life that is in it.

This would be true of virtually no other book from my great-grandfather's world.

I could pick up a science, mathematics, physics, medical, law, engineering, or any other kind of book from his generation and it would be dead, dated, and surpassed by a thousand other books.

I pick up his Bible and Jesus Christ leaps off its pages and confronts me in the same way He does in the newer Bible I hold.

The Bible lives because it is the Word of the living God.

On the Spanish galleon /Atocha, /which sank off Key West, Florida in 1622, were four seeds, preserved an unprecedented 365 years in salt water.

When planted in a lab, they sprouted and stood three inches tall.

Life produces life.

God's Word does the same.

The Bible is the /living /Word because it gives life.

A living thing is identified as living because it propagates, it gives birth, it multiplies.

A thing is alive because it gives life to another.

A rock does not give birth to a rock; a brick does not give birth to a brick.

A single-celled protozoan and a great blue whale are alive because they give life.

How do I know this Book lives?

Because it gives life.

Peter says it: "For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God" (1 Peter 1:23).

What other book could have been left among the Tzeltals and given life to forty-four thousand people, then cause them to send two women to Colombia, where it was translated into another remote dialect—giving life to thousands more?

Only the Word of God.

This Book has a strange, mystic vitality.

It acts toward me like a person.

It wrestles with me, smites me, comforts me, smiles on me, frowns on me, clasps my hand, warms my heart, weeps with me, sings with me, whispers to me.

This Book never gets sick or old.

Its eye never dims, its ear never deafens, its step never slackens, its brow is never creased with a frown.

This Book lives, breathes, moves.

You do not bring life to Scripture; you /draw /life from it.

Even a single verse can give eternal life.

How many times I have come to my study, weary and stressed with the care of the church, distracted by everything having to do with the thousands of people under my pastoral care.

My mind has been clouded, my body has been tired.

I open my Bible to a passage.

I open my Greek testament.

I open various translations.