Sermon Tone Analysis
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What is the best Christmas present that you received this year?
Advent means “God Comes to Us”
Advent typically has four Sundays.
Since we have a fifth Sunday in December this year I thought I would add another sermon to the series.
It can refer to the coming of God to earth in Jesus or it can refer to Jesus’ second coming.
The fact that we live between these two advents means that we have a role in this story.
It can refer to the coming of God to earth in Jesus or it can refer to Jesus’ second coming.
Let’s review how God comes to us:
Hope is confidence in the goodness of God.
Peace is the experience of the goodness of God.
Joy is our internal response to the goodness of God.
Love is our active response to the goodness of God.
Faith is all of the above.
God comes to us as faith-- faith to believe, faith to repent and faith to participate in what God is doing.
What is Faith?
Jesus came.
Mary and Joseph obeyed.
The shepherds and the angels bore witness.
The wise men worship.
What you do with all of this information is called faith.
You might say, “If I’m supposed to do something then it’s not God coming to us, It’s me that’s doing it.”
The Bible tells us that even what we are able to do is a gift from God.
In the NT, faith and faithfulness are the same word.
phil 2:13
It’s only according to context that we can diferentiate
Faith describes the substance of our relationship with God.
In faith, there’s God’s part and there’s my part.
If I’m worried about what’s my part and what’s God’s part, I miss the point.
What I think is my part is really God working through me.
And sometimes God will ask me to do things that only He can do.
After Jesus rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, the disciples Peter and John began to find out what faith really means.
To answer the question, “What is faith?”
we’re going to start in the middle of the story with Peter’s sermon.
Faith to believe
Faith is the ability to accept what is true.
According to Peter’s testimony, Most of the Jewish people- God’s people, were in denial as to who Jesus really was and is.
Faith is the ability to accept what is true.
As if Jesus’ birth was not enough to convince anyone of His divinity, His death and resurrection are the ultimate proof.
For anyone to come to faith, the important question is, “Who is Jesus Christ?”
Is He real?
When did you first discover that Jesus is real?
Is Jesus God? Lots of religions revere Jesus but they stop short of calling Him God.
Why? because if He’s God then He has absolute authority.
Is Jesus Lord?
That’s the real question.
If Jesus is Lord, then everything must come under the authority of Jesus Christ!
Faith is the willingness to trust what we have come to know.
Our English word “believe” doesn’t exactly capture all that it means to have faith in Jesus.
Trust is a better word because it implies something that we do with our whole being, not just our mind.
You can believe that a chair will hold you, but trust has you put your full weight on it.
Faith is the exercise of applying what we know to how we live.
So Jesus is God who lived, died and rose again for you and me.
So what?
What difference does it make?
What it means for you is that you are more that just a person who eats, sleeps and breathes for you own pleasure.
You have a greater purpose!
God’s purpose.
Peter went from being the disciple who denied Jesus to being the one to tell the whole city that they were wrong to nail Jesus to the cross.
Peter changed.
He turned from denial to face the truth about Jesus.
And then he began to do the things that Jesus did.
Faith to repent
Act 3:1
You are responsible for what you know.
Peter gives the people a way to save face - they acted in ignorance.
The problem with ignorance is that you can be ignorant and not even know it!
But when you have revelation and you ignore it, what’s your excuse?
There are lots of people out there who are living their lives in ignorance to the things of God.
But that’s not us.
We know too much to plead ignorance.
So if we know what they need to know and don’t know, what are we waiting for?
To repent means to turn around.
When you realize that you are going the wrong direction and you stop and turn around - that’s repentance.
You simply admit that you made a mistake and you change.
What’s so hard about that?
Well apparently, it’s a lot harder than we think because no one uses that word anymore.
To the believer repentance is a gift!
As often as you realize that you have missed following God in some area of your life, you can change.
That’s great!
You don’t need to keep making the same old mistakes.
What keeps us from repentance is pride.
Sometimes Christians have the worst kind of pride because they have been pretending to have it all together and they don’t want anyone to know that they’re not perfect.
Someone might say, “I did all that.
I took Elijah House and I repented.”
So why did you stop?
Repentance should be a lifestyle for the believer, not something you do once, but something that you do regularly as you grow in grace.
Repentance leads to restoration.
The Christian life isn’t all repenting.
There are times of refreshing that come from the Lord.
Repentance isn’t actually our focus.
Our focus is on the presence of the Lord.
Repentance is simply making the adjustment when our thoughts and attitudes are not like what we see in Jesus.
Jesus is the perfect image of God and God is about restoration.
We can see in Jesus what God originally designed us to be.
He shows us what humanity looks like without sin.
God is restoring us into His image in Christ.
Let’s go back to the beginning of the chapter to see what restoration looks like.
Faith to participate
Restoration means seeing people that way that God sees them
Peter and John told the lame man to look at them.
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