Sermon Tone Analysis

Scripture Reading and Prayer

Tonight’s Scripture reading will come from the Gospel of John, chapter 1, verses 1 through 5, and then verses 14-18

This is God’s Word / thanks be to God

Almighty Father in Heaven, may your name and your renown be revered, honored, and delighted in as holy.

We thank you for today, and for the daily bread that we have received today from your fatherly care over us.

We thank you for Jesus Christ, your only begotten Son, the Word made flesh, who we meet and encounter in the pages in the Scriptures, the divine and inspired Word of God.

I ask the Holy Spirit to awaken in our hearts a hunger for your glory, and a desire to know and love Jesus Christ with our whole beings, to truly be able to taste and see the Lord is good.

Introduction

This is our second night back at Redeemer Youth for 2020, and I hope you all are adjusting back to your normal schedules and routines after having some time off school.

Mel and I were able to enjoy some time with some of my extended family for a few days during Christmas week, where we both proceeded to get the flu and I spent my annual week off work grinding homework while feeling like death.

One of the dumbest pop culture maxims that gets thrown out around this time of year is “new year, new you!”, and that absolutely does not apply when you have the flu.

With the new year often comes talk of “new year resolutions”, and if you’re sitting here thinking about the resolution that you made for the new year that you’ve already broken, don’t worry: more than 90% of the general population fails to keep their New Years Resolutions.

But what’s sad is that whenever we make a New Years Resolution and then fail to keep it or break it, we often just abandon the resolution all together, and sometimes we even go a step further abandon the concept of “resolutions” entirely until the next new year comes around.

Our history of all our failed New Years Resolution has put a bad taste in our minds about being “resolved” to do something, and tonight I want to tackle that awkward sense of guilt and shame we have about one very common New Year Resolution: reading the Word of God more often.

Last week Andrew talked about a guy named Jonathan Edwards and his famous “resolutions”.

These were not New Years Resolutions, but resolutions that he made and would regularly remind himself in order to help ensure he did what he resolved to do.

One of those resolutions reads:

“Resolved, to study the Scriptures so steadily, constantly, and frequently that I may find and plainly perceive myself to grow in the knowledge of them.”

Basically, “I am going to study the Scriptures so much that I’ll be able to clearly see that I’m growing more familiar with the Bible.”

And I think a lot of us, at some point in our lives, have “resolved” to do something like that, maybe as a New Years Resolution or maybe throughout the year as the Lord convicts you of this.

I also think a lot of us, at the same time, have resolved to spend more time with the Word only to fail at doing it, and then the next time we flirt with the idea of “I need to spend more time reading the Bible”, we get discouraged at all the other times we’ve promised or “resolved” to do the same thing and then failed to do it, and so we get caught in this vicious cycle of resolving to do something, failing, feeling guilty of our failures, resolve to do something, failing, and so and and so.

The same is true with going to the gym, or dieting, or kicking a bad habit, or any other “resolution” you set out to do.

We aren’t going to necessarily dive in to how to practically set and commit to a new Bible reading plan, or what are the best ways to dive into Scripture, because those are things that we regularly do in our Gospel Communities on Wednesday Nights and our Foundations reading groups that meet throughout the week.

If you want practical guidance on how to do this, we discuss this all the time and will talk about it some when we split into our groups here later.

Instead, tonight, I want to spend some taking an indirect approach at diagnosing why it is we all struggle to commit to studying the Word of God, and I want to do it by posing a question to you tonight: who is Jesus, and why do you love him?

Who Is Jesus and Why Do You Love Him?

I didn’t come up with this question: I stole it from a guy named Michael Horton, who is one of my favorite theologians and who hosts an excellent podcasting/radio ministry called The White Horse Inn (it’s easily one of the best Christian podcasts you could listen to, I cannot recommend it enough).

One of the things he does on his show is he and his producers go out on to college campuses in California near where they live and just ask people basic questions about God, the Bible, and Christianity in general, and often times they record their conversations with people and discuss their answers on the show.

The question “Who Is Jesus?” is a question they ask often and they usually get a wide range of answers: “Jesus is God”, “Jesus was a good moral teacher”, “Jesus was a political revolutionary”, “Jesus didn’t actually exist”, and anything else you can think of.

If the people they’re talking to claim to be Christians, they’ll usually ask “why do you love him?” as a follow-up question, and again, they usually get a wide range of answers: “because he loves me”, “because he saved me from my sins”, “because he died on the cross for me”, “because he taught us how to love one another”, etc.

If the people they’re talking to claim to be atheist, agnostic, “Spiritual but not religious”, or follow some other non-Christian religion, they sometimes ask them what they think about the Bible, and unsurprisingly, the answers often reflect a low view of the Bible that corresponds with their low view of Jesus: “the Bible is full of fairytales”, “the Bible has some good moral teachings, but nothing more”, “the Bible is just a byproduct of religious men who wanted to control people”, and so on.

Last semester, we talked a lot about the Bible and why it’s trustworthy, dependable, and why we ought to believe its

The reason why Horton and his team ask these questions is not because they want to get into debates with people where they beat them over the head with how smart they are.

The reason they ask these two questions is because they want to highlight the relationship between your love for Jesus and your love for the Bible and how the two directly relate to each other.

We learn who Jesus is through his Word; we are able to love Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, the incarnate Son of God who became fully god and fully man who lived a sinless life to die in the place of sinners because we encounter that Jesus in the Word.

Conversely, because we love Jesus, our Lord and King who we will one day see face to face and worship forever, we want to spent time with him in the Word so that we can learn more about who he is and what he has done.

The Bible is God’s Word that reveals to us the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, and you can meet the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ, through His Word which testifies from start to finish that Jesus is God.

The

There are people who try to tell you that you can love Jesus apart from the Bible (or that the Bible somehow gets in the way of us loving Jesus), and there are people who know the Bible in and out but whose hearts are cold to Jesus Himself.

The Bible does not pit loving God and loving His Word as being opposite to each other; the Bible teaches us that in order to know Jesus and to truly love him, we must go through His Word.

The Bible is not a means to it’s own end - the Bible points us to Jesus, and Jesus points us to the words he has spoken directly to us in the pages of the Scriptures in order for us to know who he is.

I am going to be blunt with y’all tonight.

I think if I were to ask y’all “who is Jesus?”, most of us in here would be able to give great answers that come from the Bible.

I think y’all are collectively some of the smartest teenagers I’ve ever met when it comes to a general knowledge and familiarity of the Bible.

I also think that if I were to ask “why do you love him?”,

most of you in here would be able to give good answers to that question as well - at least, on paper.

I think it’s a very real and serious danger for us to be able to give good and true reasons why we say we love Jesus, but to do so in a way that is cold, distant, and uninterested to actually loving and delighting in Jesus himself, and that is a very dangerous place to be in, and I think for many of us, it explains why we have such a hard time reading and studying the Scripture - the words we say about Jesus do not match the way we actually feel about him.

So for 2020, when it comes to tackling how we read the Bible more or study the Scriptures more deeply, maybe we need to look at it from a different angle.

Maybe instead of asking how we can better hack our schedules to fit in our Bible reading, we need to honestly ask ourselves if we truly love and desire Jesus as much as we say we do.

Maybe our problem is not whether or not we have the time, or technique, or tools to be able to read and understand the Bible; maybe the issue is that we give lip service to our love for Christ, but we do not truly delight in knowing and behold him.

We give can say that Jesus is our all, but find the thought of spending an hour reading our Bible or praying to be too difficult.

We can say that Jesus is worthy of all our worship, but struggle to say no to our entertainment and distraction so that we can give our full focus and attention to worshipping him on Sundays.

We can believe that Jesus Christ is the only Son of God,

begotten from the Father before all ages,

God from God,

Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made;

of the same essence as the Father.

Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation

he came down from heaven;

he became incarnate by the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary,

and was made human.

[He lived a perfect, holy, righteous life, but]

He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate [as a sinner in our place];

he suffered [physically on the cross and from the full wrath of God that we deserved] and was buried.

The third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures.

He ascended to heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again with glory

to judge the living and the dead.

[And for those who place their faith in his sacrifice on the cross for their salvation] His kingdom [in the new heavens and the new earth, free from the Satan, sin, and death] will never end .

and find that boring.

"Okay”, you might be thinking, “how do I learn to love Jesus?”

In closing, I have two answers for that.

First, its a general axiom that if you love someone you want to spend as much time with them as possible, and the way we spend time with Jesus is through reading the Word and through prayer, and there are no shortcuts to that.

You cannot love Jesus and it not overflow into you spending time in the Word and you spending time in prayer - it just does not happen.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, is to think and meditate on your eternity with Christ.

Think about the fact that you will die someday, and that when you do, you will be ushered into the presence of Jesus and dwell with him forever.

Think about the joy, the wonder, the delight, the peace, the security, the majesty, the glory, the awe, that will come from being in the presence of God and how this will never, ever end, or get boring, or get uninteresting.

And as you think about this, ask yourself if you think it is possible to have a taste of that sublime bliss today - the answer to that question is “yes”.

I’ve used this quote from Dr. Martyn Lloyd Jones before, but I am going to close with it again because I think it perfectly captures what I’m trying to get at:

“All I have tried to say can be put like this.

You are going to see God! Do you not agree that this is the biggest, the most momentous, the most tremendous thing that you can ever be told?

Is it your supreme object, desire and ambition to see God?

If it is, and if you believe this gospel, you must agree with John, “‘Every man that has this hope purifies himself, even as He is pure.’

The time is short, and you and I have not long to prepare.

The Great Reception is at hand; in a sense the ceremonial is all prepared; you and I are waiting for the audience with the King.

Are you looking forward to it?

Are you preparing yourself for it?

Don’t you feel ashamed at this moment that you are wasting your time on things that not only will be of no value to you on that great occasion, but to which you will then be ashamed.

You and I, creatures of time as we appear to be, are going to see God and bask in His eternal glory for ever and ever.

Our confidence is that he is working in us and preparing us for that.