Sermon Tone Analysis
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Today is Mother’s Day and I want to wish all the mom’s a very happy day.
For many of us our moms are no longer with us.
This is the 13th Mother’s Day without my mom.
There are days that I still want to be able to pick up the phone and talk to her.
One of the things about my mom that has always been a source of encouragement to me was her faith in God.
She faced a number of challenges in her life but she always kept her faith in God and that God was with her during those hard times.
I’m not sure how she navigated those stormy times of life other than by her faith in God.
The first event in her life that really challenged her faith was when my one sister was diagnosed with cancer as a 9 year old.
They struggled through the very rudimentary treatments in the late 1950’s for that disease but it spread and in January of the year that I was born she died.
Through that time she kept her faith.
When I was about 2 as best as I can place it my mom developed some female issues and nearly bled to death.
The doctors weren’t sure that she was going to survive and recover.
It was during this time that my dad received Christ as his Savior.
Things were serious enough that extended family members were working to figure out how to farm out us kids if she did die because with seven kids my dad couldn’t handle that on his own.
My mom was in the hospital in New York for surgery when our Matthew was born.
We nearly lost her on the operating table because of an allergy to one of the medications they gave her.
It was really touch and go for several weeks after until she recovered.
She talked about that time later and told me that she had such a peace that God was with her during that awful time.
When she was diagnosed with cancer in 2003 she faced it as she had every other past crisis with a determination and faith that God would be with her.
Amazingly she had good health up until the day she got up one day and was standing in her living room drinking a cup of coffee and talking to my sister and then God called her name and she was gone.
Throughout her life her faith in God sustained her.
Her faith was in spite of the circumstances and situations that she faced.
It is easy to claim to have faith in God when things are going good in our life.
It is an entirely different thing to have faith when life is challenging us.
The type of faith during those challenging times is a truly victorious faith.
John in our Scripture text this morning writes
And this is the victory that has defeated the world: our faith.
I don’t know about you, but I want that kind of faith that John wrote about, a victorious faith that overcomes the world.
It is easy to talk about that kind of faith, but the hard part is how do we obtain that kind of faith?
God in His Word helps us by giving us a definition of what faith is.
The writer of the Hebrews wrote
That chapter of Hebrews is known as the faith chapter because the writer goes on and mentions a large number of Old Testament figures and how they had faith in God.
In the Passion translation it puts it this way:
I like that, there is a great point for us that faith is “the foundation needed to acquire the things we long for.”
Faith is the foundation.
For many years in my Christian journey I struggled with consecrating my entire life to God.
My head told me I needed to do that.
Intellectually I knew that if I wanted the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit to happen in my life that I needed to take that step.
In my heart I wanted to take that step but something always held me back.
Things finally came to a head when I was filling out my application to renew my District License and there is a question on the application that asks if you are entirely sanctified.
In the past I just checked the yes box and went on.
I couldn’t check the yes box that year.
I felt so troubled within by the Holy Spirit that I checked to no box and sent my application to the Board of Ministry.
I went to meet the Board of Ministry knowing that they would not renew my license.
The ministers I met with questioned me if I had marked the correct box and I told that I had indeed checked the correct one.
They questioned me some and told me that they couldn’t recommend me to have my license renewed.
One of the ministers took me aside after the meeting and he confronted me and told me that my problem was that I didn’t have enough faith that God could and would do in me what He desired through the work of the Holy Spirit.
I was more than a little offended when I left that lecture from him but I knew deep down that what he said was true.
What I discovered was that faith really wasn’t about me.
It really was about God working in me and me getting out of the way so that He could do what He wanted to do.
Read down through Hebrews chapter 11 and you see individual after individual who simply said yes to God and then got out of the way to allow God to work through them.
In the middle of that great chapter the writer says:
The faith that they had was in something that went beyond their lifetimes.
He wrote that “all died still clinging to their faith.”
It seems in our culture we want instant satisfaction.
If we ask God for something we want an instant answer.
The writer to the Hebrews reminds us that those he wrote about did not receive instant satisfaction, even up until their death they were looking to the future for the fulfillment of God’s promise.
God’s promise has been fulfilled through Jesus Christ.
We live on this side of the cross and celebrate the fact that God through Jesus came to us.
It is because of Jesus that we can have this faith and live in that faith on a daily basis.
John in our scripture text writes:
That is for us the beginning of our walk with God.
Our relationship with God begins with the belief that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of God.
John reminds us of Jesus words when He was questioned about what the greatest commandment was.
The religious leaders were trying to trap him.
Jesus told them that the greatest commandment was to Love God with our entire being.
The second greatest commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves.
John is telling us in that verse that our love for God is intertwined with our love for our fellow Christians.
It’s easy to love God or to say that we love God but the proof of that love is in how we love “the children of God.”
It is out of that love for God that we carry out His commands.
John is talking about our obedience to God.
It’s more than just a legal or moral obligation, it’s a love obligation that we want to be obedient to God.
We can be like a child who is told to do something like clean their room.
After a lot of back and forth with them putting up all sorts of excuses the parent finally gives them an ultimatum and the child stomps off saying “I’ll do it but I’m not happy.”
We can act just like that with God.
We serve Him grudgingly out of sense of moral or legal obligation but we are not happy about doing it.
Going back to the Hebrews we read at the end of that great chapter of faith these words:
These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.
They didn’t have that childish grudge obedience to God.
They put their faith in God even though they had to work through some issues with that faith.
They put their faith in God and even though they didn’t get to receive what God has promised they served Him in obedience.
We can be like that child who reluctantly obeys or we can out of love serve God in obedience.
That doesn’t mean that we won’t have questions about what He’s asking us.
Yet we serve Him out of love for what He has done for us.
John goes on and writes in verses 3 and 4:
Many people think that to be a Christian simply means that all they have to do is believe in Jesus.
As I said that is the starting point, that is where we begin.
John says that is when we are born of God.
It doesn’t stop there, we don’t just get born and stop there.
What would happen to a baby if after birth we declared them to be an adult and fully responsible for themselves and their own care.
They wouldn’t survive.
They have to be fed and cared for until they can begin to do things for themselves.
The same is true in the Christian life.
A new Christian needs to be cared for, to be taught, to be fed, to be discipled so that they can grow in their faith and relationship with God.
That growth occurs as they become obedient to God and carry out His commands.
You might be thinking, what commands.
Start with the 10 Commandments.
They weren’t 10 suggestions of God.
They put the framework around our relationship with God and others.
You might say that they are the frame around the loving God and loving others.
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