Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Turn with me in your Bibles to John 12.

On November 16, 2018, a young missionary named John Allen Chau was killed on a remote island in the Indian Ocean.

He was attempting to take the gospel to the North Sentinelese people, a group well known for their hostility towards outsiders.

In fact, they are so well known for their hostility that the Indian government has outlawed outside contact with the people both out of concern for the safety of those who might wander into their territory and be killed, and out of concern for the Sentinelese people, for fear of spreading diseases amongst the small group and out of concern to prevent greedy foreigners from trying to take advantage of the primitive people.

In the days and weeks following John Chau’s death, a media firestorm erupted.

Some Christians praised him as a martyr, while many other people decried him as a foolish neo-colonialist who just couldn’t leave well enough alone.

His own father blames the American missionary movement and what he calls “extreme” Christianity for his son’s death.

Others said, “John Allen Chau is not a martyr, just a dumb American who though the tribals needed ‘Jesus’ when the tribals already lived in harmony with God and nature for years without outside interference.”

Another person said, ““I’m sorry, but what a deluded idiot.”

Most Christians were, naturally, more sympathetic.

But many Christians preferred to distance themselves from what they saw as a backwards view of Christianity bent on saving people from the fires of a Hell that doesn’t exist.

John Allen Chau’s death sparked a firestorm of controversy, even amongst evangelical Christians, and at the root of the issue is the question: “What does it mean to be a disciple of Christ?”

Transition: In John 12, we see a picture of true discipleship contrasted with false discipleship.

We see true discipleship embodied in Mary while we get a very clear picture of false discipleship embodied in Judas.

FCF: Our hearts are naturally inclined to idolatry—to the love of self, comfort, and all the world has to offer.

This naturally leads us to dilute Christ’s call to discipleship to its bare minimums.

Main Idea: But in John chapter 12, we will see that one whose heart has been truly changed by Christ doesn’t hesitate to give everything he has to follow Christ.

Scripture Introduction: Let’s begin reading in John 12:1-11.

Prayer for Illumination

Discipleship is like a weeping woman before her savior—it’s prompted by a grateful heart.

(vv.

1-3)

Her love for her brother was so great that there was no price too great for his life.

Mary is expressing a profound, deep thankfulness and gratitude for her brother’s life.

Her love for the Savior was so great that there was no sacrifice she was unwilling to make.

Mary could have chosen to just say “Thank you,” but her gratitude was so deep that she had to show it.

Words couldn’t suffice!

And that love prompted her to give the most precious and valuable thing she owned.

Her gratitude to Christ was so great that there was no humiliation she wouldn’t endure to bring him glory.

Mary takes the role of a hired servant, anointing the feet of Christ.

More than that, she debases herself even further by using her own hair to wipe his feet.

Those who are in love with the world’s praise and what people think of them can never do this.

The indignity and humiliation of debasing themselves like this is just too much.

But we serve a savior who took on the ultimate humiliation and shame for our sake.

He left heaven where he was praised as King and took on a frail human body.

He left his throne above to become a lowly carpenter and then be executed like a common criminal.

While we often depict Christ as wearing a loincloth on the cross, in all likelihood, he was naked.

Even as Christians, we cannot bear to portray our Savior with the indignity and humiliation that he truly endured.

Christ endured all of this to save your soul.

True discipleship is like a weeping woman at the feet of her Savior--it happens when the wonder of what Christ has done for us seizes our hearts and we overflow with thanksgiving from a grateful heart.

Discipleship is like expensive perfume—it’s extremely costly.

(vv.

4-6)

This ointment that Mary used was worth almost a year’s salary.

If this story was set in modern America, that would be somewhere in the neighborhood of a $40-50,000 bottle of perfume.

Feel Jesus and his disciples could have done a lot with money like that.

Fed the hungry

Built homes for the homeless

etc.

Being a follower of Christ means realizing the infinite worth of Christ, and the relative worthlessness of anything else in comparison.

It’s like finding a buried treasure in a field, then selling everything you own so you can buy that field.

Being a disciple of Christ may cost you the praise of men.

We can debate the missiological strategy that John Chau used, but that is for the realm of missiologists.

John Chau wasn’t perfect, and his strategy wasn’t perfect.

But when we peel back the cleverly disguised ‘concern’ that the media had for the Sentinelese people, what we find are these basic assumptions:

“There is no Hell.”

Like Patrick Chau, Justin Graves, a pastor and a friend of John’s from linguistics school, has blamed evangelical culture for enabling Chau’s death.

“John Chau was a good man,” he wrote in a Facebook post.

“He was a loving, passionate individual I was blessed to befriend, and the loss of his light on this earth was devastating.

But it cannot be left as a mere tragedy.

His death brings to light a multitude of issues with Evangelical views” and “hell-based ethics”.

“If you believe in heaven and hell then what he did was the most loving thing anyone could do.”

John Middleton Ramsey, friend to Chau

“There are many ways to God.”

“Just a dumb American who thought the tribals needed ‘Jesus’ when the tribals already lived in harmony with God and nature for years without outside interference.”

Like his son, Dr Patrick Chau is a graduate of Oral Roberts, an evangelical university in Oklahoma.

I had thought he might want to defend evangelical doctrines against the unsympathetic media coverage sparked by his son’s death.

In an email, however, he called religion “the opium of the mass[es]”.

“If you have [anything] positive to say about religion,” he told me, “l wish not to see or hear” it.

He said his son’s zeal was a longstanding point of contention and that they’d agreed not to talk about John’s missionary work.

“John is gone because the Western ideology overpowered my [Confucian] influence,” he said.

He blamed evangelicals’ “extreme Christianity” for pushing his child to a “not unexpected end”, and he referred with particular bitterness to the Great Commission, Jesus’s injunction that Christians spread the gospel to all peoples.

Discipleship is like an alabaster jar—it’s all or nothing.

(vv.

4-6 & Mk.

14:3)

This type of expensive perfume was kept in a sealed alabaster flask.

The contents could only be used when the neck of the flask was broken.

You cannot “hold some back” if you want to be a true disciple of Christ.

It’s all or nothing.

"[John] also attended a program at the Canada Institute of Linguistics, a missionary language school.

There he befriended another student, Ben S, who was struck by his “quiet determination” and “confidence”.

“Was it his faith?”

Ben wondered in a post remembering his friend.

“Was it his years of mountaineering and extensive emergency medical training?

Probably all of this factored in” – Chau “was just the kind of person who inspires your confidence and trust”.

One night in the computer lab, Chau told Ben of “his burden” to save the Sentinelese.

“I was impressed immediately that this was something no one but God alone could relieve him of,” Ben writes.

“He had already heard all the arguments of why this was a fool’s errand and would jeopardize any mission associated with it, let alone the [lives] of the individuals involved.”

This “was a sacred trust for him that no amount of reasoning would wrest from his grasp”.

In October, Chau traveled on a tourist visa to Port Blair, the Andaman islands’ regional capital, and took up residence in what he described as a “safe house”.

There he assembled an “initial contact response kit” – including picture cards for communication, bandages and dental forceps for removing arrows – and gifts for the Sentinelese: tweezers, scissors, cord, safety pins, fish hooks.

He carefully documented his activities in a handwritten diary.

The resulting, 13-page testament – written with the earnestness and self-consciousness of someone who had digested many missionary and anthropologist accounts of indigenous contact and knew he might be writing for posterity – recounts his final days in fascinating and tragic detail.

Hoping it would lessen the risk of accidentally infecting the Sentinelese, he entered a self-imposed quarantine.

For 11 days he went without direct sunlight.

He prayed, exercised, and read The Lives of the Three Mrs Judsons, a 19th-century missionary account.

On the night of 14 November, he and some fishermen – Christians who had agreed to help – set out in darkness for North Sentinel, carefully avoiding coastguard vessels.

Their journey was illuminated by glowing plankton, Chau wrote, and around them fish jumped “like darting mermaids”.

They reached North Sentinel late at night and anchored nearby.

The next morning, 15 November, he made his first approach.

The fishermen refused to go any closer to the island, so he stripped to his underwear – he thought it would make the Sentinelese more at ease, the fishermen later said – and paddled a kayak toward the shore.