Sermon Tone Analysis

Good morning church!

It is so great to see you guys this morning!

If you are new here, we are pumped to have you worship with us!

In fact, we have a gift we would love to give you!

It’s waiting on you at Next Steps in the lobby.

If you will fill out the card from the back of the seat in front of you, there should be a pen there also, and drop it by Next Steps on your way out today, our volunteers working there will hook you up with a free t shirt and a little info about our church.

Those cards can also be used to let us know about prayer requests and next steps we can help you make in your walk with God.

Church, please use those as well!

So, last week, we started this series called The Book.

This week, is kind of building on the ideas from last week.

But, don’t worry, if you missed it, you won’t miss the point of this week, I promise.

Last week, we saw that God CHOSE to make himself known to us.

He did this most generally through Creation.

God built into all of his creation evidence of his own existence.

When you look around at the cosmos or at the minute particles of matter and wonder what being could be behind all of this expanse, you are having that thought because God wants you to!

He is REVEALING himself to mankind through creation.

We call that general or natural revelation.

It shows us THAT God is.

However, God also CHOSE to reveal himself in a more intimate way.

He gave his word, the Bible, as a SPECIAL revelation of Himself to man.

If natural revelation shows us THAT God is, SPECIAL revelation shows us WHO God is.

We can know God’s desires, his will for the world, a long history of gracious acts towards humans even though they sin, and countless moments in which God intervened in human history in major ways, the pinnacle of which is him sending his son to die on the cross for the sins of all of us!

All of these are things that looking at planets, trees, and DNA will never show me!

I NEEDED God’s Word to show me that!

You did too!

And if you are not a believer, God’s Word stands ready to reveal those things to you as well!

This morning, I want to add another layer here, though.

Turn to 2 Timothy 3. It’s towards the end of the NEW TESTAMENT.

It’s not just that the Bible reveals parts of Who God is.

Little nuggets of his character and we are left searching elsewhere to fill in all the holes.

It is our belief that ALL THAT WE CAN KNOW ABOUT GOD IS FOUND IN HIS WORD.

The Book is NEEDED, absolutely!

But The Book is also ENOUGH!

Let me read this passage to you that will provide the outline of thought for us this morning...

PRAY

Before we dive into the three points I have to share with you from this passage this morning, I want to share something with you that I didn’t know early in my faith.

The New Testament books could be broken down this way:

The Gospels - Matthew-John

History - Acts

Paul’s Letters - Romans-Philemon

General Letters - Hebrews-Jude

Prophecy - Revelation

And, yes, I have hand signals to help me remember that order!!

But 2 Timothy falls into the section we called Paul’s Letters.

Timothy is believed to have been written by the Apostle Paul who was once a persecutor of Christians but had his life turned upside down by Jesus and became a follower!

Paul’s letters could be broken down into two sections: The Community Letters and the People Letters.

Romans-2 Thessalonians are letters written to communities above people throughout the known world at the time.

The People letters are 1 Timothy through Philemon.

These are written to, you guessed it, unique people not necessarily individuals, though it would be quickly circulated to multiple places and regions.

The books within these sections are ordered in a very interesting and complicated way… By length..... Romans is the longest community letter, so it goes first. 1 and 2 Thessalonians are the smallest, so they go last.

The same is true of the people letters.

Philemon is the shortest.

If you will commit these strange facts I share with you to memory, it will help you navigate your Bible more effectively.

You would know that Titus sounds like a name, so it’s not a community letter.

Must be a people letter!

Paul is writing 2 Timothy as a letter to one of his disciples named Timothy.

We don’t get an age on Timothy, but we know he was younger than Paul by a number of years, cause Paul mentions his youthfulness on occasion.

Timothy, at this time was serving as a pastor at the church of Ephesus.

So Paul is giving him things to challenge him but also ways in which he can challenge and grow the people he is shepherding.

All of this that I read earlier is setting up for a charge to Timothy to “preach the word” in chapter 4. For Timothy to preach the Word, Paul believed he needed to first remind him of just how sufficient God’s Word really is!

We see three things in this passage…

1. NO GRADES

When I was younger, my great grandparents had an above ground pool and deck at their house.

Me and my cousins were there nearly every summer day.

We played a game in the pool we called school.

Did y’all play that game?

One person would be the teacher and they would start by standing in the water with their legs apart as wide as possible.

Everyone else then took turns swimming under their legs.

This was kindergarten.

If you could swim under there without touching the teacher, you passed and went to the next grade.

If you touched, you had to repeat that grade before moving on.

Two failed grades and you were expelled from the game.

With each new grade, the teacher would slide their feet a little closer together.

You had to make it all the way through high school.

Christianity almost has this feel to some people.

That there are gateways that are hindering a person from leveling up in their faith.

For some people this is a certain level of obedience, things they do.

But for some this involves some sort of hidden knowledge that I can find in the Bible and when I do BOOM!

I get to level up in my walk with God.

I enjoy that for a while, but then I’ve got to find some new hidden thing again.

It’s a never ending search for biblical secrets.

Like Nicolas Gage looking at the back of the Declaration of Independence with special glasses on!

Listen Church, God’s not sitting back waiting on you to learn something new or discover a secret in his word so he can give you some sort of a higher ranking!

We act like God is giving us patches for some spiritual vest for the weird things we think we can find in the Bible!

This has led to things like The Davinci Code and tons of other wrong ideas from the Bible.

We have people reading God’s Word today and “discovering new things” in the Bible.

That’s scary y’all!

If believers for 2000 years have read the same text you just read and we have no evidence that anyone before has interpreted it the same way you are.... That’s scary.

If you are listening to a preacher who is claiming a fresh and new word from the Bible, I would be cautious.

OK?

Notice in the text that when Paul mentions there are people being led astray and trying to lead other’s astray, he doesn’t challenge Timothy to find a new word from the Scriptures.

His focus is on what Timothy already knows!

Do you see that? “continue in what you have learned and firmly believe.”

So often, we think that we need some new revelation to tickle our mind or ears to keep us focused on God and graduate to something deeper, when in reality, we often need to rest in what we have already studied and believe!

I’m not saying we don’t need to study more, but we don’t need to study more, just to be studying more.

If you haven’t applied any of the texts you have read or studied in the past year, is it really beneficial for you to move on to the next study?

This is why Bible Studies today are a million dollar industry while actually reading the Bible is arguably really low!

Instead of actually applying what we already know from Scripture and continuing in that obedience, instead we want to keep moving on, moving on, the next study.

One of my seminary professors made the comment that Baptists snort Bible studies like cocaine.

We find a good one, suck it down as quick as we can, then we ride that high for a very short time and then we are looking for the next high, the next study.