Sermon Tone Analysis

One thing that I have been learning working as a counselor is how many people do not have a healthy support system.

Their disease has caused them to destroy relationships with the healthy people in their lives.

Now that they are living sober those healthy people are not ready to let them back into their lives.

One of the tools that we help our clients with is identifying those people who will be healthy supports.

It is very sad when a client cannot identify even one person who they can turn to.

Sadly it happens very frequently.

Who do you turn to when you’re facing difficult times?

What do you do when you don’t know what to do?

Job was someone who knew he could put his trust and faith in God even though he lost everything.

Towards the end of the book that tells his story he’s had conversations with his three friends that showed up and Job says this about God:

Job says that he can go to God and bring his case before him.

There is something calming and reassuring to know that we can go before God with our needs.

Job 23:6 “No, he would surely listen to me.”

The writer to the Hebrews earlier in this chapter that we’re looking at has been writing about entering into the rest of God.

That concept of “entering into the rest of God” is more we can even think about dealing with this morning, but let me just give you a brief glimpse of what he’s talking about.

The writer is talking about the Sabbath, that seventh day of creation when God completed His work and rested.

He talking about the Promised Land and those that were obedient entered into.

He’s talking about a Sabbath-rest for us today.

The one theme that I see running through this concept is being obedient to God.

I’m going to meddle a little bit.

Is that OK? Thanks for your permission!

Would you say that the 10 Commandments are valid for us today?

The first four relate to our relationship with God.

No other gods before me

No idolatry

No taking His name in vain

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy

The last six relate to our relationships with others.

Honor your parents

Don’t murder

Don’t commit adultery

Don’t steal

Don’t lie about others

Don’t desire your neighbors wife or his property.

Those last six seem pretty easy.

For the most part we do pretty good with most of them.

That Don’t commit adultery one seems to get a pass in our culture and in the Church.

Our marriage just isn’t work out, we’re not really compatible.

We’ve outgrown each other.

Those are things that we hear from people in the church and not just people in the pew, but people in the pulpit.

The sad thing, the damaging thing is when a pastor sins in this regard and then divorces and continues right on in the pulpit.

What does that communicate to the Church and to the world?

Look at our culture today.

So many couples are just living together.

They live together, have a child or two, buy a house and then save up to get married.

They’ve gotten it backwards.

I had someone tell me that they had it backwards because that was the situation they were in.

They freely acknowledged that they didn’t have it right.

But do you know what they told me then?

They told me that God understands and that God had blessed them.

This is not just people out in the world, I can understand that because they don’t know the truth of God’s word.

This is people in the Church.

They come to church, take part in worship praising God, asking God for blessings but then they go home and the sin continues in their lives.

That is not God honoring, that is not living in obedience to God’s will for us.

That is sin.

If we agree that those last six commandments are very important, that they are things that we recognize as sin if we violate them, then why is number four not all that important?

Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy

I sometimes wonder if we get stuck with the wording of it?

Do we read

Exodus 20:8 “Remember the Sabbath day”

Do we put a period after the word day and just stop there?

Remembering is easy.

Yep, I remember that day, God rested.

That’s great.

Let me read the entire commandment

You read all the way down to verse 10 where God says “Do not do any work on it.”

Apparently the Sabbath day is very important to God and if we don’t honor it, if we don’t remember it then we are disobeying God which is a sin.

Ok, I’m done meddling.

It’s in this context that the author writes:

For the word of God is alive and active.

Oh, wait, hold up.

That is not the beginning of that sentence.

We need to back up a little bit to get the full context of this passage.

He’s talking about I believe the written word of God and the literal spoken word of God.

What God says is alive and it’s active.

The Sabbath-rest for us is part of that entering into an obedient relationship with God and laying our trying and our wants and our burdens down and resting in His presence.

The sad thing is that it’s not about what we do, it’s all about what has been done.

It’s been done by what Jesus did for us on the Cross and rising again from the dead.

It’s about what the Holy Spirit is doing in our lives today.

God has done everything necessary for us.

He now invites us into a personal relationship with Him grounded on obedience.

Have you ever felt like this when you talk to kids, teenagers in particular that you might just as well be talking to the wall?

I know that they can look at us and we sound like that invisible teacher on the old Charlie Brown shows – wa wa wa wa wa….

There was a saying that was popular when my older kids were teenagers and they tried it on us.

They’d say as they held their hand out in front of them to “talk to the hand cause the head ain’t listening.”

There are times that we talk to people and it seems like it would be just as easy to talk to a brick because no matter what you say it doesn’t penetrate their ear drums and get into their minds.

The author here says that the word of God is alive and active and that it’s “sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.”

Is the writer talking about the written Word of God, meaning the Bible?

Yes.

Is he talking about the spoken Word of God? Yes.

You have to remember that the Bible wasn’t pulled together into one comprehensive volume for several hundred years down the road so he couldn’t have been speaking just about the Bible because it didn’t exist yet.

He’s talking about what God has said, whether or not if it was written down.

God’s word is alive and it’s active is the key thought here.

God is alive and He is active today.

Praise God!

What does he mean that God’s word is alive and active?

I wonder if the author had the words of John running through his mind as he wrote this.

John wrote in his Gospel these word’s:

Who was John talking about?

He’s talking about Jesus.