Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome/Introduction:

Good morning!

Welcome to Community Christian Church.

My name is John Price, if we haven’t met, and I am the Associate Pastor here.

What is the most important thing in your life right now? Seriously, answer that.

And no.

It doesn’t have to be Jesus, even though we are in a church service right now.

EXAMPLES:

Financial Security

Finding a new job

Figuring out your future

Spouse, Parent

Kids, Education, Food

Attention: GLASS, METAL, RUBBER example

Take your life and all the things that you think are important, and put them in one of three categories, represented by three items: glass, metal, and rubber.

Things of rubber, when you drop them, will bounce back.

No harm is done when these things get dropped.

Missing the final game of the World Series, missing your train and having to wait for a couple more minutes,

Things of metal, when dropped, create a lot of noise.

But you can recover from the drop.

If you miss a meeting at work, you can get the CliffsNotes.

If you don’t balance your checkbook and lose track of how much you have in your account, and the bank notifies you of an overdraft—that will create some noise in your life, but you can recover from it.

Things of glass, when dropped, shatter into pieces and will never be the same again.

They can be glued back together, but they are altered forever.

They may be missing some pieces, and they probably can’t hold water again without leaking.

The consequences of this brokenness will forever affect how the glass is used.

You’re the only person who knows what those things are that you can’t afford to drop.

More than likely, they have a lot to do with your relationships with spouse, children, family, and friends.

Need:

While we all may have differing opinions on what is the most important thing in our lives, but I think it goes without saying that relationships are extremely important because when they are broken it’s really hard to piece them back together.

As a country, with all of our issues and divisions and opinions; we can really distill everything down to broken relationships between one another that causes us to become tribal, entrenched, judgmental, and disabled to one another’s relational needs.

This is why we read or listened to our opening verse from John 13:34-35

It’s interesting that Jesus doesn’t say: agree with one another.

He doesn’t say, have warm feelings toward one another.

He doesn’t say, have the same outlook on life and fit perfectly into one another’s camp.

No.

He said to love one another.

We aren’t doing a good job at that.

BROKEN RELATIONSHIPS DATA:

In an article by Amanda Mushro, were she talks about why most American’s having made a new friend in five years, she highlights a recent “study, [that shows us that] 45 percent of adults say they find it difficult to make new friends and, for many of the 2,000 people polled, they felt their popularity peaked at age 23.”

“So, how many friends do adults actually have?

The number might surprise you.

The average American has 16 pals.

However, the breakdown of how these friends function in our lives is quite different.

Of the 16, three are friends for life, five are people they really like and would hang out with one-on-one and eight are people they like but don’t necessarily seek out.

For many, their best friends are the ones made when they were younger.

Nearly half of those surveyed have stayed friends with their high school besties, and 31 percent still consider their college friends their closest ones.”

Not only are we bad at making new friends and developing new relationships.

We are actually suffering physically, mentally, and emotionally because of inability to building the relationships that we actually want.

Harvard Study/Article

“Conversely, a relative lack of social ties is associated with depression and later-life cognitive decline, as well as with increased mortality.

One study, which examined data from more than 309,000 people, found that lack of strong relationships increased the risk of premature death from all causes by 50% — an effect on mortality risk roughly comparable to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and greater than obesity and physical inactivity.”

“One study found that midlife women who were in highly satisfying marriages and marital-type relationships had a lower risk for cardiovascular disease compared with those in less satisfying marriages.”

“A large Swedish study of people ages 75 and over concluded that dementia risk was lowest in those with a variety of satisfying contacts with friends and relatives.”

In an article by Robert Hall, he summaries the issues surround our relationships this way, “the numbers tell us our relationship infrastructure is unraveling: more people live alone, more people are single, more divorces, more single-parent households, fewer siblings, fewer close friends, more people working remotely, greater political animus, less people attending church, and on and on.“

If you don’t have deep, meaningful, satisfying relationships; then scientific studies show that you won’t live as long, you will be at a higher risk for heart disease and dementia.

So, this is a really important topic that we are taking on for the next three weeks and it is my prayer that by the end of this series you will have done two things: 1. Established several goals for your relationships and 2. Develop an action plan on how to implement those goals in your life immediately.

We have a relational pandemic on our hands.

What I mean by that is that we, generally speaking, are failing to build deep, meaningful relationships that would characterizes like the writer of 1 Samuel characterizes Jonathan and David’s relationship.

Transition: The best example of #RelationshipGoals that we have is found between guys who lives well over 3,000 years ago.

Their relationship with one another will actually help us today to build the type of relationships we actually want to have and reverse what is happening in our culture, in our city, and even in our own lives or families.

The relationship I am talking about is found in 1 Samuel 18:1-4 and its between two guys who really shouldn’t have been friends at all.

Read 1 Samuel 18:1-4

POINT #1: YOU WERE DESIGNED WITH RELATIONSHIPS IN MIND

Jonathan and David‘s relationship with one another shows us, first and foremost, that relationships are important because we were designed with relationships in mind.

After killing Goliath and winning a massive victory for Israel, David speaks with Israel’s King and during that conversation, Jonathan meets David and they instantly became close friends or really, if you look at the Hebrew words, they became soulmates.

“This was understandable because David and Jonathan had much in common; they were both courageous and capable young warriors who possessed profound faith in the Lord.

Both had initiated faith-motivated attacks against militarily superior Philistines that had resulted in great victories for Israel.”

They found, within each other, someone who instinctively and naturally understood them and was like them.

I have a friend back home who is like this for me.

Stephen and I have gone months without talking to each other, but when I was in Cincinnati back in August we met up and it was like we hadn’t even missed a beat.

We talked for hours.

Prayed for one another, laughed with one another, got vulnerable with each other, challenged each other, encouraged each other, and we simply knew that even though we were going to go several months without seeing or talking to each other - we still had each others back and that we’d be for the other one no matter what.

That’s the type of relationship that Jonathan and David have because they knew that they were purposefully designed with relationships in mind and they were on the look out for others who were like them and could build into them.

Read Genesis 1:26-28,31

Application: Be Like Jon and David

You were intentionally designed to be in relational community with others, including with your Creator.

Be like Jonathan and David and start looking for the people that puts in your path and develop those relationships.

Transition: The best example of establishing good #RelationshipGoals in our lives is found in Jonathan and David’s relationship because they show us that we were designed with relationships in mind.

But they also show us that trust is the bedrock from which we can build any relationship off of.

POINT #2: VULNERABILITY IS THE FOUNDATION OF ANY RELATIONSHIP

For any relationship to survive the surface level and become deeper, meaningful, and satisfying; it must be built on the foundation of vulnerability.

We see this in the relationship that existed between Jonathan and David.

READ 1 Samuel 18:3-4

1 Samuel 18:3–4 (NIV)

And Jonathan made a covenant with David because he loved him as himself.

Jonathan took off the robe he was wearing and gave it to David, along with his tunic, and even his sword, his bow and his belt.

You can also read more about the vulnerability that existed between Jonathan and David throughout 1 Samuel 19 - 20 and 1 Samuel 23.

What is a covenant?

Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary: “A ‘covenant’ is an agreement enacted between two parties in which one or both make promises under oath to perform or refrain from certain actions stipulated in advance.”

We would understand this to be a contract between two people where both make promises to fulfill their end of the deal.

Covenant between Jonathan and David

Jonathan’s gift to David.

The word for the robe that Jonathan gave to David often denotes a royal robe.

Ugaritic texts refer to a special robe worn by the crown prince.

If Israel had the same custom, Jonathan would be renouncing his claim to the throne by giving David that robe.

He also gave to him his daily warrior’s garment and bow.

The Israelite sword was carried in a sheath that hung from a belt.

The bow was probably made of animal horn and sinews bonded with strips of wood.

Jonathan’s gifts to David may very well represent his willingness to give up and transfer his particular position as heir apparent to the throne of Israel.