Sermon Tone Analysis
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ME: Intro - Mom’s Transplant?
I almost always wear this green band.
It says donate life on it.
I got it when my mom was in the hospital in Philly.
She was in the hospital because after dealing with lung issues most of her life,
Her heart had failed.
While in the hospital,
She was on life support because she needed a heart transplant.
As a result of her heart failure,
She was putting on fluid,
Could not breath,
Unable to oxygenate her blood,
And malnourished,
Just to name a few things.
So, the doctors addressed these things.
They drained fluids,
They gave her a feeding tube,
They put in a trachea so she could breath,
And hooked her up to a machine that would oxygenate the blood.
But none of these things ultimately addressed the source of her problem.
She needed a new heart.
And after a week and a half,
She received a double lung and heart transplant.
After she recovered,
She no longer needed all these other things because the doctors addressed the source of the problem,
They were able to give her a new heart.
My mom needed a new heart in a physical sense.
We all need a new heart in a spiritual sense.
Sadly, we often do not address the source of the problem,
Because we think putting ourselves on spiritual life support is the solution.
In other words, we treat Christianity as if we just stop doing bad things,
Then God will be happy and let us come to heaven.
There are so many problems with this way of thinking.
First and foremost, it is not true.
This is not what the Bible teaches.
Second, we cannot stop doing bad things.
We cannot modify our behavior enough to save ourselves.
We cannot stop doing what the Bible calls sin.
This really should be clear to us.
Think about things you still do even though you don’t want to do it?
You know it is wrong, you know it is destructive,
But you can’t stop yourself from doing it.
You continue to struggle.
You want to break the habit but you can’t.
You try to modify your behavior,
You tell yourself, “This is bad, I shouldn’t be doing it, stop!”
You may even try to make changes, or put up barriers, to stop yourself,
But eventually, you find your way around those changes,
Back to doing the bad things.
Why?
Why does your behavior modification not work?
Well, as another pastor once said,
Behavior modification is like mowing dandelions.
The day you mow over the dandelions,
The lawn looks great, right?
But after just a couple days,
The dandelions are back and they’ve multiplied!
Why?
Because you did not address the root of the dandelions.
Such is the case with behavior modification.
Our behavior is the surface of the problem.
So, changing behavior does not address the source of the problem.
The source is the heart.
We need to address the source, not the surface.
If we do not deal with our sin at the heart level,
No amount of behavioral changes will stop bad things from rising to the surface.
All of us have a heart level problem.
All of us, the Bible says, are sinners by nature.
We are all broken and have a natural bent toward evil.
We naturally love the things God hates.
We naturally hate the things God loves.
As long as we try to just modify our surface level behavior,
We will never experience lasing change.
We need to change the source, not the surface.
Our attempts at behavior modification either leads to hopelessness,
As you are overwhelmed at your inability to fix your problems.
Or it produces pride because you are fooled into thinking you are able to fix your problems.
Both just deepen the problem,
Neither address the source of the problem.
Our passage this morning,
Proverbs 4:20-27, shows us that we must guard our heart above all else.
This is the answer to our heart problem.
The heart is the source of every behavior in your life.
In order to see lasting change in the surface behavior,
We must have a change at the source.
Want to obey God?
Want to walk in wisdom?
You need a spiritual heart transplant.
That is the source is changed.
Going through our passage this morning,
We will see that there are:
External Influences (vs.
20-22)
Internal Source (vs.
23)
External Indicators (vs.
24-27)
Change the source, not the surface.
Our text this morning continues the train of thought from vs. 10-19.
Although it does not use the words wisdom and foolishness,
It continues to contrast these two paths.
But now, the emphasis of this contrast reaches a deeper level.
It is getting at the heart level.
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