Sermon Tone Analysis

John the Baptist is one of the most interesting characters in the story of humanity.

More has been told about his birth and babyhood than almost any other character in the Bible.

After we hear about his birth, we know nothing at all until we find him a full-grown man coming out of the desert, preaching in the wilderness.

He was not coming to the towns and cities to find a crowd but drawing the eager multitudes away from the cities into the desert.

John was sent by God on a mission.

He was filled with the power of the Holy Spirit to fulfill that mission.

This made those who listened to him believe that he was a messenger from heaven.

Listen to how the Apostle John introduces us to him.

A very simple opening concerning John.

In Luke's account he talks about who was who when John began his ministry.

He wrote about political power and also religious power before he introduces us to John.

The picture that we have of John is very striking.

It is hard to find any other character in the Bible like John.

The acception would be the prophet Isaiah who was also sent by God.

The Bible tells us that he walked around naked and barefoot for three years.

With John we read about the desert, the wilderness, his camel's hair clothing, his food of locusts and wild honey, his utter recklessness with taking risk.

As the atmosphere of intense reality surrounds him, he speaks to the very last letter of the message he has been given by God.

It is to the crowd of peasants, the soldiers, the formal Sadducees, the hypocritical Pharisees, or the guilty Herod on his throne.

These are all characteristics that arouse the most intense interest in learning more about him.

Combined with his independence of character, his faithful obedience in preparing for the coming of Christ, and his utter humility in Jesus' presence.

That all suggests a man of great spiritual insight and character.

No one who studies the story of John the Baptist carefully can refrain from agreeing with the declaration of Jesus in Matthew’s gospel.

Matthew 11:11 (CEB)

11 “I assure you that no one who has ever been born is greater than John the Baptist.

There are several characteristics of John the Baptists’ ministry that I want us to take a look at this morning.

The first and probably the most notable is the positivity of John’s ministry.

Jesus brings our attention to this characteristic when he was talking a crowd of people who had listened in on his conversation with some of John’s disciples.

These disciples had come to see Jesus with a question for their master, who was then locked up in prison.

After they had walked away with that amazing answer of Christ as to His Messiahship

That is some very positive great news.

Notice the irony of Jesus’ question there in verse seven.

He’s saying to them that you traveled long distances, you made great efforts to see John, you left your homes and went out into the wilderness for what?

Some frail stalk swaying in the wind, or weak trimmings tossed by the wind?

The irony of the question is sufficient to answer it.

It is as if the Jesus had said, "John the Baptist was no stalk shaken by the wind, and you went, not expecting to find him as that shaking stalk.

If you had, you would not have gone out to see him."

Folks, it is a mistake to assume that the world is unwilling to hear an intensely earnest and optimistic spiritual message.

There will be more people willing to listen to that than any other kind of discussion.

The one question that everyone has to answer is what happens after I die.

Is this it?

Is there anything afterwards?

People are looking for this answer.

Deep down inside every person is the great question of the soul's salvation.

Deep down in every heart, there is a restlessness the becomes focused in the presence of any unique manifestation of spiritual power.

This is at least a latent force in the soul of every man and woman in the world.

It is not lost through any lack of cultivation, and it does not disappear under any degree of education.

Let any unique manifestation of spiritual power be prompted by a positive presentation of the divine message.

All classes rush with curious anxiety to listen to it.

The lost, the least, the skeptics, Pharisees or hypocrites.

It really does not matter who they are.

This phenomenon promises hope to the soul, and that is what attracts people to view it.

Catherine Booth was the wife and co-laborer with her husband William Booth and together they founded the Salvation Army.

There is a story told about her that she had been organizing the Salvation Army among the poor in Paris France.

She reserved a fashionable ballroom not far from the grand opera.

She went there to preach the gospel in the simple, plain, straightforward way that has given the Salvation Army its mighty power.

All Paris was stirred by her messages.

The boulevard was blocked with carriages bringing ladies dressed for the opera.

Gentlemen in evening dress, gold eyeglasses, glittering diamonds, and all the other necessaries that go to make up a society fop in Paris, accompanied by the jeweled women, painted and powdered and dressed up to the latest fashion, crowded every available seat.

When the Catherine showed up on the platform, opera glasses came into great demand, and laughing comments were hear throughout that great ballroom.

But when she knelt to pray silently for a few minutes, the audience rose and gazed at her in perfect wonder.

One lady asked “Is she sick?" and the answer was, “She is praying to God." Exclamations of surprise broke out at the lack of regard for dress that made her willing to kneel in the dust.

The subject of her message that evening was, "Has God left Paris?"

At first, as she spoke, the look of amused wonder was upon the faces of the audience.

Fans would be fluttered, glasses in use, and false smiles put on like a mask in society would hide the real heart feelings.

But after a while, as the power of God could be felt through the straight tender words of the speaker, they would for once forget themselves and be lost in the subject.

Fans would be folded, glasses forgotten, and the mask would drop, leaving on those faces a look of weary longing, showing that the heart beneath had not been entirely deadened by the false joy and emptiness of the Paris world.

However, some of the ladies, who had not come prepared to weep, could not keep back their tears, which washed away their makeup.

As they wiped away the tears, they wiped the paint with them, making their handkerchiefs red and their faces pale.

And this plain, simple, straightforward, positive message of man's sin and God's willingness to save through Jesus Christ had the same effect among the poor in that wicked city of Paris.

Catherine’s daughter in-law told of the first conversion Catherine Booth made in a miserable small hall in the poorest part of Paris.

She said that one evening, Catherine made her way to the back of the hall and sat down beside a poor, promiscuous working woman.

She put her arms around her and asked if she wanted Jesus as her friend and Savior.

And when there was no answer, her heart broke, and she looked into the poor woman's face and exclaimed, while her arms were still around her neck, "I love you," while her tears fell upon the hard-worked hands.

That melted the heart, which no amount of preaching would have broken.

Before that night was over, the woman had found salvation and peace in the blood of Jesus.

That same message backed by the Holy Spirit, when given by us, will have the same effect.

You can depend on it.

I pray to God for the Spirit of John the Baptist, for the Spirit of Catherine Booth, which will make this gospel message real to us and give us the courage and faith and love to carry it to the people who are within our reach in these days.

During the ministry of John the Baptist there were some classes of people whose excitement astonished John the Baptist.

He was not surprised when the publicans came to him.

But, when he saw multitudes of Pharisees and Sadducees coming, he exclaimed in wonder, "You offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" Matthew 3:7.

The Pharisees were the formalists.

They followed the letter of the law strictly, but they did not have its spirit.

They were selfish and hard-hearted.

They would argue a question of tithes as though it were a question of life and death.

Yet, they had no mercy for a broken heart.

They were ready to stone a hungry man who rubbed an ear of grain between his fingers on the Sabbath day.

Frederick W. Robertson says, "They had shrunk away from all goodness and nobleness and withered into the mummy of a soul."

May God have mercy on the religious mummies that are stored up in our churches.

If there are any religious mummies in this church, I pray to God that his Spirit may arouse them to life.

The Sadducees were materialists.

They were the reaction against the Pharisees.

They saw through the hollow formalities and miserable sham of the Pharisees.

But they did not realize that these counterfeits were only counterfeits of the real spiritual possibilities.

As a result of seeing some men as hypocrites and frauds, they blindly believed that all was a sham.

"There is no life to come.

There is neither an angel nor a Spirit.

And this glorious thing called man, with his deep thoughts and his aching, unsatisfied heart, his sorrows, and his loves, godlike and immortal as he seems, is but dust that lives for a time, passing into the nothingness out of which he came."

That was the creed of the Sadducees, as it is of such men as Ingersoll today, who try to feed their hungry souls on dry husks.

What I think astonished John was that these antagonistic classes, one wedded to its formalism, the other denying everything, both crowded around this prophet of the wilderness, each seeking to know how to "escape from the angry judgment that is coming soon."