Sermon Tone Analysis
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Better Is One Day
WELCOME
“A day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere.
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.
For the Lord God is a sun and shield; the Lord bestows favor and honor.
No good thing does he withhold from those who walk uprightly.”
(Psalm 84:10-11)
Good morning family!
I wonder if you really believe that.
That God withholds no good thing from those who walk uprightly.
Hard to believe because we don’t have every good thing that we want
So we tell ourselves that the problem must be that we’re not “walking uprightly” enough
But the Gospel tells us Jesus walked uprightly perfectly IN OUR PLACE
Therefore God graciously gives us all things that we need
If you don’t know that providing love this morning, we hope that you won’t leave here until you meet our Jesus
In just a moment we’ll hear a reading from Psalm 8. Turn there now.
While you’re turning, 3 quick announcements:
1) A word about PBC.
We are Family.
Fellowship Groups begin this week
Groups available on Tuesday AM & PM, Wed PM; on zoom & in person
Go the blue flag or the website for more information
2) Refugee Ministry Interest Meeting (tonight at 4 PM)
If you’re interested please attend
Meeting in the room behind the blue flag
If you can’t attend but you want to help, PLEASE let us know at the blue flag
3) TableTalk Prayer at 5:30 PM
Now look in your Bibles at Psalm 8:1 as Susan Thomas comes to read for us.
Scripture Reading (Psalm 8)
Prayer of Praise (God is Unity), Susan Thomas
Come Behold the Wondrous Mystery
Blessed Be Your Name
Prayer of Confession (Rebellion), Cameron Harris
Behold Our God
PBC Catechism #2
How many persons are there in God?
There is one, and only one, true God, infinite in all His perfections, eternally existing in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
Pastoral Prayer (Mike Klaassen)
SERMON
It’s been said that “Mixing Christianity with a political party is like mixing ice cream with horse manure.
It might not harm the manure, but it sure messes up the ice cream.”
[1]
If that’s true (and I think it is) then we might conclude the easiest way to avoid mixing the ice cream of Christianity with the manure of a political party is to avoid talking about anything political.
The problem with this approach is that eventually we’ll have nothing to talk about.
As politics increasingly becomes the national religion in our country, nearly everything is political.
Including much of what we read in our Bibles.
So at PBC we’ve taken the opposite approach.
This year will mark the sixth year in a row we’ve dedicated two weeks in January to discuss two tough topics that are increasingly political: abortion and racism.
Most of our preaching teaches God’s Word verse-by-verse, book-by-book.
Occasionally we’ll address important topics.
But why these topics?
Like it or not, our nation is stained by two great evils.
The evil of racism that led to chattel slavery and the Jim Crow south, and the evil of abortion that has led to the murder of over 60 million unborn babies.
Because of this, both abortion and racism are commonly discussed in our country.
You can’t get far on any newsfeed without hearing something about one or both topics.
We hear a lot about abortion and racism from the world.
It’s wise to hear about them from the Word.
And when we go to the Word, we learn that the two issues are actually related.
They are twin evils because both deny the Bible’s clear teaching on the value of human life as image-bearers of God.
All humans are created in God's image regardless of size, so we fight the evil of abortion
All humans are created in God's image regardless of skin, so we fight the evil of racism
So today, with God’s help, we’re going to begin the first of two sermons on the tough topics of abortion and racism.
And this year, to make things a bit more challenging, we’re going to discuss these tough topics from two tough texts.
Turn in your Bibles to Exodus 21:20
Let’s go to the Lord one more time and ask Him for His help.
PRAY
Is the Bible part of the problem?
Are the Scriptures at least partly to blame for the evils of racism that have plagued our world for centuries?
Simply asking the question might strike you as offensive, but an increasingly vocal group of unbelievers in our world would say yes.
For example, in his book, “Letter to a Christian Nation,” NYT best-selling author Sam Harris writes...
“In assessing the moral wisdom of the Bible, it is useful to consider moral questions that have been solved to everyone's satisfaction.
Consider the question of slavery.
The entire civilized world now agrees that slavery is an abomination.
What moral instruction do we get from the God of Abraham on this subject?
Consult the Bible, and you will discover that the creator of the universe clearly expects us to keep slaves.”
[2]
Is Sam Harris right?
If he is, than Christians can hardly speak against the evils of racism.
If he’s right then our Bible is at least partly to blame for the evils of race-based chattel slavery that plagued these shores for nearly 250 years.
To respond to accusations like this we need to go right into the eye of the storm, to one of the passages Sam Harris alludes to in Exodus 21:20
God’s people were rescued from slavery in Egypt, they crossed the Red Sea, and now they’re camping in the wilderness at Mount Sinai.
There God gives them laws that will govern this nation, beginning with the Ten Commandments.
Included in those laws are something that may surprise you: laws about how to treat slaves.
And perhaps most troubling is the law given in...
Exodus 21:20-21—“When a man strikes his slave, male or female, with a rod and the slave dies under his hand, he shall be avenged.
But if the slave survives a day or two, he is not to be avenged, for the slave is his money.”
Today’s sermon is divided into two parts.
First, we’ll examine the meaning of this text.
Then, we’ll discuss its significance for followers of Jesus today.
The Meaning of a Tough Text
What do we mean by meaning?
The meaning of the text is always what the author intended.
When I introduced Holly Boutot as “my sister and wife” a few months ago, you could rightly ask me, “what did you mean by that?”
But you don’t get to decide for me what I meant.
I meant what I intended to communicate, even if I communicated something poorly.
So we can’t take a passage like Exodus 21 and say it’s about slavery to sin, because that’s not what Moses meant when he wrote it.
He was referring to real people in real slavery with real masters.
We learn the author’s intent by reading carefully, examining the context, the culture, the meaning of words, etc.
To determine what this text means we need to examine three key concepts...
A. The Institution of SLAVERY
When we hear the word “slave,” our minds almost immediately go to slavery in America.
Moses lived nearly 3000 years before American slavery
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