Sermon Tone Analysis
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OUR HYMN OF PRAISE
By Rev. Will Nelken
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Presented at Trinity Community Church, San Rafael, CA, on Sunday, December 26, 2021
The angels sang at the birth of Jesus!
And their song invaded our planet and stirred the hearts
of wondering shepherds, who told the story to everyone they could find.
“People must know,”
they told each other.
The angels’ song still stirs wondering hearts today!
And we sing it, again and again, with a variety of tempos and melodies, to our generation and the next.
Glory in the highest!
Glory in the highest!
Glory in the highest, to You, Lord!
(“Glory in the Highest” by Chris Tomlin, Daniel Carson, Ed Cash, Jesse Reeves, Matt Redman)
I stand, I stand in awe of You
I stand, I stand in awe of you
Holy God, to whom all praise is due
I stand in awe of You
(“I Stand in Awe of You” by Mark Altrogge)
Does God give us a song, too?
He does!
In fact, singing is characteristic of God’s people
through the ages.
It’s more than historical tradition; it’s spiritual compulsion.
Listen to the words of the psalmist (Psalm 40:1-3):
1
I waited patiently for the Lord to help me, and He turned to me and heard my cry.
2
He lifted me out of the pit of despair, out of the mud and the mire.
He set my feet on solid ground and steadied me as I walked along.
3
He has given me a new song to sing, a hymn of praise to our God.
Many will see what He has done and be amazed.
They will put their trust in the Lord.
I learned to play the guitar when I was eight or nine.
But I had learned to enjoy singing at a
younger age.
My brother recounts how I would disappear into the bathroom for 45 minutes at
a time, while singing my heart out (great acoustics in there!).
I picked up the guitar again in
junior high school, imagining rock stardom in my future, but it was not to be.
I even learned to
play the standup bass (back then, they didn’t use guitars in junior high band), but it was just a
hobby.
Teenage imagination usually runs in superlatives—best-in-class stardom in whatever your favored hobby or sport may be!
Guinness Book of World Records for comic book collections!
There’s this built-in need to be recognized as “special” in some way (or many ways).
And, to a
teenager, “special” looks like super-stardom—or, in Bible terms, defeating Goliath with only a
slingshot, or wiping out an entire army of Philistine warriors with only the jawbone of a donkey, or being beaten to the point of death for preaching about Jesus, and getting up to do it
again!
In real-world terms, it may look different, but it’s the same stuff.
When my younger son was
asked to write a paper for school, describing what he wanted to be when he grew up, he
wrote that he wanted to have a corner office with a view in a downtown office building, with
his name on the door.
When I asked him, what he saw himself doing there, he told me, “I don’t
know.
It doesn’t matter.”
So, he actually had NO IDEA what he wanted to be when he grew up,
only where he wanted be, and the esteem and recognition he wanted to receive.
It’s something we never grow out of.
Even as adults, and until the day we die, we long to be
recognized by someone as “special.”
We sometimes label it as narcissism, but it’s really just
human; everybody wants it.
In the Western world, where most have more than they need, our efforts turn to giving people
everything they want (but have not earned), so that no one feels left out.
It seems, in modern-think, that failing to win the prize for exceptional effort and skill is a stain
on our pride, an enormous put-down, the source of all shame—instead of simply an indicator
that you were made for something else.
It has reached the point of absurdity—trophies for
mere participation!
Just imagine… Mom walks into her child’s bedroom: “Good morning, honey!
Oh, look!
You’re
breathing!
Aren’t you special!”
This foolishness is generating young adults who have no aim, no purpose, no real sense of
value in themselves, other than stardom in their own imaginations, measured by “likes” and
“retweets” by people they don’t really know, in a world that doesn’t really care.
It’s such a
fragile house to live in.
RANT ENDED.
At age 21, I opened my heart to the possibility of Jesus—not just as a person with real history,
but as a person with real divinity.
And He came to me, and revealed Himself to me!
He gave
me a new song to sing, a song of praise to the Living God!
I picked up my guitar again, and
started singing to Him… and never stopped!
When Jesus and His disciples had completed their last supper together, they sang a hymn before leaving the room to go to a prayer meeting in a nearby garden.
We have reached the end of the calendar year 2021, and it seems appropriate that we should
offer a song of praise to our Lord and Savior before we go into the new year.
Four Verses and a Chorus
And I’ve found a passage in the New Testament that never fails to release a fresh song in my
heart—at the end of Romans 8.
I imagine it has four stanzas, based on four questions that Paul
put to the church in Rome; questions that also demand an answer from us!
Let me explain, and see if we can “sing” it together today!
The four questions are rhetorical; that means, the readers are expected to answer them the
way Paul would.
These are such powerful, life-enhancing questions that we must be certain of
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