Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Bible Introduction (2m)
Ever been in a power cut?
One where everything goes out, including the street lights?
Norfolk - September 2020.
Utter darkness.
Couldn’t see hands in front of face.
No idea if we had candles in the house, or where.
But did have some power in our phones and their flashlights.
Could have used those.
But what if we’d kept our eyes closed?
Would have been no use at all.
We’d have still be in utter darkness.
When it comes to God’s love for us, God has revealed it all to us.
2 Corinthians 4:1-18 (Jan), Paul tells us that Satan would love it if we couldn’t see it.
If were blind to it.
He would rather us keep our eyes closed to it.
The devil cannot take from the soul the light of faith: he, however, removes the light of consideration; so that the soul may not reflect on what it believes.
And as it is of no avail to open the eyes in the dark, so says St. Augustine, "it is of no advantage to be near the light if the eyes are closed."
The eternal maxims, considered in the light of faith, are most clear; yet if we do not open the eyes of the mind by meditating on them, we live as if we were perfectly blind; and so precipitate ourselves into every vice.
Introduction (5m)
We need to remind ourselves that God loves us
We should constantly be asking the Lord to help us to grow in our capacity to understand God’s love.
Why?
Satan blinds us from seeing the glory of God and the face of Jesus Christ
“Glory” is simply the radiance of his love.
The Devil keeps us from seeing that!
R K Hughes tells the story of a member of his congregation who told how she had repeatedly explained the gospel to another woman who simply did not get it, though she apparently wanted to.
So finally she said to the woman, “You have a veil over your heart.
And you need to pray that God will remove it.”
A few weeks later the woman called, elated, as she explained that she had gone to bed the night before perplexed, but when she awoke that morning everything was clear.
The veil was gone forever.
R K Hughes goes on to write: Nothing had been wrong with the gospel.
The gospel had been veiled to the woman because it was veiled in her.
The veil was in her heart and mind, not over the gospel.
As Calvin put it, “the blindness of unbelievers in no way detracts from the clearness of the gospel, for the sun is no less resplendent because the blind do not perceive it.”
We can be blinded by the dark
This blindness is a spiritual issue:
It is God who has to speak light into our hearts.
God has to open our "spiritual eyes" to enable us to see the glory of God.
Only God can do that!
No sermon can do that!
No amount of Bible study.
No amount of fellowship and discussing God’s love together and do that.
All those things can be used by God to do that, but only God can reveal God.
We struggle to believe God's love.
It is literally too good to be true.
We always try to sabotage it with a “but”.
We’re too weak to believe in God’s Scandalous Love.
But he has the power to help us see it.
So, if you don’t get it, if the glory of God sounds like too much mystical jargon, if the gospel just doesn’t make sense to you, you need to ask God to remove the veil.
If we can get just a glimpse of God’s Scandalous Love, then the logic of the gospel and the transforming glory of Christ will become the clear reality of our existence.
Explanation (5m)
We’re blinded by contract
The trouble is that the gospel that many of us have heard over the years isn't necessarily that beautiful.
So, you may have heard the gospel told this way:
God created us and put us in the Garden of Eden.
Then he decided to put us to the test.
He put the tree in the middle of the garden and said to Adam and Eve, “don’t eat from that tree”.
Just like the Marshmallow Test, we watched earlier.
And just like the Marshmallow Test, the temptation to eat from the tree was too much.
We broke the rule, and God became angry with us.
He's been angry with us ever since.
God then worked with the Israelites to try to fix this problem by giving them loads more rules.
They couldn’t obey those rules either, so God became even more angry.
Finally, having lost patience with us altogether, God sends Jesus into the world and then takes his anger out on Jesus instead and punishes Jesus so that he does not have to send us to hell.
And that's the "Good News".
Does that sound familiar?
The problem with this version of the good news is that it’s a distortion.
It doesn’t come close to capturing the beauty of the real Good News.
Just think about it for a moment.
Do you really need the power of the Holy Spirit to believe that version of the good news?
I don’t think so.
There’s nothing beautiful or scandalous about that version.
One of the reasons that has led to this distortion of the good news is we've lost the difference between a covenant and a contract.
A covenant and a contract look similar but in fact, they’re very different.
Many of you deal with both on a regular basis.
So, the contract is something like an employment agreement, or an agreement to purchase a product like a house or a car.
The covenant is like a marriage.
Any contract you make is a deal.
Any covenant, particularly in a covenant of agape love is not a deal it's a pledge.
Contracts deal with law.
That's part of the deal you make with the other person.
You say to the other person, "here are the rules which govern our deal".
The covenant deals with love.
The covenant is a pledge of love.
Contracts are always conditional.
They have terms and if those terms are broken then the deal is off.
A covenant of agape love is unconditional because it's about you pledging what you're going to be towards another person, not what you’re going to do for them or what they are going to do for you.
Every time I order something from Amazon, I enter into a contract.
If what I’ve ordered doesn’t turn up or arrives damaged, then the deal is off.
Amazon have to refund me my money.
On the other hand, over 22 years ago now, I made a covenant with Gail in marriage.
I pledged myself to her, promising to be her husband for better or for worse.
The problem is, that society today sees almost everything in the world like a kind of contract.
We see everything in contract terms rather than in terms of an agape love covenant.
And we’ve fallen into the same trap in the ways in which we look at the story of the Bible.
So, if you look at Genesis 3, you see Adam and Eve in the Garden walking with God in the cool of the day.
The Bible communicates to us that life as God intended it to be was about relaxing with God, in a state of innocence.
You’re with God.
You enjoy God and God enjoys you.
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