Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Opening Story/Illustration: When I was a teenager in Youth Group I remember one night going to youth service and we had a visitor come in the door.

He was probably 15 or 16 years old.

He introduced himself and in our conversation with him, we came to the realization that this was the first time in his life that this young man had been inside a church.

My youth pastor, my friends, and I were shocked.

I don’t think we had ever met someone who had lived in our little community who had never been to a church at least once in their life.

But here’s the sad reality - If that happened today, I wouldn’t be shocked.

In fact, if the statistics are right, Church attendance in America is on a sharp decline and the number of people who have never attended a church is on the rise.

We are, as you know in a period of great change.

In fact, Political Strategist Doug Sosnik has argued that we will look back on this moment as a “hinge” moment…a connection moment that ties together two historical periods in time, one before and one afterwards.

The Church is growing explosively in the southern hemisphere in places like Asia, Africa, and South America.

But in places like Europe and the United States it seems to be dying.

Philip Jenkins has argued that by the year 2050 only one out of five Christians will be a non-latino white person, and the center of the Christian world will have shifted firmly to the southern hemisphere.

The fastest growing religious group in America is what’s known as “the nones.”

These are people who have no religious affiliation.

“The number of nones in the 1930s and 1940s hovered around 5 percent.

By 1990, that number had risen to only 8.1 percent, a mere 3 percent rise in over half a century.

Between 1990 and 2008—just eighteen years—the number of nones nearly doubled, jumping from 8.1 percent to 15 percent.

Then in just four short years, it climbed to nearly 20 percent, representing one out of every five Americans.

And for adults under the age of thirty, it increased to one out of every three people.

But it’s gotten worse.

The latest figures from the General Social Survey were released in 2015, filling in the gap between 2012 and 2014.

This was followed by findings released from the Pew Research Center based on its massive US Religious Landscape Study.

In just two years, the nones climbed from 19 percent to 23 percent, or nearly one out of every four adults.

The nones are no longer the second largest religious group in the United States; they are the largest.

And they are still, by far, the fastest growing.”

“More troubling is that of the 85 percent of American adults who were raised Christian, nearly a quarter of them no longer identify with Christianity.

Former Christians now represent 19.2 percent of the US adult population overall.”

“There are more than four former Christians for every convert to Christianity.

And the rise of the nones and the fall of Christians is widespread, crossing race, gender, educational, and geographic barriers.

Forget the Bible Belt or the Catholic North.

This is happening everywhere and across every demographic.”

What does all this mean for the Church?

What does all this mean for missions in our own back door?

How do we respond to all of this?

In her book, “The Gospel Comes with a House Key,” Rosaria Butterfield spells out how many of us feel.

She says, “Let’s face it: we have become unwelcome guests in this post-Christian world.

Our children ride their scooters in neighborhoods where conservative Christianity is dismissed or denounced as irrelevant, irrational, discriminatory, and dangerous....Christian common sense is declared ‘hate speech’ by the new keepers of this culture.

The old rules don’t apply anymore.

Many Christians do not know what to say to their unbelieving neighbors.

The language and the logic have changed almost overnight.”

She goes on to tell us that we have basically 3 options in response to this crisis, but I want to add a 4th one here:

1) Hunker down in our homes and churches and keep the world out.

2) Compromise the Message of the Gospel.

3) Sacrifice for the Good of the Other.

She says, “Instead, God calls us to make sacrifices that hurt so that others can be served and maybe even saved.

We are called to die.

Nothing Less.”

4) I would add anger - Be angry at the way things are and try to angrily get them back to the way they were.

In a sense we have almost gone through the stages of grief - We are in a state of grief because there is a feeling that we have lost our way of life.

We’ve denied it and tried to hide from it (Fear)

We’ve become Angry about it (Anger)

We’ve tried to bargain with it (Compromise)

All of this has left us in despair and depression

But the good new is - The next stage is acceptance - And by this I mean accepting that there is a problem and finding a real way forward.

Listen, what I’m not saying is that the gospel will be lost.

Jesus is going to build his church regardless of what we do or what the Church in North America does.

The question is are we going to be a part of what he is doing?

Transition to Scripture: We have, in opinion, what I would call a Crisis of formation.

That rather than being people formed by the Spirit into the image of Jesus, we have allowed all sorts of other people and sources to form and disciple us.

Paul had something to say about this in Romans 12. It’s a very familiar passage of scripture this morning and I want to look at it, hopefully from a different angle.

Scripture: Romans 12:1-2, 9-21

Transition to Points:

The Idea Paul is getting at here in verses one and two is this - Based on all that Jesus has done for us, our reasonable response is to give our lives to Him fully and totally.

But there is a reminder here that there is a world, a culture that wants to force us into it’s mold.

The idea here of “conform” is like this Playdough with this cookie cutter.

Paul is reminding us that the culture has a pattern or a mold for us they want to shape us in.

He says instead of allowing yourself to be molded and formed like the world, be transformed by renewing your mind.

What we think is important.

Right thinking comes before right behavior.

Paul is telling us here that we need to let the word of God and the Spirit of God begin to work in our thought life to transform us from the inside out.

So we read this passage in Romans 12 and we often read it in this sense - Don’t conform to the world.

So that means no drinking, no cussing, no Murdering, no stealing, no sex outside of marriage.

We sort of check off these things we don’t do and we look at ourselves and say we are good.

But what if - What if Satan were a little bit sharper than that.

What if he’s using the world and the culture around us to form us in ways we aren’t even paying attention to?

What if we are being subtly conformed to the world - and think about this - What if that way of thinking has hindered our Evangelism?

What if our thought process has been wrong?

What if We’re missing the mark on reaching people because our thinking is off?

Points

Don’t be conformed to Fear

Many of us live our lives afraid.

When it comes to sharing our faith with those around us, one of the number one issue that comes up is fear.

We are afraid we won’t know what to say or do.

We are afraid we won’t have all the answers.

Another belief we often have is this - We are afraid if we get around “those people” that somehow that will mess up our Christian walk.

Or we are afraid of what other Christians will think of us if they see us with that person or in that place.

We’re afraid of all the ungodliness in our culture and we are afraid of how it might influence our lives

Illustration: I remember being in a Sunday school class some years ago and the teacher was teaching and the issue came up - having unsaved friends.

And she taught us that we shouldn’t have any unsaved friends.

I remember something inside me that it didn’t set right with me.

I didn’t have any smarts back then to back it up or say anything.

But the obvious counter-argument is this:

If we never get around unsaved people, how are we supposed to share the message of the Gospel with them?

Imagine with me, it’s missions Sunday, so let’s imagine that we support a missionary who goes to the field and begins his or her work.

They don’t learn the language like most missionaries would.

They don’t go out and meet the people.

Instead, they get with their fellow missionaries form their home country and they start a little church.

They meet together every day and pray that God would help them reach the culture around them.

But they never learn the language, they never go out and spend time with anyone other than their fellow missionaries.