Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
0.14UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.08UNLIKELY
Fear
0.55LIKELY
Joy
0.53LIKELY
Sadness
0.57LIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.58LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.77LIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.81LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.67LIKELY
Extraversion
0.13UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.57LIKELY
Emotional Range
0.47UNLIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
When everything is shaking we pay attention to everything in Christ that isn’t
When We lived in Oregon on the Northwestern part of the US, we lived in the Willamette valley, about an hour from the pacific ocean.
And off of the Oregon coast was the Cascadia Subuction Zone.
It was a massive fault line that had scientists worrried for decades.
They are still worried about it.
Because of the possibility of earthquakes and tsunamis there were warnings when you spent any amount of time on the coast.
We loved to vacation in Astoria and on the drive there you would pass in and out of a tsuanami evacuation route.
And every beach you were on had a large sign with arrows pointing up to where the tsunami evacuation routes were.
Show 2 pictures.
For some reason I was always really concerned about it.
The possibility that an earthquake and a tsunami could happen at any time was a bit anxiety producing.
I’m not high anxiety normally but we would be playing with the kids on the beach and the signs would just be looming.
There was always this unease that at any time everything could change.
That everything could break apart.
In fact in an article I read about the Cascadia Subduction Zone, it stated that everything West of the I-5 was overdue for an event that would be basically liquefied.
That is disconcerting.
And we live in a culture where it feels a bit the same.
That at any point there can be a life shattering event that changes everything.
- People are feeling that uncertainty.
We are feeling that uncertainty.
There was a study done by Springtide research about young people and faith and they ended up calling 2021’s study “The State of Religion and Young People: Navigating Uncertainty.”
And they interviewed over 10000 people in order to understand the culture more clearly.
Show slides
57% of people ages 13-25 stated that they expected that when the pandemic is over a lot of things will be different in mostly disappointing ways.
So whether it’s us, the next generation or our neighbors, we live in a world where things shake.
Hebrews gives us helpful but serious parting words.
We have experienced shaking.
WE have experienced the moving of most everything we have known to be certain ground.
The author of Hebrews understands that and invites us to the mountain that cannot be shaken.
When things are shaking we tend to not look to much of anything, in fact we tend to look to ourselves.
We can’t see much outside of ourselves to do much else.
I want to show another part of the study where it shows what it is young people are anxious about: Show slide.
While we have new things to be anxious about the experience of being anxious about our lives is not new.
Soren Keirkagaard talks a lot about anxiety and the spiritual experience.
HE was an early exetentialist philosopher and a devoted Christian.
And he spent his entire life looking at the Christian experience on the inside.
At this point in history there was a shelling of Christianity.
A loosening of it in the culture.
There was through the enlightenment continued talk of a culture that exists without God.
And that the best way forward is to pursue life without God.
Kierkagaard argued that a life given infinite choices left up to us only leads to anxiety.
And you can see that in the slide.
People are anxious.
They are shaking.
And it feels like everything is shaking around them.
And it is not just the younger generation.
It is us too.
We shake.
We worry.
We feel anxiety.
I love Kierkagaard’s definition of anxiety, it is “freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.”
So it is freedom that may happen based on what we think is a possibility of a possibility.
Have you ever ruminated on something over and over and over.
Anxiety is a perverse meditation where we keep placing a possibility of a possibility over and over and over again in our lives.
Anxiety is never what is happening, it is always what may possibly happen.
And when we shake we will often come to the end of our own means.
anxiety will quickly absorb our resources.
But for the church that is good news
- It seems like for us and for the church that maybe we have already reached the end of our own means.
- What are we find when we reach the end of our own means?
For the international church there are still some strategies and means and gifts that churches are employing in order to perpetuate the church.
Before those are Christianity as marginalized insignificant and nearly forgotten, you find that the only thing at the end of our own means of Christ.
We have seen what shakes and seen what breaks and we have seen Christ.
We don’t shake when we know Christ is the founder and perfecter of our faith
I think that therefore is a giant therefore, a callback to the entire book.
What difference does it make that we know any of this?
Because seeing Christ changes us in such a way that we can shed everything that weighs us down and run.
He gives a great description of what Christ did and why He did it.
Christ is the founder and perfecter of our faith.
He started it and He will complete it.
Christ’s work on our faith allows us to walk on uncertain ground.
Because it is not the ground that we have to worry about.
Philippians 1:6 (ESV)
And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
We don’t shake when Christ speaks a better word
The author continues to do what he has been doing up until this point.
He is using the copy, contrasting the OT with the NT.
He is showing us a mountain where God resided and no one could ascend (except Moses) with a mountain where we can ascend.
Notice the two descriptions.
Mt Sinai is void of people or of community.
There is no cloud of witnesses.
It is void of ch 11.
Mt Zion is full of celebration.
It is full of angels
It is full of worship.
We have come to this mountain.
The one that speaks a better promise through Christ.
It is His word that allows to ascend unscathed.
It is His word that allows anyone to get close to Him.
These descriptions take us to Deuteronomy 4 where Moses receives the 10 Commandments.
And we are reminded that God through His word delivered and gave them words of life.
This is what a life in God looks like
And now God speaks through a better promise in Christ.
Not just that we would have the words of life but that we would have life Himself.
The commandments showed us what life is like.
Christ gave us life Himself.
We don’t just have to see what it is like we can experience in His better Word.
We move from a place we cannot be, we are not allowed, we will die if we touch it to a place where we are welcomed in.
This is the picture of transformation.
Where we ascend based on what God is doing not based on our own attempts.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9