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Love Sustaining Love
A few weeks back someone asked me, “How love could be both the root and the fruit of the Christian life?”
It actually is a very good question.
Today I hope to describe how love and be the root, growth, and fruit of the Christian life.
In order to illustrate this I am going to use the analogy of an apple tree.
I am holding in my hand here an apple seed.
And in my other hand an apple.
Now we can understand how this can become this over time.
This analogy is useful in understanding love of God and how it can be the seed, root, growth, and fruit of our lives.
Another way to examine love is to look at it grammatically.
“Love loves love!” is a complete sentence.
Love is the subject, action and object.
In this way we can look at love as being a complete package.
It is the fullness of love that is lived out in the Christian life.
As I mentioned in last weeks sermon God is the source and author of love.
God is love.
In this way when we come to Christ God plants the seed of love in our heart and lives that is His Holy Spirit.
When we allow this love to mature in our lives it is the action of the this love to produce sanctification in our lives.
By loving God and others well the seed of love grows into maturity.
In the flesh we simply love those who love us.
Jesus says “What good is it to only love those who love you.
Even sinners do the same.”
So then the higher mature love is to let God through His process of sanctification work in your heart to put to death selfish and unloving ways.
As we mature then God uses our lives to produce mature fruit.
This fruit of love is then a witness to a lost world, but also a ministry to the brothers and sisters in Christ.
In this way love can be both the source and the fruit.
And this should not come as a surprise to us.
The Bible frequently describes how we reap what we sow.
Why should we expect anything different when it comes to the greatest spiritual virtue of love.
Let’s dig into God’s Word!
I have already talked about the second part of that passages in the past two sermons.
Jesus has laid down His life for our sins.
He is talking about those that place their faith in Him the ones that listen and obey Him.
Jesus is calling them friends.
This is what happens when we turn from living a sinful and selfish life to trusting in Christ as our Lord and Savior.
What a friend we have in Jesus.
This command to love is connected then to the sacrifice that Jesus has made.
Jesus also is a commanding us to “love one another.”
This command to love one another is connected then to the first part of this passage with a very important phrase.
Jesus says In John 15:9 ““As the Father has loved me, I have also loved you.
Remain in my love.”
The phrase “remain in my love” establishes a clear connection between the visual of vine and branches and His teaching on loving obedience to God and sacrificial love toward others.
Taking it a step further I believe that the description the follows the metaphorical language is one of Jesus’ explanations to his disciples (See Matthew 13:10-17).
We know that Jesus would use the metaphorical language of parables and then pull His disciples aside to explain what the parables meant.
The Source of Love
Ultimately Jesus is our source of Life and Love.
In this passage Jesus refers to himself as the vine and refers to us as branches.
God the Father is the gardener.
We see then that it is our connection to and abiding in Christ that gives us life and fruitfulness.
We often look at our salvation experience through the lens of getting a ticket to heaven.
However, if we take the metaphoric language seriously there is a life sustaining connection to Christ that is needed.
It also says that those that are not fruitful are cut off and thrown into the fire.
The question might be what causes a branch to be unfruitful?
There is a verse I want to zero in on here.
John 15:6 “If anyone does not remain in me, he is thrown aside like a branch and he withers.
They gather them, throw them into the fire, and they are burned.”
I recall when we used to have rose bushes that I would cut back once a year.
In the spring as the bush would grow there were on occasion branches on the bush that although they were connected to the base of the rose bush physically they were not connected in a life giving way.
This is referred to as die back.
It is important to cut out the die back when it is detected as what ever is causing it can infect the health tissue in the rose bush and cause it to die.
I bring this up because Jesus seems to be saying that there is a difference between being physically connected to the vine and abiding in the vine.
When we are merely physically connected we do not produce fruit because we are dead.
In the same way a dead rose branch will never produce a rose and needs to be cut off if we are not connected to abiding in Christ then we will likewise be cut off.
That is dead in a spiritual sense.
This has eternal consequences.
This passage also says that these branches will be burned up.
This is a clear representation of eternal punishment in hell in my opinion.
John 3:16 “For God loved the world in this way: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.”
This is a familiar verse to most church goers.
It also can be familiar to the world at large.
Less familiar is John 3:18 “Anyone who believes in him is not condemned, but anyone who does not believe is already condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the one and only Son of God.”
It is this condemnation that leads to branches being burned up.
Notice the connection to love though.
In John 3:16 we read “For God so loved the world.”
In John 15:9 we read “remain in my love.”
The Gospel is an expression of God’s love for us.
We experience and are connected to God’s love when we believe in Jesus Christ as our savior.
Jesus is the source of our love.
It is his love that flows into our lives and enables us to bear the fruit of love.
Using the picture then this apple seed is symbolic of the gospel of God’s love.
If this gospel it received and planted then it grows up.
Love, more specifically God’s love is that seed.
The Growth of Love
Pruning
It would seem that there is more to this than simply believing in Christ.
In this metaphorical language Jesus also says that God the Father is pruning those that remain in Christ.
That is to say there is not only salvation, but also a process of sanctification that is occuring as God removes those parts of you that are getting the way of being fruitful.
As followers of Christ then we must be willing to respond to God to remove those barriers.
Jesus not only describes the action of being cleaned, but also the method of being cleaned.
Notice John 15:3 “You are already clean because of the word I have spoken to you.”
It is the Word that God uses to do His pruning.
Our Heavenly Father is the Gardener and His Word is the pruning shears.
God’s word is often represented as an instrument that cuts.
There are so many things that get in the way of the fruit of love.
None greater in my estimation than the thoughts and intentions of the heart.
Truly as I think about the times that I have failed to love well it is nearly always one of these two.
On the one hand the way that I think about the other person has a huge influence on how I treat them.
It is also possible that when it comes down to it I really never intended to love them in the first place.
My thoughts about the other person simply become a way to soothe my conscience for acting in an unloving manner toward them.
I can justify being unloving because they deserve it.
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