Sermon Tone Analysis

Announcements

Are there any announcements?

FCC Outreach Meeting to be scheduled soon.

Pray for Carolyn Swanson she is having surgery on her esophagus tomorrow in Seattle.

There is prayer and Bible study every Sunday morning at 9:15am.

It is led by Patti Pointer who is a dynamic teacher.

Please come and grow!

Introduction

Good morning and welcome to FCC, where we worship God in Spirit and in Truth one verse at a time, one verse at a time.

Thank you for the message of music and for the Bible study that happens each Sunday before church.

What a blessing it was last week when brother Juan shared the Word and how he taught on waiting and patience.

Thank you!

We have come as far as verse 7, in Matthew 3.

So let us open our Bibles there.

Read Matthew 3:1-12

Prayer

Review

In looking back over the first 6 verse we discovered:

That when John the Baptist showed up on the scene, it had been 400 years since Israel had heard the prophetic voice of God.

That is 400 years church, and look at what the Lord had this radical, politically incorrect preacher preach:

Israel had fallen away from God and the first word was repent.

We know that the Greek word here is metanoia and it means to turn from sin to holiness, from self to God.

It means a change of heart, a change of mind, and a change of direction church, but it does not come easy most of the time.

In fact, much of our repentance comes through great pain and sorrow.

Much of it comes through us making bad choices over and over and choosing death rather than life.

We will learn a little later more about repentance shortly.

2. Thousands were coming to John to hear is message and the message cut to the heart church.

Did you know that a surgeon must cut, in order to heal?

They were cut to the heart, the Lord led them to John, he preached a message of repentance and let them know that the Kingdom of Heaven was at hand.

This means that the long awaited Messiah was coming and that their hearts needed to be prepared.

3. Remember, that when a King was going to visit a certain area that he would send a forerunner to proclaim the King is coming.

He would also clear away any obstacles that might be in the way.

Here church, I think it is important for us to take a look at our own lives and clear away any obstacles that are stopping us form worshiping God whole heartedly!

Not only that, but remember that John was in the wilderness and we talked about the wilderness being a quiet place in our lives, a place where we can leave the city and the busyness of life to hear and heed the voice of God church!

For we do not want to be like Israel who had not heard the voice of God for 400 years because of their disobedience.

John was baptizing and because this was true repentance that was happening, they started to confess their sins.

Please remember, that confessing and forgiveness are not the same thing.

To confess our sins, means that we are in agreement a with what that Holy Spirit is telling us about our sin.

It means we acknowledge that we have sinned and then we seek God for forgiveness.

Israel had been trapped in religion that could not reform reform the flesh!

Praise God for his mercy, for it is the guilty that needs mercy, and let us remember:

Mercy begotten, is mercy bestowed.

This means that we give away what God has given us.

The people were responding to John’s ministry by the multitudes

Baptism was a ritual practiced in Judaism by those who were Gentiles converting to Judaism.

They would also have to be circumcised as well.

John’s baptism wasn’t into Judaism, the people he baptized were already Jews.

His baptism was in a sense a statement that the people were adopting something new, they were moving away from their sins toward righteousness.

The religious leaders caught wind that John was preaching a message they needed to hear.

I wonder if the Lord used someone that returned from this revival to tell the Pharisees and Sadducees?

Or did the Spirit speak to them and say go!

We see here that Pharisees and Sadducees came to the the baptism.

Why?

Did they come to be baptized or to stir everything up?

Where they concerned that this man John was going to take away there power?

Let us remember church that the people that were coming to Jesus were very religious.

They prayed three times a day, went to the synagogue on Sabbath and payed tithes and made offering church.

But they had left their love and they were just going though the motions.

The Pharisees were the legalist, while the Sadducees were the liberals.

The Pharisees were the ritualists and the Sadducees were that rationalists.

The Pharisees were separatists, while the Sadducees were compromisers.

These two groups usually fought each other for control of the nation, but when it came to opposing Jesus Christ, the Pharisees and Sadducees united forces.

Pharisees- the Pharisees formed a self-righteous, “holy” community within the community; they were legalistic isolationists who had no regard or respect for those outside their sect.

They believed strongly in God’s sovereignty and in divine destiny and that they alone were the true Israel.

They considered themselves to be superspiritual, but their “spirituality” was entirely external, consisting of the pursuit of meticulous observance of a multitude of religious rituals.

Sadducees- The Sadducees were at the other end of the Jewish religious spectrum—the ultraliberals.

This sect also arose during the intertestamental period, but from among the priestly aristocracy.

They were compromisers, both religiously and politically.

They cared little for the Greek intellectualism of the day, and was attracted to the practices of Rome.

The Sadducees claimed to accept the law of Moses as the supreme and only religious authority, and they scorned the legalistic traditions of their antagonists, the Pharisees.

In New Testament times they were still closely associated with the priestly class (see Acts 5:17), to the extent that the terms chief priest and Sadducee were used almost synonymously (as were the terms scribe and Pharisee).

But they cared little for religion, especially doctrine, and denied the existence of angels, the resurrection, and most things supernatural (Acts 23:6–8).

Consequently they lived only for the present, getting everything they could from whomever they could—Gentiles and fellow Jews alike.

They believed in extreme human autonomy and in the unlimited freedom of the will.

They considered themselves masters of their own destinies.

The Sadducees were much fewer in number than the Pharisees and were extremely wealthy.

Among other things, under the leadership of Annas they ran the Temple franchises—the money exchanging and the sale of sacrificial animals—and charged exorbitantly for those services.

It was therefore the Sadducees’ business that Jesus damaged when he drove the moneychangers and sacrifice sellers out of the Temple (Matt.

21:12–13).

Because of their great wealth, Temple racketeering, and affiliation with the Romans, the Sadducees were much less popular with their fellow Jews than were the Pharisees, who were strongly religious and had some measure of national loyalty.

So here we have it church, John is preaching a politically incorrect and not a seeker friendly message of repentance and the religious leaders showed.

And John Said:

The text does not say John said, Hi, how are you?

But he called them straight out brood of vipers!

Vipers (echidna) were small but very poisonous desert snakes, which would have been quite familiar to John the Baptist.

They were made even more dangerous by the fact that, when still, they looked like a dead branch and were often picked up unintentionally.

That is exactly what Paul did on the island of Malta when he went to gather wood for a fire after the shipwreck.

As indicated by the response of the natives who were befriending Paul and the others, the bite of the viper was often fatal, though Paul miraculously “suffered no harm” (Acts 28:3–5).

Brood of vipers means off spring, therefore John was saying that they were descendants of snakes and he was calling out their religious hypocrisy that was deadly.

There is a picture here that I think is important for us to see.

When the desert grass would catch fire, or farmers would burn there fields, these little vipers that looked just like sticks would flee the fire.

They would scurry along on the ground and run from of the flames.

Note, that fire or wrath represents the judgement of God.

Can you see how the venom of the religious leaders were impacting the people?

By the way, we all need to have truth tellers like John in our lives.

People that are not afraid to speak hard truths that must be spoken because they love us ands want to see us be holy for He is Holy!

John is not just saying repent!

He is was saying that true repentance, if is is genuine and not just words spoken, that your will bear fruit.

Fruit comes in all shapes and sizes, but we could correlate this with:

There is the fruit of holiness, the fruit of moving from a taker to a giver, from an unforgiver to a forgiver, from hate to love, from talking all the time to listening well.

From being harsh and critical, to becoming full of gentleness and kindness1