Sermon Tone Analysis

Year of Welcome

This year we’ve been talking about what it means to be a welcoming church.

So far I’ve shared a few ideas about how we can relate to guests of our church including these three questions I encouraged you to ask each week:

As you drive to church pray, “Lord, who do you want me to connect with today?”

And then be watching for the Lord’s leading as you interact with people at church.

While you’re in church pray, “Lord, who’s missing that needs a word of encouragement?”

And then when you notice someone’s absence, use the cards at the back of the church to send them a note.

When you walk through the sanctuary doors ask yourself, “how can I position myself so others feel welcome here?”

Being intentional about asking these questions will make a huge difference in how welcoming we are to people who walk through our doors.

But think about this thought, if we wait for people to come to us, entering our door, and trying to figure out our culture, then we are requiring them to be the missionaries.

That’s why Jesus doesn’t say that we should wait and make disciples, but GO and make disciples.

He is calling us to be the missionaries.

Ellen White says that it is Christ’s method alone that will bring true success in mission work.

He first mingled with people, genuinely desiring their good.

He sympathized with them and ministered to their needs.

That is the true spirit of hospitality and welcome—to go to them, spend time with them and minister to them where they are.

In his book Surprise the World, Michael Frost suggests that being a missionary is less about doing a particular task—like going door-to-door or preaching on a street corner.

He talks about forming habits of mission.

I’d like to encourage you to think the same way.

And the first welcoming habit I’d like you to adopt is to bless three people each week. 1 person from the church, 1 person from the community and someone else from either the church or outside the church.

The word bless comes from the biblical idea of speaking well of someone, praising someone, or pronouncing or making someone happy.

The english word, “bless” comes from a concept that is even more practical—to add strength to someone else’s arm.

So this week, I’d like to you to look around and ask yourself, who needs me to hold up their arms this week?

How can I bless someone?

It may be an encouraging card, or a phone call where you say, “you are valued.”

It may be that you pay for a random person’s lunch, or you help a neighbor with a project.

Three people with at least one of them being from the church and at least one from the community.

Can you do that this week?

https://cicministry.org/commentary/issue59.htm

Introduction

The other day I was sitting in the barber’s chair getting a haircut When the hairdresser asked me, “what do you do for a living?”

I told her I’m a pastor and she said, “of which church?”

I told her I pastor a Seventh-day Adventist church and under her breath she let out An “oh…” and the conversation kind of hit a wall.

After an awkward silence I asked her, “do you have a religious background?”

Apologetically she said, “I‘m catholic.”

I like awkward, so with a big smile and a little laugh I said, “you sounded almost sorry to admit it.

What’s that about?”

She turned to look me in the face and then said, “I have an aunt who’s Seventh-day Adventist and she’s always on our case about being Catholic.”

”I’m sorry,” I replied.

And somehow that little confession and my simple apology opened up the conversation.

She told me about how she doesn’t go to church “religiously” mostly because her priest manages several parishes and she’s never quite sure when they’re doing mass at her parish.

Sometimes its Wednesdays, sometimes Saturdays… so she rarely attends.

“And besides,” she told me, “Every week the Bible story is basically saying the same thing.”

She admitted that she has trouble staying awake in church because she has ADHD and its just so repetitive.

When I heard that I was baffled.

There are so many stories in the Bible.

We could preach on something different every single week for years!

And I got to thinking, has she read much of the Bible for herself?

So I asked, “Have you ever read The Bible?”

“Are you kidding!

I couldn’t read that.

It’s so boring I’d fall right to sleep.”

Do you hear what she’s saying?

The Bible is a boring old book.

It’s not relevant for my life.

What’s the point?

Before she finished cutting my hair I was able to point her in the direction of an excellent resource for getting started reading the Bible, and she seemed at least a little curious.

If you look back in history you’ll find that for years the church had put its traditions and religious forms in place of scripture.

Church leaders said that only they could properly interpret scripture and so they banned the members from reading the Bible.

Rituals and superstitions were a poor substitute for the Word of God.

Finally, in the 16th century a whole group of people rose up in protest and demanded that the Bible become the sole authority for truth and Christian practice.

They rejected the idea that church tradition was the main source of God’s guidance, instead claiming that God spoke through His Word.

They rejected the idea that the priest or pastor in the pulpit was the sole authority for interpreting scripture.

One man translated the Bible into the language of the people, instead of the antiquated Latin text that few could read.

He said That he wanted a plowboy in the field to know more about the Bible than the priest did (which honestly wouldn’t have been hard, most priests only knew the prayer books and very little about the Bible).

Today we benefit from the protest of the past.

Everyone here has a Bible in their home, if not two or three.

If you don’t have a Bible, please feel free to take one of our pew bibles home with you.

It is because of their protest some 500 years that the course of religious history has taken a dramatic turn in favor of having access to God’s Word.

But do you ever feel like my hairdresser?

That the Bible is not very interesting—something you fall asleep to?

Or that the Bible is not very relevant—good for pastors and church sermons but not so helpful in the day-to-day?

Or maybe you feel like the Bible is monotonous and flat because you hear the same stuff every week From the pulpit.

If you‘re feeling like the sermons here are repetitive, then please, let me know.

And tell me what you’re curious about, what questions you have, or what issues you feel need to be addressed.

No, not someone else’s issues you think I should talk about, but the stuff you yourself know you need.

Tell me those things and I’ll start exploring how I can incorporate that into my sermons.

But what do you do if the Bible seems dry, bland, and irrelevant?

Precious Words

Let’s step back from religion and talk a bit about life In general.

Most of us live with at least a little dissatisfaction with our Circumstances: the amount of money you have, the house you live in, the friendships you have or don’t have, your marriage, a struggle with an addiction, an anger problem that gets the better of you, a job that is just fine but not really fulfilling, a child who has wandered from the course you set for them…

It would be quite rare if you didn’t live with a regret for past decisions that have hurt you and others, or experience a little frustration with your physical, emotional, or mental limitations.

Or maybe you’re confounded by the political situation you find yourself embroiled in—either here at home or overseas with with all the conflict you see going on.

You’d be a rare individual If there wasn’t something in your life that you were dissatisfied with.

What do you do about those things?

How do you rekindle the fire of a distant marriage relationship?

How do you find satisfaction in your work?

How can you handle the difficult relationships with your boss or coworkers or relatives?

What should you think about politics or international conflict and all the other pressures that impact your life but you have no say in?

And what about parenting, or addictions, or money, or so many other things?

There are all sorts of answers that you’ll be fed.

Just look on social media and you’ll find advertisements for financial schemes to help you make a whole lot of money if you just follow a few simple steps, which they’ll show you for a small fee, of course.

Nearly every webpage on the internet has a solution for the dissatisfaction you have with your scale at home.

Just follow their easy steps and you’ll lose weight or gain muscle or tone your abs.

If you’re dealing with anxiety, your doctor has a medication for that.

If you’ve got a marriage problem that’s caused by some past trauma in your life then a therapist has an eye movement desensitization therapy to solve that.

But the thing we all know deep down in the bottom of our hearts is that all those solutions are just wrapping paper to try to cover up the ugly truth about our lives.

They don’t truly solve our problem.

If we’re truly honest with ourselves, losing that weight won’t make us any happier, and having more money won’t resolve our dissatisfAction.

That pill to deal with anxiety might smooth out some rough emotions, but the problem still persists.