Sermon Tone Analysis
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Text
Prayer
Our Father and our Lord, you are holy.
You created the heavens and stretched them out, and spread out the earth and what comes from it.
You give breath to all people, and motion to our bodies.
You are Yahweh—that is your name.
You give your glory to no other, nor your praise to anything created.
You, Yahweh, go out like a man of war, a zealous fire within you.
You cry out, shouting loud, and show yourself mighty against your foes.
For a long time, Lord, you have held your peace.
You have kept still and restrained yourself.
With great mercy and patience you endured the continued wickedness of your creation.
Now, Father, you tell us you will cry out like a woman in labor; you will gasp and pant.
You will lay waste to mountains and hills, you will burn all vegetation and dry up the waters.
And then you say this, Father: you will lead the blind, and will turn the darkness before them into light.
You say these are the things you do, and you will not forsake them.
You have sent a servant, in whom your soul delights and your Spirit rests upon, to bring justice to the nations.
You will take him by the hand and keep him, you will give him as a covenant for the people, a light for the nations.
Through this servant, you will open the eyes that are blind.
You will bring the prisoners from the dungeon, and from the prison those who sit in darkness.
Through this servant, you will bring your people out of darkness into light.
Father, I ask that the sunshine of this promise would shatter the door to every dungeon here.
That today, in this place, chains would break and prisoners would rise to new life in Christ.
Amen.
Introduction
These verses contain the hope of every Christian.
These verses contain the hope for any sinner who is at the end of themselves.
These verses display the power of God the Father, and the kindness of the beloved Son, Jesus Christ.
In this text are three points I want us to see:
The Darkness
The Kingdom
The Light of the Gospel
First, the Darkness.
1.
The Darkness
This world is dark.
It is an R rated world.
The lives we are blessed to live in America are the first of its kind.
Never before has their been such comfort, luxury, healthiness, and prosperity.
This disconnects us from the real darkness and brokenness of the world.
We need to understand that we are born into this darkness.
When Adam fell, the entire human race fell with him.
From generation to generation, the consequences of the fall are inherited.
This explains the constant moral evil of our kind.
Death is a constant reality for every human being.
We can distance ourselves from its howling, but there is no escaping its shadow.
Death will not happen until God wills it to happen, but it is guaranteed for each and every person—unless Christ returns.
And for those who love the darkness, death would be preferable.
The shadow of death also changes how we live our lives.
There is a kind of desperation that we experience.
We experience anxiety about things because we know time is limited.
If it weren’t, there would be plenty of time for things to sort out.
We experience fear because we know our life is fragile, and if it isn’t protected it will slip through our hands like ash.
Because death is coming, we know our time is limited.
In previous centuries, the reality of death was as present and constant as the cycle of day and night.
However, in our current society, because of its possessions and protections, death is less like the shadow of night and more like an advanced decay.
Today’s gospel is that of consumption — to go to a good school, get a good job, make good money, and buy nice things.
But the school always costs too much, the job always gets old, the money could always be more, and the nice things eventually become irrelevant.
It’s never fully satisfying.
The gospel of consumption cannot heal a spiritually dead heart.
If we do not have the light of eternity, we will only have the darkness of this world.
1 John 2:16–17 (ESV)
16 For all that is in the world—the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride of life—is not from the Father but is from the world.
17 And the world is passing away along with its desires…
We need to understand next exactly what we just read in 1 John.
That we are not only born into, but, by nature, love this darkness.
Mankind is so fallen, so corrupt in his nature that we ought not ever ask the question, “how could someone do something so horrible?”
The question we ought to be asking is, “how could someone do something so good?”
This likely offends people in this very room.
I know this, because it offends me.
When the few of us here at Bowman are standing out in front of the abortion mills on surgical abortion Wednesdays, we call out to mothers and fathers pleading with them to show mercy to their baby.
We tell them we are here in the name of Jesus and are ready to give them whatever they need to raise their child.
And if they can’t even do that, we are ready to adopt their baby.
The world says that these people are confused and want to do the right thing.
Why then, do they curse at us, threaten us, and berate us for being “too judgmental”?
Because the light is exposing their works for what it is: darkness.
And this was every believer’s reaction before their conversion, in one form or another.
Eph 2:3 says the natural, unsaved person rejects and rebels against God, and “lives in the passions of their flesh, carrying the desires of the body and the mind, and are by nature children of wrath.”
This is the actual state of mankind, apart from grace.
I believe that this actually connects with our experience.
If God saved you later in life, then you likely remember a good portion of it when you still loved your sin.
I do, and I shudder to remember how my darkened mind viewed and interacted with the world.
Even those “good things” that I did—they were, at the very best, motivated by a desire to receive praise or create a sense of inner righteousness.
How long did those moments last for me?
How long did they last for you?
How do they last for you?
Whatever moral house of cards I stacked up with my actions, like leaves they were blown away.
In fact, there was a season in my life a little bit before I think I got saved where there was a deep darkness that hung over my life.
It was inexplicable, uncontrollable, and could only be avoided by the most involved distraction.
What I was experiencing was the effects of attempting to suppress the law of God that I knew, by nature.
Please hear this: if you are here today, and you still hold God at arm’s length, this is why you have never found peace.
This is why you lose sleep, experience fear at night, or otherwise feel like there is a pending crisis around the corner.
It is because you are made in the image of God, and know what God expects from you as his creature.
You and I know that we have willfully rejected Him and his authority as Creator, and we don’t even want to have him in our thinking.
Listen, we all need to hear this.
We are not the heaven-ready, holy and good people we have been raised to think ourselves to be.
Our culture worships practices such as “self-care, having no regrets, and following our heart.”
Each of these is a fundamental rejection of what God says about us, and ultimately what we experience ourselves to be.
Where God calls us to love our neighbor as ourselves, we are told to care for ourselves in order to care for others.
Where God says to hate sin and flee temptation, the world calls us to cast our regrets away because guilt is a bad thing.
Where God says “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick,” the world tells us it is a noble and always-true guide for our life.
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