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
0.17UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.1UNLIKELY
Fear
0.14UNLIKELY
Joy
0.53LIKELY
Sadness
0.56LIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.57LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.61LIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.43UNLIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.92LIKELY
Extraversion
0.12UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.94LIKELY
Emotional Range
0.77LIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
Responding in Trials
What’s up guys?
Tonight we’re going to be talking about trials.
What’s a trial?
Court
Hard times!
Times of trouble!
Exactly, trials are hard times or struggles that we go through!
We’re going to be looking at how we should respond to trials as believers.
In order to understand how we should respond to them, we’re going to look at a man named Nehemiah.
So, I need everyone to open their bibles to the book of Nehemiah.
If you don’t know where that is, its about a third of the way through your bible, in the really big and intimidating section we call the Old Testament.
Go ahead and open that up, and while you’re getting there, I’m going to give you three questions that we’re going to answer tonight:
When we find ourselves in hard times, what do we do first?
How do we approach God?
How do we respond to God?
Before we get started, let me pray for our time together.
Alright, let’s set a scene real quick.
So right now, Nehemiah is in Babylon, everyone say “Babylon”.
Before we got here, Jerusalem, a big city in Israel, was destroyed and a lot of the people there were taken into Babylon.
Does anyone remember the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego?
The king (Nebuchadnezzar) who threw them in the fire is the king who destroyed Jerusalem.
Nehemiah is in the same place that that took place!
Now though, Nebuchadnezzar died and King Artaxerxes is here.
Who thinks they can spell that?
Good try, it’s A-R-T-A-X-E-R-X-E-S.
One important thing about Nehemiah is that he’s just a guy in exile from Jerusalem.
He works for the king, but isn’t in a royal position.
He’s about to get some hard news.
His brother came to him from Jerusalem and said this:
So Nehemiah just learned that the walls that protect his home city have been destroyed and the people inside aren’t safe.
Let’s pretend for a second that there are walls around your town.
Wether you’re from Granby, Windsor, Springfield, doesn’t matter, just pretend there are walls to protect the people inside.
If I were to tell you right now, as you’re sitting here, that the walls were destroyed, how would you react?
What would you do?
You’d be sad?
You’d cry?
You’d go home to help?
Start a GoFundMe
Call family at home
I agree, these are all good responses, but what if you didn’t have all these resources?
No phone, no computers… I know I would cry and not know what to do! I’d be so overwhelmed thinking there’s nothing I can do!
But what if we prayed?
We see in Nehemiah 1:4 that Nehemiah’s VERY FIRST response to this news was to weep.
Like many of us we would be sad and cry.
But when he does this, he also prays.
He prayed and mourned to humble himself before God so that God could use him for the people in Jerusalem.
When we pray what does it usually look like?
Do we usually pray to ask God for something?
I know if I started praying for the people my first point would be to ask God why or how this happened.
That’s not what Nehemiah does.
Before he does anything he confesses the sins of himself and his people in Jerusalem as that is what likely led to this destruction.
He calls himself out in Nehemiah 1:7.
He ends his prayer with this: Nehemiah 1:11
What is he asking success for?
Remember earlier when I asked you about how you’d respond if the walls of your town had been destroyed?
I’m going to ask you that again, but with a couple more caveats.
You still have no resources like a phone, but now you don’t have access to transportation.
So the only way you could get home is to walk or ride an animal.
Would you go to help your town?
Yes.
Okay now pretend it’s in Texas, would you make the journey?
Look how far that is!
I wouldn’t want do it!
That’s a 20 day walk if I never stopped.
Here’s the thing, that is exactly what Nehemiah was about to do.
In Nehemiah 2:1-8 we see Nehemiah go to King Artaxerxes, say Artaxerxes, and ask him for permission to go to Jerusalem.
Remember, Nehemiah works for the king, the most powerful man in Babylon.
He already prayed for months before asking the king and even right before he asked him, he prayed again.
The King not only let him go, but provided him with a lot of help for the journey!
The rest of chapter 2 shows Nehemiah in Jerusalem, checking the walls and preparing to rebuild.
Alright, that was a lot, let’s recap!
Tonight we saw this seemingly random guy, Nehemiah, hear about the destruction of his home’s protection.
When he heard about it, he immediately wept and turned to God.
He felt pain for them and confessed their sins in response to this news; He humbled himself before God.
Then we saw him pursuing God’s call to go to Jerusalem; he was being obedient to God.
What got him through this?
Prayer.
I told you we were going to answer three questions tonight, remember?
I’ve already given you the answer, so let’s see if you got it.
Question 1:
When we find ourselves in hard times, what do we do first?
Pray to God for guidance
The bible tells us over and over again to pray.
There are verses like 1 Thessalonians 5:17 that literally say:
The word “pray” (and the words that include it), is mentioned 375 times throughout the bible!
If we are to “pray constantly”, why wouldn’t we enter times of trouble in prayer?
This prayer that Nehemiah prays comes from the instructions we see a couple books earlier in 2 Chronicles 7:13-14
Here we see God give Solomon instruction on prayer in times of trouble, which followed.
This brings us to question 2.
Question 2:
How do we approach God? (Anyone know the answer?)
Humbly
What is humility?
(Ask)
Humility is the absence of pride or arrogance.
We humble ourselves before the Lord by letting go of our pride and, like we saw with Nehemiah, understand how our sins can effect our circumstances.
We see many examples of humility throughout the bible, but there are two key times we are commanded to be humble before God.
Our first example is James 4:10.
When we come before God, we put aside our pride and come honestly and openly.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9