Sermon Tone Analysis

The Eternal Timeline

This morning we focus on the greatest happening in human history, at least until now.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the most compelling story I know.

It is amazing to me that sometimes folks think they need to dress up this amazing story.

No novel, no movie, no play, can compete with the story of the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

and yet, so many times, people in the church feel they need to dress it up a bit.

On resurrection Sunday, all over the country this morning, churches are holding easter egg hunts and that sort of thing all because they want to take advantage of the fact that Resurrection Sunday is probably the most attended church day of the year.

Naturally, every pastor, every church board, every Christian who cares about the Great Commission and seeing people participate in the church want to see a lot of people on this Sunday morning.

But sometimes, rather than the actual reason for the celebration, the resurrection of Jesus Christ, being the centerpiece and main focus, many churches will resort to trying to create a carnival atmosphere, with colored eggs and candy and coloring books and all kinds of things like that.

Now, they will tell you, “we want families to come to our church.

We want to attract them to our church, so we will use whatever gimmick is necessary to get them here, and then, once they are here, we can expose them to the gospel.”

I would never put their motivations into question.

I believe many people really want to reach their communities, and so having these types of events has become, in many churches, the main way to do outreach.

Like I say, I’m sure their motivation really is to see people come to saving faith in Jesus.

However, the problem of this is that the bible tells us that in the end, there is one means that God uses to draw men to himself, and that is by drawing attention to the risen Savior through the proclamation of the gospel.

It is a mysterious thing called preaching.

1Cor1.21

Interesting.

Paul calls it the folly of what we preach.

Now, we know for certain, if we study all of Paul’s writings, that he didn’t believe it was folly for him to preach, but rather, it seems folly to those who have put an awful lot of stock in the wisdom of the world.

Those who think of themselves as philosophers, wise people.

those who like to debate.

I did something I always say we shouldn’t do a moment ago, I read you one verse absent from its context.

Let’s take a look at what Paul meant when he was using the word folly.

You see, what he was saying was, that it is folly to those who are not in Christ, or in other words have never come to saving faith in Jesus Christ.

To those who have not responded to the good news about Jesus with faith, all of this seems to be folly.

Do you see what Paul is saying here?

The world can’t know God through wisdom, that is, the wisdom of people.

But what appears to be a folly to those who put a lot of stock in their earthly wisdom is the power of God and the wisdom of God.

And those of us who God has drawn to himself through the preaching of the gospel, and have been regenerated by His Spirit, and saved with a saving faith, are not ashamed to share this with others.

Paul said to the Roman church,

So the gospel, or good news about Jesus, is folly to worldly people who feel they have a lot of wisdom, and it appears to be silly and weak to many, but for those of us who are being saved, it is the power of God, so we are not ashamed of it, for it brings salvation to all who believe.

Many in the world look at what goes on in churches every week, that people would gather to pray and sing some songs and hear some guy stand up and talk about what the bible says to us.

For many, it is folly.

But it is the means that God has ordained by which he draws men and women to himself in order to save those that he will give the gift of faith to.

So gathered here this morning are many people.

Some of you I know, many of you I do not.

I do not assume that everyone here has put faith in Jesus and made him Lord and King in their lives.

In fact, unless we have the first church service in history where everyone is for sure saved, out of this many people, I can assume that there are many here who do not have a true, saving faith in Jesus, and so I preach.

Some of you are here because you were kind enough to join your family.

You don’t attend church except at the holidays, which indicates you most likely do not have a deep love for the church such that you desire to be here, but you still have enough respect or love for your family that you are willing to come a couple times a year to church.

In this group there are those who may be agnostic, that is, they don’t really care much about church or religion, but have nothing against it, and possibly there are those who are antagonistic to the church, and maybe even have a good reason for not liking the church, because they had a bad experience and were once hurt by people in the church who called themselves the people of God.

Others among us are true believers, and attend church regularly and are committed to the church, giving their time, friendship, finances, and talents to make the church the beautiful community it is.

Some are here and are true believers, but are traveling and so are here this week but will be back in their own home church next week.

And it is possible that some are here that simply found our website and wanted to be somewhere this Sunday morning and you found that our location or our service time worked into your plans this morning.

As I preach this morning, I have nothing to do with whether God will draw someone to himself, other than my responsibility to preach and be faithful to God’s Word.

But my prayer for you is this: For the true believers among us, may this reminder of the wonderful story of God’s salvation plan build your faith and inspire you to serve God better.

For those who are not believers, my prayer is that God will draw you to himself this morning by his Holy Spirit through his Word and through the folly of this thing we call preaching.

The title of this sermon is Perfect Timing.

Let’s look again at the verse I opened with: Gal4.4

From eternity past, God has always known the perfect time to implement each of the steps in his plan to give salvation to sinners.

We are going to look very quickly this morning through a few of the major events in God’s timeline.

And God has put eternity in our hearts:

We must begin with a very important understanding, and that is that God is not constrained by time.

He is eternal, meaning He has always been around, and always will be.

He is self-existent.

There is no force above Him that He must rely on to exist.

So when we look at this timeline, it is important to understand that the timeline we are talking about actually has a beginning, even though God himself does not.

The creation marks the beginning of the timeline as we know it.

So God created the world, everything in the world, including the elements, energy, the laws of physics, he created creatures, animals and human creatures.

God is the only thing eternal, and has complete control over time, and in Galatians 4.4 we see that Jesus was born in the fullness of time.

Now, to fully appreciate how God knew way ahead of time when the fullness of time would be, the time that would be just right and perfect within his plan of redemption for humankind, we can go through various parts of scripture, and we can see that in this book, the Bible, written over a period of thousands of years by dozens of authors, who were separated not only by time but in many cases by geography as well, is absolutely perfect in how every part fits together with the rest, and this morning I hope you will leave here with at least an better appreciation of the perfection of God’s Word and how amazingly it was assembled.

I mentioned the creation, but I cannot elaborate too much here at this time, or I may get in trouble as many of you have hams in the oven and we don’t want those lunches overcooked.

But shortly after creation, we have an event in the timeline we refer to as the fall.

You may have heard this story.

God created the first two humans Adam and Eve, and he placed them in a paradise, the Garden of Eden, to care for the garden and to be fruitful and multiply, and they were allowed free access to the entire place with one exception, they were not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The serpent twisted God’s words, and Adam and Eve ultimately ate of the tree, and this is when sin entered the world, and with sin, many consequences of sin, including death.

And perhaps at this point you are wondering what this has to do with resurrection Sunday.

Well, here is the deal.

Jesus rose from the grave and we celebrate that today.

But why did He need to die in the first place, and what good does it do us?

Well, to fully answer this question we must talk about the fall.

So Adam and Eve sinned, and God came to them and issued a decree of the grave consequences.

Death, painful childbirth for the woman, thorns and thistles to thwart the efforts of the man in his work, he would sweat and work hard to do the same work that previously had been pleasurable for him.

But the consequences were not for Adam and Eve only.

The serpent also was given a punishment, because the serpent had twisted the Word of God and led astray Eve.

And in the curse of the serpent, which included being relegated to eating dust and going on its belly, there was also a promise that gives a hint that God would someday provide a remedy for the sin of mankind.

This scripture points us towards Jesus.

He would be the one whose heel was bruised, that is, he suffered and died on the cross, but who ultimately would bruise the head of the serpent, and we will get there soon and elaborate on that a bit.

Throughout the Bible we see God expanding on this promise of one who would be born of woman and would bruise the head of the serpent.

Of course, we often hear this verse at Christmastime, and so those of you who may only come to church at Christmas and Easter, even you probably picked up that this prophecy has to do with the birth of Jesus.

Matthew’s gospel tells us clearly that this prophecy was fulfilled in Christ.

Since we are on the subject of the timeline, again we go back to the verse we started with: Gal4.4-5

There are many events in the timeline that I cannot go over in this brief time together.

I know the crockpots are simmering back home for many of you, but in the intermediate time between these major events are many other important events that prove or verify the truth of God’s word, especially the many prophetic passages that point to the birth, life, death, resurrection, and second coming of Jesus.

There is Abraham’s journey, and the enslavement of God’s people in Egypt, led out by Moses, who also gave the law.

Finally the arrival at the promised land, but with many problems and fallbacks and hard lessons learned.

With Moses came the law, the ten commandments you may have heard of, but also the laws regulating sacrifices, so that whenever a sin happened, there was a remedy, which involved blood.

But all of this pointed to a sacrifice to be made that would be a once for all sacrifice.

Do you know who made the first sacrifice for sin in the Bible?

God did.

You see, before sin entered the garden, Adam and Eve were naked, innocent, completely free from shame.

After they sinned, their eyes were opened.

They now understood evil, and they suddenly realized they were naked.

The way God covered their shame was that he killed animals to make them garments.

This showed that to cover for sin, for forgiveness of sin, for the removal of shame from sin, there had to be the shedding of blood.

Of course, one may still say, “but I don’t really think God is going to punish people for sin, since they are just doing what is in their nature to do.”

But if we think this we have totally missed the holiness of God.

In our world, this is pretty common.

People have no respect for God.