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
0.11UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.1UNLIKELY
Fear
0.12UNLIKELY
Joy
0.54LIKELY
Sadness
0.6LIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.77LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.63LIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.94LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.29UNLIKELY
Extraversion
0.29UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.79LIKELY
Emotional Range
0.41UNLIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
Introduction
This morning, we begin a new series on the Gospel According to Luke.
You will usually hear me saying Gospel According to Luke (or Matthew, Mark, or John).
I don’t say, The Gospel of Luke.
I know it’s a bit silly and splitting hairs, but these gospel accounts are not about the authors, but about Jesus.
And to say The Gospel of Luke can make it sound like it is the gospel about Luke and I don’t want that to be the case.
I have for decades said it this way, and I will probably for decades continue.
You may roll your eyes if you would like.
If I were in the pews, I probably would be doing it to if I heard someone make such a mountain out of a molehill.
That being said, in my 21 years of preaching, I have never preached through Luke and have rarely preached out of Luke.
The Christmas story and the parables of the lost sheep, coin, and son are about it as far as sermons coming out of Luke.
And there is a reason: Luke is hard!
Luke is unique.
You may have heard of the Synoptic Gospels before.
Matthew, Mark, and Luke are the Synoptic Gospels.
They are giving a synopsis of Jesus’ life and they are relatively the same.
So they could be compiled together, which is often what people do, and see the same account from three different views.
John is not part of the Synoptic Gospels because John is very different than the rest.
Hardly any of John goes with the other three.
But if Luke is part of the Synoptic Gospels which are so similar to Matthew and Mark, then why do I say it’s hard—that it is unique?
It is because of Luke’s perspective, or rather then angle at which he narrates events and sayings.
One of the goals that Pastor Matt and I have in this series is to let Luke speak for himself.
In other words, we are going to do our very best not to be influenced by Matthew, Mark, or when the occasional reference comes, by John.
Luke has an agenda and we want that agenda to come through.
So prepare yourselves now.
Often when reading a gospel passage, we filter whatever we’re reading through the lens of Matthew.
Whether we’re reading in Mark or Luke, we read it with our Matthew glasses on, and distort the agenda of the author.
Pastor Matt and I are going to try not to let that happen as we preach through this gospel account.
This morning, I have the privilege to introduce to you the Gospel According to Luke.
And in so doing, I want us to see four acknowledgments in this introduction that Luke wrote.
He first acknowledges his appreciation for those who have come before.
He then acknowledges his aim in writing this particular gospel account.
Thirdly, Luke acknowledges his audience.
And then, closely related to aim, but altogether different, Luke acknowledges his angle as he wrote this gospel account.
appreciation
aim
audience
angle
Appreciation
The first acknowledgement that Luke makes in this gospel account is his appreciation to those who have already gone before him and written their own narratives as to the life of Jesus.
Do not think that Luke is finding fault in their writings.
He appreciates all their hard work.
Now,we aren’t sure exactly who Luke is referring to here, but we can be fairly confident that he means at least Matthew and Mark.
There had to have been others who wrote down their narratives as well; we just don’t have them.
Not everyone who wrote of Jesus was inspired by the Holy Spirit.
Those who were had their writings preserved and so we have the four gospel accounts along with the rest of the Old and New Testaments.
Traditionally speaking, Luke was the third person to have written a gospel account as Scripture.
You can probably guess that in tradition, Matthew was the first, Mark was the second, Luke was the third, and John was the last to write a gospel account.
Today, many scholars believe that Mark wrote his first, but tradition tells us that he was second.
Now, you’ll notice that Luke states that these people compiled a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us and that they were delivered to us.
That is not only the title of today’s message, but the title of the entire series.
Because while Luke may be talking about other gospel accounts, the point is that these things actually happened—they were accomplished.
And those accomplishments did not stay silent, but were delivered for us to know and believe.
How could someone not be appreciative of these faithful men writing, compiling, and making available—to anyone who could read or hear someone else read—the life of Jesus, his works, and his sayings?
And Luke makes a distinction here.
These men were eye witnesses and ministers of the word.
While Luke could certainly be considered a minister of the word, he was not an eye-witness.
It is very possible that Luke garnered much of his information from these gospel accounts, but he certainly garnered them from faithful men who were eye-witnesses and ministers—preachers of the word.
It is often believed that in order for a biblical author to be inspired by the Holy Spirit, he couldn’t have done any research or gathered data from outside himself.
The stuff he didn’t know was supernaturally revealed to him.
That is usually not the case.
Most biblical authors who were carried along by the Holy Spirit did the hard work of research.
When Luke wrote that Mary pondered these things in her heart, it isn’t because the Spirit revealed it to him, but more likely that he talked with Mary herself and she told him.
So Luke, was indebted and appreciative to those who had done much of the leg work.
And he was indebted to those who shared with him their experiences and memories of Jesus.
Aim
But it is not only that Luke acknowledged his appreciation for those who compiled and delivered the gospel narratives before him, but he also acknowledged his aim in writing his own gospel narrative.
That being said, this type of narrative is called a bios.
It isn’t a biography; it’s bios.
Dr. Jonathan Pennington distinguishes bios from modern biography in four areas:
Bios mixes chronology and topics.
Bios writers often wrote mainly controversial subjects.
Bios writers write their subject as someone to be emulated.
Bios writers did not write for information sake, but transformation sake.
So taking the first one (Bios mixes chronology and topics), we find that the gospel accounts are often out of order chronologically.
If you read Matthew, Mark, and Luke together, you’ll find that though they often talk about the same subject, they are surrounded by different events.
This often makes “fact-checkers” claim that that the Bible contradicts itself because Matthew says such and such happened before this or that, but then Mark says it happened before such and such.
Bios writers are more interested in lumping ideas and topics together than presenting a chronological construct of a person’s life.
The second (Bios writers often wrote mainly controversial subjects) isn’t hard to see, is it?
Jesus is constantly being confronted by the Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers about all types of controversial issues: marriage and divorce, working on the sabbath, who is my neighbor, etc.
The third (Bios writers write their subject as someone to be emulated) is easy to see as well.
But it’s not just that they present the good qualities and not the bad.
Jesus, of course, had no bad qualities.
But this is why half of the gospel accounts don’t start with Jesus’s birth.
You can’t emulate a virgin birth.
We have very little about Jesus’s childhood.
What we do have is found in Luke!
Again, there’s a reason that Luke puts it in there; but it’s only one scene of Jesus’s childhood.
The main thing is Jesus’s work and words that the gospel writers want us to emulate.
The fourth (Bios writers did not write for information sake, but transformation sake), is certainly understandable as well.
It is not only that we should try and emulate the subject of the bios, but be transformed by him.
Life should be completely different because of this man.
And these are Luke’s aims.
Look at verse 3 once again.
Luke wanted to write an orderly account for Theophilus.
Now, Luke deviates a little from what the norm of bios is.
Notice that little clause, “To write an orderly account” there.
Luke was not just saying that he wanted to to make sure that all his Ts were crossed and Is dotted.
He wasn’t just saying he wanted to make sure all the papers were straight and neat when it was delivered to his audience.
Those to words, “orderly account” really mean sequential account.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9