Sermon Tone Analysis

Bookmarks & Needs:

B: John 4:46-54

N: Auxano Survey, clicker

Welcome

Good morning, and welcome to Family Worship here at Eastern Hills Baptist Church!

It’s good to be here together this morning to praise the Lord and consider His Word as a church family.

If you’re joining us online this morning, thanks for being a part of our live stream.

I really appreciate the men and women that make up our Audio Visual ministry and the work that they do every week to run the sound and lights, the display and the stream.

Thanks for your faithful work, team.

And choir and Michelle, thank you for blessing us with that song this morning.

Auxano Survey Time

I’ve been talking about this morning for a few weeks now, and as I’ve said during those announcements, this is a special day in the life of Eastern Hills.

Hopefully just about about everyone who has been here this month has heard about this morning and what we will be doing together today.

Maybe you’ve been attending Eastern Hills for 50 years or maybe 50 days, this is a family activity that is going to be very important in the months and years to come.

We’d love to get some information and input from you before we step into the next phase of this endeavor.

Visitors....

A little over a year ago, we realized that we were going to have to do some pretty major repair and upkeep things to the building, and through the conversations that came from that realization, we decided to contract with an architect to walk us through a process of vision, direction, mission, and what God might want to do in the life of the church and how our building helps or hinders that mission.

That mission, summarized in one sentence is: The Eastern Hills Baptist Church family exists to connect people to Jesus and to each other.

We voted as a church to adopt the Building Master Plan that was developed as the guiding concept for our future direction for the building.

However, this concept is a long-vision, three phase concept, and the first phase is mostly infrastructure issues: fixing and upgrading our lighting system (they are happily working for the time being), changing the building over from evaporative cooling to central air and replacing our in some cases 40-year-old furnaces, upgrading our electrical supply to accommodate these changes, and a couple of other things on the property like a shading structure over the courtyard and making the drainage ditch at the south end of the property more attractive and safe.

But that was only the beginning of the journey that we’ve been on.

We also voted to contract with a church consulting group called Auxano who helps churches think through things like this, and for the past few months, a group of church members has worked with Clint from Auxano to really refine the “how and why” of our mission, and to look further out into the future by considering our location, our church culture and focus, and how God might want to use Eastern Hills in a very particular, practical way to advance His Kingdom.

We created a document with that information called the “Case for Support,” and it has been available on our website and in the foyer and office for a couple of weeks now for you to look at, read, and pray through, and I hope you’ve done that.

We believe that God has situated Eastern Hills, both the people and the property that we meet on, to be used by Him to do a great work in the lives of others through very practical means, which we are calling “neighboring moments.”

These neighboring moments are both about serving the neighbors around our homes, but also about serving the neighbors around this building, our church family home.

This kind of endeavor is going to take time and resources, and what Auxano has helped us prepare for this morning is a church “Campaign Readiness Survey” that we want every family in the church to complete this morning, if possible.

This survey will provide us with valuable insight from the church family to help gauge how well we have communicated the direction and vision with the church, perhaps see any blind spots or things we’ve missed, evaluate the overall engagement of the church family, and just give an idea of the initial support that we might have available for stepping into phase 1 of the Master Plan.

The survey is about 20 questions long, and should take about 10 minutes to complete.

You can choose to put your name on it or not, and there’s also a place for you to share your thoughts, ideas, questions, or excitement on the survey.

The first 13 questions are more general about your engagement in the church, and in fact, you don’t need to know anything about the Master Plan or the Case for Support to answer those 13 questions.

Starting with question 14, they get more into the specifics of the Master Plan and the Case for Support.

If you haven’t seen the Case for Support, you can see that document on our website, which is ehbc.org,

under the Family Life tab, the section titled Auxano Church Partnership.

The surveys will not be evaluated by any of us here, but by the staff at Auxano, who will then compiled the information and give us a snapshot of where we are at this moment, as well as the input that we get from the survey.

Before we get to the survey, I just want to make a couple of things clear: first, married couples are welcome to fill the survey out TOGETHER, but you don’t HAVE to.

However, if spouses do choose to fill this out separately, when you get to question 20 especially, make sure that only one of you answers that question, and the other chooses “Spouse already responded.”

Otherwise, our information will be skewed.

Second, if you aren’t formally a member of the church yet, but you’re engaged in the life of Eastern Hills, we want you to complete the survey as well.

Third, nothing in this survey is obligating you to anything, so please be completely honest, because we really need and want your input so that we can wisely evaluate our next steps.

So let me give you the instructions, and then pray, and then really as an act of worship as a church: us together taking part in what God is doing in the life of this church family.

The most efficient way to do this is for everyone who wants to take the survey to get their cell phones out, and we have a QR code that you can use to get directly to the survey on your phone.

So you’ll just get your phone out, open up your camera, and aim it at the screen, or if that doesn’t work, you can use the QR code on the front of the EHBC Life (bulletin).

It should ask you if you want to open it in your browser, and then you can start filling it out.

That link on the screen is where the QR code points to if that method doesn’t work or if you’re joining us online today and watching on your phone.

There is also a direct link on our website, which is ehbc.org,

then look at the Family Life tab and select Auxano Church Partnership.

If you don’t have a smartphone or don’t want to use your phone to take the survey, just raise your hand and we’ll get you a paper copy.

If you use a paper copy, just raise your hand when you’re done, and we’ll collect them.

Pray, thanking God for the ability for us to join together as the body in this time of worship, and ask for His guidance as we take the survey together.

We’re going to play some background music so you can focus on this and let’s begin taking the survey.

Opening

Thank you for participating in this special event in the life of our church family.

And now, we are still going to look at the Bible this morning, but I promise that it will not be as long of a message as I might normally preach.

Last week, we kicked off our new series, Signs, where we are looking at the seven signs that John recorded in His Gospel to show that Jesus is the Messiah, and we opened the series with the understanding that it is dangerous to ignore or misinterpret the evidence that Jesus is God and Christ.

We saw the first sign, when Jesus changed the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, and I guess you could summarize last week’s message with the phrase, Jesus is better.

Better than anyone or anything we could possibly follow after.

This morning, we will consider the second sign that John recorded, which also happened in Cana of Galilee.

Let’s stand in recognition of the Word of God as we read our focal passage together, John 4:46-54

PRAYER (Fires and sister churches affected by them; Celebration Baptist Church in Rio Rancho, Jesse Parker senior pastor since January of this year)

We all have to make decisions every day.

Some of those decisions are bigger and more difficult to make, decisions which might have a profound impact on our lives from that moment on.

We are generally more cautious with that level of decision.

I’m thinking decisions about whom to marry, what job to take, buying a house or a car.

These decisions can be huge.

And there is kind of a path that we go through as we make these kind of huge decisions.

The four steps are: AWARENESS->UNDERSTANDING->APPRECIATION->OWNERSHIP.

I’ll use the idea of buying a house to break this down.

When you want to buy a house, before you even start looking, you have some idea of what you want in a house, so you can only look at houses that fit a general set of criteria.

As you look at the various listings that fit your criteria, you be come AWARE of the various houses that are available.

Then you start to consider the different aspects (size, location, price, bedrooms, etc.) of the individual houses so that you have UNDERSTANDING of the options.

As one house rises to the top of the ones that fit your criteria, you gain an APPRECIATION of that house: you start to envision what it would be like to live in that house, the ways you would organize, etc.

And finally, you purchase the house: you enter OWNERSHIP.

And with ownership comes passion.

It’s YOUR house.

While any analogy is going to fall short when we try to use it to illustrate the eternal truths and weight of the Gospel (certainly trusting in Jesus is substantially different than buying a house or a car), this is kind of what we see in our focal passage this morning with the royal official from Capernaum.

To very quickly catch us up from last week as far as the Gospel of John is concerned:

After the wedding, Jesus went to Jerusalem for Passover, and there He cleared the Temple of the money changers, and then predicted His death when asked what sign He would give for His authority to do such things.

He also did miraculous things there during the Passover festival as well, as evidenced by John 2:23.

Then in chapter 3, He had His evening chat with Nicodemus, where Jesus told him, “Unless someone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John 3:3) There was a slight issue with John the Baptist’s disciples, and that prompted John to say about Jesus: “He must increase, I must decrease.”

(What time is it?

3:30) From there, Jesus went to the Samaritan village of Sychar, where he met the woman at the well, and revealed His identity as Messiah to her by saying, “I, the one speaking to you, am He (Messiah).”

She goes into town and tells her fellow Samaritans about Him, and many from the town believe that He is the Savior.

So just before we arrive at our focal passage, we see Jesus return to Galilee after staying in Sychar for a couple of days.

I didn’t put this in the focal passage because we don’t actually meet the royal official just yet.

But it’s important for especially our first point:

So Jesus returns to Galilee, knowing that a prophet has no honor in His own country, and while they welcome Him, there is still not comprehension of who He really is.

This brings us to our focal passage and the royal official.

1) Before the sign, the official was AWARE of Jesus.

This royal official could have been a Jew or a Gentile, we cannot be sure.

In fact, we know only three things about this royal official as we first meet him: 1) He serves in the court of the Tetrarch of the province of Galilee, Herod Anitpas.

This is the same Herod that would have John the Baptist beheaded.

2) He lives in Capernaum, which is on the northern coast of the Sea of Galilee.

3) He has a son who is gravely ill.

These are borne out in verse 46:

But what we learn from the beginning of verse 47 is that this royal official was AWARE of Jesus.

John 4:47 (CSB)

47 When this man heard that Jesus had come from Judea into Galilee...

Others were fully aware of Jesus.

Back in chapter 2 when Jesus was in Jerusalem for Passover, we see the sellers were aware of Him, His disciples were aware of Him, the Jews were aware of Him.

In John 3, we see that Nicodemus was aware of Him, John the Baptist and his disciples were aware of Him.