Sermon Tone Analysis

Psalm of the Day: Psalm 116

In this psalm we see two things That I think will be good for us to remember us this morning as we prepare our hearts for worship.

First is that we should, as the psalmist remember all the things that God has done for us.

He has, verse 1, heard our cries for mercy, verse 2 inclined his ear towards us; verse 5 been gracious and merciful; verse 6 he has preserved us, verse 7 given us rest, verse 8 delivered us, verse 13 he has given us salvation.

and that is but a few of the things that the psalmist lists.

Put shortly: He has been wonderful to us.

Which leads to the second point, we should worship him.

In verse 12 we ask: what shall I render to the Lord, Romans 12 tells us that we should offer ourselves as a living sacrifice!

Verse 17 “I will offer you the sacrifice of thanksgiving and call upon the name of the Lord.

Lets bow in a time of silent prayer and reflection as we prepare our hearts for what the LOord will do this morning.

Scripture Reading: Psalm 27:1-4

Sermon

Good Morning Church!

I was glad when they said to me let us go and worship in the house of the Lord!

Well this morning we are starting Matthew 11.

WE will be looking at Matthew 11:1-6 this morning.

And this will be a very important, very, I pray, Useful portion of scripture for all of us this morning.

Just before we dive in, I want is to remember the context, and really the flow of the entire book of Matthew.

If we remember back, all the way back to the beginning of this book, we noted that Matthew is structured where he has large discourses, or portions where Jesus is talking, followed by narratives that supplement or give insight or teach in a practical way what Jesus has taught in the discourse.

SO we had the introduction which was sort of the first 4 chapters of Matthew then our first (and the biggest) discourse: the Sermon on the mount.

Then after the sermon on the mount we had the miracle narratives that showed us that Jesus had the authority to teach and say all that he did in that great sermon.

Then, what we just finished last week was what is known as the missions discourse, and so no we start narrative, stories, things that happened, that Matthew wants to use to convince our hearts by seeing what Jesus taught play out in real life.

And so as we approach the subjects of missions, of persecution, trials, of difficulties of the mission Jesus sends his people on, and more to the point, how that message will be recieved by the world around us, It is of critical importance that we understand the heart and the issue that Matthew chooses to start with.

And so with that in mind, lets begin, before we even read, lets begin with a word of prayer.

PRAY

Before we even read I would like to start with a question:what is the opposite of Belief?

So if someone says “I believe in something” what would be the opposite thing to say?

Some of you may be thinking Doubt.

“Well,” we might say, “the opposite of belief is obviously doubt.”

But I I think that is wrong.

The opposite of belief, we have a word for it, it is just a negation of the word belief.

It is simply unbelief.

The opposite of belief is to not believe.

Doubt is a different sort of category of thing.

Alister McGrath wrote a book about this very subject, the difference between unbelief and doubt and this is what he wrote:

Unbelief is the decision to live your life as if there is no God.

It is a deliberate decision to reject Jesus Chrsit and all that he stands for.

But doubt is something quite different.

Doubt arises within a context of faith.

It is a wistful longing to be sure of the things in which we trust.

In other words, somehow, in some way one property of faith is doubt.

If you don’t live by faith then there is rally nothing that should case you to doubt.

If you don’t believe then your heart could never be trouble over what you believe in.

So For if you believe nothing you can doubt nothing.

And so when we think of doubt we should not think of it as somtinhg that Christians (at least the good ones… what ever that means), but we should not think of this as something that no good cristian would ever struggle with.

Instead we need to know how to deal with it, how to live in a world where we don;t always have all the answers to all of the things that our hearts want to know.

But instead, we must trust.

Our passage today i mentioned is Matthew 11:1-6.

The first note that I want to make, is sort of a meta note, it is in some sense above, hovering above this text like a cloud, the first thing we have to do is realize that NO ONE IS IMMUNE

The Truth: No One is IMMUNE

No one, except for NO ONE Has ever NOT struggled with thoughts of doubt, with turmoil and pain that might occur in our hearts.

We could go through really all of scripture and see this to be true.

-Abraham AND Sarah, the man and woman that all of the people of God in some way start with, the first patriarch and his wife, both doubted God could keep his promise to give him an heir.

and so they tried to work out their own way (to disastrous results) to make that happen.

Moses, the greatest prophet, the one to whom God gave the law who interceded for The people, who Led the people, who God used to set them free from Egypt, even moses doubted often.

Even when he is before the burning bush, God has revealed to Moses his name, moses struggled and doubted that he would be the one that God would call and use

David, a man after God’s own heart, a man who loved and was devoted to God, who served him.

David doubted all the time and would even put those doubts into song form.

He wrote such psalms as Psalm 13 where he writes:

Elijah -the greatest prophet in the OT, one who did not see death because God took him from this earth struggled with doubt to the point of wanting to die

And these are just the OT highlights, we could go on and on, Gideon, Joshua, many of the minor prophets, they all experienced doubt at one time or another.

Even in the NEW TESTAMENT.

There is a disciple that we have give the nickname “Doubting Thomas”.

Peter, the ROCK, doubted even while he was walking on water and then so much that he would deny Christ three times.

Doubt is in some way the universal thing that all believers will struggle with, and even, as well, and here is our connection to this passage even John the baptist would experience some form of doubt.

John the baptist, the one who, and we will see this in later passage, he was the greatest man ever born of women.

The one who saw Jesus, prophesied about Jesus, BAPTIZED jesus , even he, himself, would struggle with thoughts of doubt.

Matthew Henry writes: Where there is true faith, yet there may be a mixture of unbelief.

The remaining unbelief of good men may sometimes, in an hour of temptation; call in question the most important truths.

And so before we even dive in and see what it looks like in this text, and how we can find tools and find things that we ourselves can use to help stand up in the face of doubt, we have to start here.

It is not OK to go around thinking that we must be perfectly impregnable in our faith, in our ability to trust in God, because that is the start of our first problem

It is not to me in my own strength and might.

It is not up to me to sort of muster more faith, it is a gift from God.

And so sometimes, as my faith is grown, and stretched, and worked out, I may struggle.

“Doubting”, JC Ryle once said, “does not prove that a man has no faith, but only that his faith is small.”

But praise be to the God who uses small faith.

Faith like he grain of a mustard seed can move great mountains and cast them into the sea, and We all struggle to even have that much.

John Owen wrote beautifully and wonderfully, in what is my favorite book of all time and this favorite does stay consistent for those of you keeping score, “the death of death in the death of Christ”.

He is discussing the work of Christ, and in particular the POWER of the work of Christ.

And he is getting to the point that he is saying that there is not one thing in your life, not one sin or brokenness in your life that Christ did not die for.

So even, he writes, your lack of belief, even your frail faith, he died for that too.

And so while there is no one but no one who has’st struggled with doubt, there is nothing but NOTHING that the blood of christ can not atone for in your life.

Even, it turns out, your doubt.

even your moments of struggle, even THIS God can heal you.

So we start there.

Doubt, does not prove that you have NO faith, only that it is small.

But when talking about faith you must always remember what matters is not the size, strength or force of our faith, what matters is the OBJECT of our faith: Jesus Chrsit our Lord.

SO what might this doubt look like and how can we steel our hearts against it?

How can we be prepared for when the doubt that is inevitable, that no one is immune to comes?

well now we can turn our attention to our text.

Lets start and just look at THE QUESTION

The QUESTION

John in verse 2 is languishing in Prison, Roman prison.

He has made the “mistake” of dong what God called him to do.

He called out sin.

In particular the sin of the Herod the tetrarch.

“Hey, this marriage you are in, its not right.

You don;t get to do whatever you want.

I know you think you are all powerful roman ruler, but God is the one who gets to say what is right and wrong, and you, my friend, are wrong.”

and so he is thrown in jail.