Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Anger
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Message
Last night, we read 12 soaring truths that become yours at the precise moment when you place your life into God’s hands.
God chose you, God gave you one another called the church, the Heaven Tribe, and placed his Holy Spirit dynamite energy inside of you, the same energy that raised a man from the dead!
Now, that same Spirit lives inside of every person who believes!
That’s God’s promise for you and for every one of us! Regardless of what you believe right now, God promised to give you these truths at the precise moment when you do believe.
After Paul ended that passage from chapter 1, he made a hard turn in chapter 2 that describes another truth that exists for all of us.
Tonight I want to invite you to be honest with yourself.
Students and leaders alike when Paul wrote:
Once you were dead because of your disobedience and your many sins.
You used to live in sin, just like the rest of the world, obeying the devil—the commander of the power of the air.
He is the spirit at work in the hearts of those who refuse to obey God.
All of us used to live that way, following the passionate desires and inclinations of our sinful nature.
By our very nature we were subject to God’s anger, just like everyone else.
Ephesians 2:1-3
As a teenager, I grew up attending a student camp just like this, and at the end of each night, a couple hundred of us would gather around a campfire and sing songs together.
Some of my most intimate moments with God happened around those campfires.
At the end of the campfire, we closed the night with the same song based on Psalm 139, one of my favorite Psalms, which I read part of yesterday when I said,
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Psalm 139:14
That Psalm closes with this couplet:
Search me, O God, and know my heart;
test me and know my anxious thoughts.
Point out anything in me that offends you,
and lead me along the path of everlasting life.
Psalm 139:23-24
The Psalm is a prayer, which invites God to meet you in your mess and brokenness.
Tonight, I want to invite you to ask God to search your heart and know you.
God chose you even before God made the world.
Search for him tonight and he promised that you will find him.
Our sin and disobedience keeps Us apart from God.
The truth is: Our sin leads to death.
Not only in hell and eternal separation from our God, but also dead in life here and now.
A few months ago, a good friend of mine invited me on his production set.
During my visit, I met the man who directed Mac Miller’s final music video, “Self-Care,” which was released about a month before he overdosed and died at age 26.
Some of you know of Mac Miller, some of you don’t.
For those of you who don’t, most people in the music industry, including Dr. Dre and John Legend, viewed Mac Miller as one of the great up and coming hip hop artists of your generation.
He also dated Ariana Grande for two years.
That’s how you know Mac Miller… :)
If you ever listened to Mac Miller, then you also may know that he battled substance abuse, which began in high school.
Many of his lyrics express his battle with drug addiction.
About a month before his overdose, he released a track called “Self-Care,” from his last album “Swimming.”
In this single, he chronicled his emotional spiral downward into what he called "oblivion,” which he admits in his own words was “a beautiful feeling in oblivion.”
In the video, the scene opens with Miller laying in a coffin, symbolizing his own death.
Once you were dead because of your disobedience and your many sins, Paul said.
Mac Miller knew this, all of us know this.
In his video after lighting a cigarette, he carved into the wood of the coffin these words: “Memento Mori,” which is Latin for “remember your death.”
Every part of this video resonates with my brokenness.
Because just like Mac Miller, I once felt dead, too.
Dead in my sin.
Dead in my emotions.
Dead in my disobedience.
Friends, no pretending, I’m a broken man on this Christ Journey with you.
His music gives a voice to your generation.
How do I know?
Because his video has been viewed 126 million times only 9 months after his death.
Two scenes resonate with me from this video:
First, in the coffin,
[[[SHOW PIC: MILLER COFFIN]]]
jagged nails pointed down toward him, buried 6 feet under, and without any care in the world, Miller lights a cigarette, and sings:
Swear the height be too tall so like September I fall (down, down)
Down below, now I know that the medicine be on call, yeah (the ‘medicine’ meaning drugs)
It's feeling like you hot enough to melt, yeah (meaning the feeling of drugs happening in your body)
Can't trust no one, can't even trust yourself yeah (which alludes to the anxiety and isolation that is produced by the high)
And I love you, I don't love nobody else, yeah (I love you, meaning the high)
Tell them they can take it elsewhere (meaning they can take their help and advice elsewhere)
Self care, I'm treatin' me right, yeah (Meaning he is only thinking about himself and how he can find relief from his pain and worry)
We gonna be alright (his high is his only satisfaction)
The ‘we’ throughout these lyrics refers to Miller and his drug.
Perhaps for you, the ‘we’ in his lyric isn’t a drug, but all of us have a we… All of us have attached ourselves to something that takes away from our lives rather than gives life to us.
maybe it’s sex or porn or gossip or food or the desire to be liked by everyone.
What is that for you?
Let me talk to the middle schoolers for just a moment: perhaps you don’t struggle with drugs, sex, porn, and gossip, and junk right now - maybe you do, but for others you may not.
Regardless, when the day comes when you face these questions and decisions, I want you to know that these are empty promises that will lead you down a road that God never intended for you to travel.
I am giving you a Haka challenge not to travel down that road.
Instead, help others off that road and back to toward life with Christ.
The second scene that resonates occurres right after Miller came up from the ground when the explosions started happening all around him.
[[[SHOW PIC: MILLER COLOR EXPLOSIONS]]]
For the rest of the video, we don’t see a clear view of his face again, as he sang,
I got all the time in the world
So for now, I'm just chillin'
Plus, I know it's a beautiful feeling
In oblivion
Oblivion literally means ‘nothing.’
And for Miller he felt a beautiful feeling in his own nothingness.
At one point, we see him falling from the sky into oblivion,
[[[SHOW PIC: MILLER FALLING]]]
away from the outside world, apart from every who knows him.
I wonder how many of us run into our own oblivion in order to escape from:
Pressures
Pretending
Prejudices
through things like:
Drugs
Alcohol
Sex
Gossip
Food
Sugar
Binge TV
Anything that can distract you from what’s happening in your heart.
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