Sermon Tone Analysis
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Midnight Deliverance
One of my favorite cartoons is the Dennis the Menace cartoon.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the one printed in the newspaper or the old TV show or even the remake movie.
I enjoy Dennis.
I think that he is one of those kids you either love or hate.
I don’t think there is any middle ground with him.
Dennis had a bad habit of always getting into some kind of trouble and it usually involved his neighbor.
The neighbors were the Wilson’s.
Dennis looked at Mr. Wilson as his best friend although he drove him to distraction with the trouble that he got into.
Mrs. Wilson tried to keep the peace between her husband and Dennis.
At times I think particularly in the TV show that Mr. Wilson wished that Dennis and his family would move someplace far away from him but I also think that he loved Dennis like a grandchild.
Did you ever have a kid of your own or a neighbor kid who drove you nuts?
One of those kids that was always getting into mischief or constantly talking?
Over the years I’ve run across several kids like that, I think they were my punishment for what I was like as a kid.
I wasn’t like Dennis, always getting into trouble.
I could as my grandmother called it, get into mischief but I never really got into trouble or at least I didn’t get caught.
I was one of those kids who was curious about how things worked and why we did things the way we did them.
Basically if I was awake I was always asking questions and exploring.
I absolutely drove my family nuts with my constant questioning.
My favorite question was “why”?
If my dad was working on something, I was right behind him asking about what he was doing, why he was doing it, how it worked and on and on it went.
My dad wasn’t a very patient man and he only tolerated that for a little while and he’d chase me away.
He pretty much refused to do any projects around the house if I was there.
It wasn’t until I was an older teenager that he would let me help with any projects.
I don’t know why!
My older brothers and sisters were fair game and they did their best to avoid me.
My one brother who is closest in age to me got even with me one time.
I guess I had been annoying him to much so he plotted on how to get even.
It really wasn’t my fault, he’d never go or do anything by himself, he always had to drag me along.
One day we were in the basement and him being bigger he managed to get me tied to one of the floor jacks and then he proceeded to tape me to that pole with 4 inch wide masking tape, pretty much from head to toe.
Our mom wasn’t home, it was just the two of us.
He taped me really good because I couldn’t move and then he left me there and went outside.
Fortunately he didn’t tape my mouth because when I heard my mom come in the house I started yelling for her to help me.
She made my brother come in and let me loose.
I don’t remember if he got in trouble or not, but I learned an important lesson about not being alone with him again!
I’m just glad it wasn’t duct tape that he used!
Paul and Silas in our scripture text ran into one of those people that never quit talking.
They were in Philippi starting a new church.
The scripture says beginning in verse 16
On their way to a prayer meeting the come across a slave who was possessed by a spirit that gave her a supernatural ability to predict the future.
We don’t know how accurate her predictions were but she must have been pretty good because the scriptures tell us that she earned a great deal of money for her owners.
This spirit that she had was a demon, a fallen angel.
Based on Paul’s response to it we conclude that she was demon possessed.
We don’t like to talk about demon possession today.
Many Godly Christians dismiss the idea that a person can be possessed by a demon, but it can and does happen, even today.
This slave girl was possessed with the spirit of Python.
Pytho was according to Greek mythology a huge serpent that had a messenger on Mount Parnassus.
Pytho was famous for predicting the future.
Apollo killed the serpant.
He was referred to as Pythius.
He “became celebrated as the foreteller of future events; and all those, who either could or pretended to predict future events, were influenced by the spirit of Apollo Pythius.”
(1)
It amazes me when Christians get caught up in fortune telling or attempting to contact a deceased family member or friend through a medium, practices that are specifically condemned by God in the Bible.
There are popular TV shows with purported mediums who claim that they can speak to the dead.
If that person is real in what they are doing they aren’t doing that by their own special talent and they aren’t in contact with the dead person, they are however in contact with a demonic influence.
A word of warning is that when we dabble in things like this that expose ourselves to evil powers then we run the risk of opening our lives to the presence of a demon in our own lives.
Don’t even dabble in it.
In Leviticus 19:31 we read:
This slave woman kept this up for many days, following Paul and Silas around and shouting:
She was speaking the truth.
Even Satan recognizes who God is.
The issue here is that there was not a large presence of Jews in this city.
The people wouldn’t automatically assume that she was talking about Jehovah.
The term would have been very misleading because there were a lot of “high gods” in the Greek culture
For Paul after several days of this he got annoyed at her.
He was annoyed because she was not saying that they were proclaiming the way of salvation.
She was saying that they were proclaiming one way of salvation.
One way out of many ways.
In an Oct 18, 2006 radio interview Bishop Jefferts Schori, the former leader of the Episcopal Church stated, “Christians understand that Jesus is the route to God.
That is not to say that Muslims, or Sikhs, or Jains, come to God in a radically different way.
They come to God through human experience – through human experience of the divine.”
“We who practice the Christian tradition understand him as our vehicle to the divine,” the presiding bishop told Time magazine in its July 10, 2006 issue.
“But for us to assume that God could not act in other ways is, I think, to put God in an awfully small box.”
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That god she was speaking about is not the God of the Bible.
I will leave it at that.
This slave girl was like that little kid always asking why.
Paul had one nerve left and she was plucking it.
Paul finally became so annoyed that Luke records:
Paul had enough and he turned to her and commanded in the name of Jesus that the spirit come out of her and it did.
It’s important to note that Paul was only able to command that spirit by the name of Jesus; it wasn’t through his own authority, but by the authority of the name of Jesus.
Something that is overlooked in this encounter is that for probably the first time in this young woman’s life she is free.
Oh, she’s still a slave, but she’s been set free from the demonic influence in her life.
The God who set her free that day is the very same God that can set people free today.
Of course when you start messing with peoples livelihood you get yourself in trouble.
The owners of this slave realized that they were no longer going to be making money from her.
What do you do when someone takes your moneymaking scheme away from you?
You make up some charges against the person and take then to court and that is just exactly what the slave owners did.
Luke records that
They weren’t concerned about her, they were only concerned about the bottom line.
How easy is it for us today to turn a blind eye to a person who is trapped in sin.
We know the one who can set them free and yet sometimes it is so easy to avoid them because their lives are too messy.
Life is messy.
Think of the prostitute who came to Jesus and washed his feet with her tears and dried them with her hair.
That was messy, but Jesus wasn’t repulsed by her.
The thing about Jesus is that he never left people were they were.
He always challenged them to go and sin no more.
That should encourage us as we encounter people caught up in messy lives.
The slave owners drug Paul and Silas to the public square, before the authorities, before the magistrates.
Notice that they didn’t accuse them of taking their cash cow away from them.
No, they trumped up some charges against them and said that they were throwing the entire city into an uproar because they were advocating customs unlawful for Romans to accept or practice.
They weren’t bringing the city into turmoil, that was a lie on the part of those slave owners.
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