Sermon Tone Analysis

*1.      **The urgent need of the church*

If I were to ask you what the most urgent, most pressing need of the church today what would come to your mind?

Just as in the political arena there are single issue groups that capture the attention of everyone, so too this happens in the church.

Back to the question- what comes to mind?

* *Purity in sexual and reproductive matters?*

Fornication, adultery, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases these are all serious issues even in the church.

A few years ago /Christianity Today/ published the results of a poll showing that in several church singles groups in California—groups of unmarried and divorced people, usually between the ages of twenty and thirty-five—more than 90 percent of both men and women had engaged or were then engaged in illicit sexual affairs.

Ah, you say, that is California: what can you expect?

But a more recent poll published by /Leadership/ is scarcely more encouraging.

A study of teenagers from evangelical churches across America revealed that more than 40 percent of such churched young people eighteen years of age or younger had engaged in premarital sex (over against a national base of about 54 percent).

[i]

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These figures are alarming

God knows we need purity in sexual and reproductive matters.

But let us be frank: some societies experience high degrees of sexual rectitude without much knowledge of God, without eternal life.

Many Muslim nations, for instance, exhibit a far higher degree of sexual purity and a far lower abortion rate than any Western nation.

Surely this cannot be our greatest need.[ii]

* *Others say the church’s most urgent need is a combination of integrity and generosity in the financial arena.

*[iii]

How many people in the church regularly cheat on their taxes?

How many people in the church have their goal of having financial nest egg above the glory of God?

People can’t or won’t tithe because they are so far in debt trying to reach what the world views as success and happiness.

The bottom line of the recent financial collapse was greed!

This isn’t just in the US.

In some measure, of course, greed characterizes every culture in this fallen world.

But the raw worship of Mammon has become so bold, so outrageous, so pervasive in the Western world during the last ten years that many of us are willing to do almost anything—including sacrificing our children—provided we can buy more.

[iv]

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God knows we need to be released from our rampant materialism.

But candor forces us to recognize that there are societies far less devoted to the creed of “More!” than we are, but whose people do not know God.

How can this be our greatest need?[v]

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* *What we need in this hour of spiritual decline is evangelism and church planting*.

[vi]

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“Missions” can no longer be thought of as something that takes place “over there.”

Most Western nations are growing in ethnic diversity.

In America, we are told, by the year 2000 WASPs (white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants) will make up only 47 percent of the population.

If we ask how much effective evangelism has been done among Hispanics in Chicago, Greeks in Sydney, Arabs in London, or Asians in Vancouver, we must hang our heads in shame.

[vii]

 

You might say well what about the big revivals, the promise keeper events, the harvest crusades, the Billy Grahams and the like?

Certainly these are going to stem the tide of this spiritual decline.

When I first saw a Billy Graham event I remember seeing all these thousands of people walking to the front to repent of their sins and to acknowledge Jesus as the Lord of their life.

In my naivety I believed they were at the same point I was when the Lord drew me to himself, broken at the bottom acknowledging my sin and my helplessness and my need for a savior, but that really isn’t the case for most of the people that walked that isle.

To what extent do those who profess faith at world-class evangelistic meetings actually persevere, over a period of five years from their initial profession of faith?

When careful studies have been undertaken, the most commonly agreed range is 2 percent to 4 percent; that is, between 2 percent and 4 percent of those who make a profession of faith at such meetings are actually persevering in the faith five years later, as measured by such external criteria as attendance at church, regular Bible reading, or the like.[viii]

Even such frightening statistics do not disclose the immensity of the problem.

Many who profess faith seem to think that Christianity is something to add to their already busy lives, not something that controls, constrains, and shapes their vision and all of their goals.

[ix]

 

The true cost of discipleship is not taught

 

Luke 9:23-26 (NASB95) \\ 23 And He was saying to them all, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross daily and follow Me.

\\ 24 “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake, he is the one who will save it.

\\ 25 “For what is a man profited if he gains the whole world, and loses or forfeits himself?

\\ 26 “For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when He comes in His glory, and the glory of the Father and of the holy angels.

Luke 14:26 (NASB95) \\ 26 “If anyone comes to Me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.[x]

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In short, evangelism—at least the evangelism that has dominated much of the Western world—does not seem powerful enough to address our spiritual decline.[xi]

* *

Perhaps what we most urgently need, then, is disciplined, biblical thinking.

We need more Bible colleges and seminaries, more theologians, more lay training, more expository preaching.

How else are we going to train a whole generation of Christians to think God’s thoughts after him, other than by teaching them to think through Scripture, to learn the Scriptures well?[xii]

 

Listen to what D.A. Carson says

“I am scarcely in a position to criticize expository preaching and seminaries: I have given my life to such ministry.

Yet I would be among the first to acknowledge that some students at the institution where I teach, and some faculty too, can devote thousands of hours to the diligent study of Scripture and yet still somehow display an extraordinarily shallow knowledge of God.

Biblical knowledge can be merely academic and rigorous, but somehow not edifying, not life-giving, not devout, not guileless.”[xiii]

Clearly all of these things are important.

I would not want anything I have said to be taken as disparagement of evangelism and worship, a diminishing of the importance of purity and integrity, a carelessness about disciplined Bible study.

But there is a sense in which these urgent needs are merely symptomatic of a far more serious lack.[xiv]

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*2.      **The one thing we most urgently need in Western Christendom is a deeper knowledge of God.

We need to know God better.*[xv]*

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When it comes to knowing God, we are a culture of the spiritually stunted[xvi]

* *

we want our felt needs met, so we have the seeker sensitive movement, we want an experience so we have the charismatic movement, we want to come to church with no bible, get our coffee, set back in a nice comfortable chair and be entertained for about 30 minutes and then go on our way, get back home where I can do what I want to do.

Mid week studies are you crazy!

I am far to busy for that.

Daily bible reading and prayer come on I’m not some kind of fanatic!

Then we wonder why we are spiritually stunted.

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Even so, this is not a class that directly meets the challenge to know God better.

Rather, it addresses one small but vital part of that challenge.

One of the foundational steps in knowing God, and one of the basic demonstrations that we do know God,

is prayer—

 

Spiritual, persistent, biblically minded prayer[xvii]

 

 

Robert Murray M’Cheyne declared, “What a man is alone on his knees before God, that he is, and no more.”[xviii]

Ask yourself this morning what kind of man or women are you?

We are a country, a church that has forgotten how to pray!

 

Two years ago at a major North American seminary, fifty students who were offering themselves for overseas ministry during the summer holidays were carefully interviewed so that their suitability could be assessed.

Only three of these fifty—6 percent!—could testify to regular quiet times, times of reading the Scriptures, of devoting themselves to prayer.

It would be painful and embarrassing to uncover the prayer life of many thousands of evangelical pastors.[xix]

Where is our delight in praying?

How much of our praying is just largely formulas , peppered with clichés that remind us, uncomfortably, of the hypocrites Jesus rebuked?[xx]

I do not say these things to manipulate you or to  conjure up guilty feelings.

But what shall we /do/?

Have not many of us tried at one point or another to improve our praying, and floundered so badly that we are more discouraged than we ever were?

Do you not sense, with me, the severity of the problem?

Why is there that secret guilt in our hearts when we speak of our prayer life?

Granted that most of us know some individuals who are remarkable prayer warriors,

is it not nevertheless true that by and large we are

better at organizing than agonizing?

Better at administering than interceding?

Better at fellowship than fasting?

Better at entertainment than worship?

Better at theological articulation than spiritual adoration?

Better—God help us!—at preaching than at praying?[xxi]

If someone comes up and asks us to organize a project, its no problem but if they ask us to lead a prayer we freak out!

 

Shall we not agree with J. I. Packer when he writes, “I believe that prayer is the measure of the man, spiritually, in a way that nothing else is, so that how we pray is as important a question as we can ever face”?[xxii]

Can we profitably meet the other challenges that confront the Western church if prayer is ignored as much as it has been?[xxiii]

Our aim, then, in this series of meditations, is to examine the foundations again.