Sermon Tone Analysis

Wow, that's today's sermon.

How'd you guys know?

You laugh.

I'm telling you you're going to think we really planned the words and everything out.

It's an understatement to say, This has been an emotional week.

For the family for me.

Everyone involved.

Last August.

I was planning this message for this week.

You know, it's beautiful.

God knows exactly what we need to hear.

When we need to hear it.

Unless you think that a sermon on peace is due to current events, I reassure you, it is solely due to a sovereign, God, who knows and loves his people.

The God of Peace.

Paul said in Philippians, "be anxious for nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication with Thanksgiving, let your requests be made known of the God, and the peace of God, which passes all understanding will keep your hearts and Minds in Christ Jesus."

We know that, we rehearse that, we claimed that.

Humanly speaking, we all struggle with that.

Rick Rude in chapter 6 in the book, "When Suffering is Redemptive," the book that I suggested might be a good reading this month as we explore, the idea of Redemptive suffering.

What is it God teaches?

What purpose does God have?

As a sovereign God, who is an all-powerful God, What possibly could he have in store for us through suffering?

The whole book is 6 or 7 different testimonies of people who've gone through great suffering, some of which is suffering that is far beyond anything you and I would face or at least in part we only face, although some of us may face them very clearly.

And what God taught them through it--- Redemptive suffering.

Rick Rude in this chapter 6 of the book "When Suffering is Redemptive," asked the rhetorical question, "If God loves me, why has he allowed me to suffer in the ways I have?"

Through the experience of great loss at a time

that is typically the prime of life for a young couple, preparing for Ministry, he came to understand, as he put it, "It's in the Crucible [The Melting Pot] of affliction that our faith is tested.

But it's also in the Crucible of affliction that God's faithfulness is proven."

Page 103.

Later he noted on page 113, "Affliction has a way of forcing us to deal with our hearts.

It is to shake us out of the place that we are normally are comfortable being,

in the surroundings of life that we have put in place as safety nets,

so that we might realize that there's only one true safe place.

That is in the care of our heavenly father.

It's wonderful to be taught by the Lord through his word and life's experiences.

Let me give you the big idea for today.

God, always provides what we need, according to his eternal promise, when we most need it, when it benefits us most, and points most clearly to His glory.

He always provides what we need according to his eternal promise, when we most need it, when it benefits us most, and points most clearly to His glory.

We'll come back to that.

The book of Hebrews, Hebrews chapter 13, is where we'll be today, if you're not there and would like to turn and follow along.

Hebrews chapter 13.

The book of Hebrews was written primarily to help the Jewish Christians see the picture that Judaism painted of the work that Christ had accomplished, and then help them realize how it now changes their relationship with God, with each other, even with the world around them.

Their relationship with the Lord through Christ was now personal rather than National.

They were now a part of a spiritual family rather than a physical one.

And they now had the sinless and perfect God in the flesh as their high priest, rather than (as it often was) a corrupt one.

The book was meant to help them realize the conduct of their relationship with God was always meant to be faith in God's Eternal promise, not in the observances of The Law or in rights and traditions.

As such, the book was meant to bring God's people peace and rest.

In fact, if we had to boil down the entire topic of the book of Hebrews for the Jewish believers, it would be that God through Christ has finally brought to his people,

peace and rest.

And it's now yours.

Matthew 11:28 through 30, certainly that's Christ's intent, right?

"Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest, take my yoke upon you and learn from me for a gentle and humble in heart and you shall find rest for your souls, for my yoke is easy easy...," to pull.

Really?

What you want me to do, all these things in my life; and you want me to trust you wholly and completely in; and you don't want me to doubt; and you want me to live righteously and do righteous things.

It seems like there's just one list after another.

That was the Jews' focus.

Hebrews was meant to free us,

because truly, "[His] yoke is easy."

This load, this burden, what we carry, is not meant to be heavy.

It's meant to be freeing.

Having brought all of this in the focus for the believing Jews, the author (we really don't know who he is) then wrote a benediction, a closing prayer to wrap things up for the Jewish believers.

Both a Petition of the Lord and a comfort for Jewish people, believers who by this time, were facing tremendous challenges from both the Romans and the Jews for their faith in Jesus Christ.

It was to be a benediction that would ease the burden of both their spiritual, as well as their physical lives.

It's a benediction that explains who this God is that always provides what we need, when we most need it, when it benefits us most, and points most clearly to His glory.

If you will, come with me to book of Hebrews 13:20.

I'm just going to hit two verses today, so we can see first and foremost, God is what we need.

God is what you need.

Verse one.

"Now, the God of Peace Who brought up from the dead, the great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the Eternal Covenant, even Jesus our Lord..."

Let's stop here.

We'll reread that again as we come into verse 21, so that we understand the sentence, but that verse gives us an awful lot of understanding about who God is.

It explains to the Jewish people, once and for all, through a perfect sacrifice, a sufficient, eternal sacrifice of shed blood, one that's is different than all the Old Testament combined, one that can, in a sense, bring them to a point of peace.

Finally,

it's now theirs.

There's no other religion apart from the Bible, no other God, that is like the God of the Bible, the Creator and sustainer of all things, both material and immaterial.

All things exist because he brought them into and sustains their existence by his mere will and word.

There is a simple harmonic wave in the pond of Creation's existence, that disturbs the tranquillity of God's relationship with creation, that peace that existed at the moment of the last thing created on day 6,

including all of humanity.

There's now this harmonic.

I don't know if you've ever had something in your car that you've hit.

That was a large object that you hit hard and fast.

And you think, oh no, you have a flat tire.

You don't have a blowout.

And then a few months down down the road, you you start feeling this shimmy in your in your steering wheel and then a little bit more down the road it starts making these vibrations sound and you realized, "Hey, I've got a big lump in my tire."

It's a, it's a harmonic that gets created, it's a spot in there, that as you go down the road, it just keeps beating that spot.

It's causing a harmonica that roughs it up and build it up to the point where it begins to bubble and form.

That is what sin is doing to Creation.

The Bible tells us that sin has a course that it's on.

It's a harmonic ripple from a rock being thrown in to the pond of God's peace.

That glass that was once their, the beauty that once existed there and that ripple is going out and it's increasingly de-harmonizing or disturbing the harmony that God created.

Now, through Christ in Hebrews, God's desire is to bring peace back.

True relationship with Jesus Christ, so that He might begin to still the waters of creation

and bring it back to peace.

You hardly can live a day without realizing or sensing the harmonic of sin.

Needs are realized.

Fears, even as an infant, are experienced.

and in short order, the film

God is not the god of the school.

He's the God of Peace.

And God wants to come in to insert relationally into this creation that has been discarded with sin.

He wants to bring it back to peace.