Sermon Tone Analysis

I have noticed: we live in a very all or nothing society.

People tend to be very passionate about something, or they are completely indifferent.

For example, take politics.

In my experience, there are three types of people - two of them are extreme - pick a politician and one says they are exactly what our country needs and the other says they are the worst thing to ever happen.

The third person doesn’t want to talk about it.

Pick any issue - it doesn’t need to be political, necessarily - and you will find that most people, if they have an opinion, have extremely strong opinions about it - it’s the most important thing ever!!! Or, they don’t care.

Pick a celebrity - whether an actor or a singer or an athlete - and opinions seem to be limited to "great”, “terrible/overrated” - and the third person says: I don’t watch movies/sports.

Or even just talk about the weather - like today’s weather.

There are those who love the heat.

There are those who hate the heat.

And then there are the shoulder-shruggers in the middle who could take it or leave it.

But I’ve never met someone passionately in the middle of anything.

Because that is just human nature.

If we care, we tend toward extremes.

Extremes are more conducive to passion, to excitement - they move us to action.

Or, we really don’t care.

Well I wonder: how does this affect how we live the Christian life?

Do unhealthy extremes, or passive indifference, affect how we carry out our mission as the church?

Well, have you ever heard the expression that Christians are “in the world but not of the world?”

The idea, of course, is that we are here in the world because we have a mission in the world - we are to proclaim the Gospel and make disciples so that God’s presence will spread to the ends of the earth.

So to do that, we have to be in the world.

But not being of the world means that we do not live according to worldly wisdom or wordly ways.

It means that we ourselves are disciples of Christ who have repented - who have changed our whole lives to conform to Christ.

It means that we have the Holy Spirit in us - which means we have the very presence and power of God with us - so we can live lives of holiness.

But in how we - Christians - live this out in practice - in how we live in the world but not of the world - we tend either to extremes, or indifference.

We tend to live our lives on one side of this.

We either live in the world OR we live not of the world.

And for those who only live in the world, we tend to wind up living of the world.

For those who live not of the world, we tend to wind up living not in the world.

For others, while we would never shrug our shoulders and say we don’t care - the fact of the matter is that we are indifferent.

I can go either way.

And so I do.

Sometimes I live in and of the world, other times, I live not of the world.

But we are called to live in the world, but not of the world, all the time.

We are called to passionately live out both, while never going to one extreme or the other.

And in our passage today, we’ll see Jesus pray that we do just that.

This passage is part of Jesus’s “High Priestly Prayer” from John chapter 17.

This is the night before the crucifixion - mere hours away from Jesus’s arrest.

Jesus has told His disciples that He is about to win victory over sin, death, and the devil.

He has told them that He is then going away, but will come to them by His Holy Spirit, that they may continue the work of the Gospel and bear fruit.

He has also spent a good amount of time explaining to them that the world hates them.

That the world is going to persecute them.

But He finishes by telling them that through His work, He is going to overcome the world.

And then, Jesus prays to the Father on their - and our - behalf.

Our passage today is part of that prayer.

And note, He is praying to the Father that He would work in and through these disciples and all that will believe.

Once again, we see that this is God’s work.

And the reason we need God to work this in us and through us, is because we are here - in the world that hates us and will persecute us - in order to bring it the Gospel of repentance and forgiveness of sins - while never living like the world.

We are in the world, but not of the world.

And that is what Jesus addresses in this part of His prayer.

We are going to see four points that Christ makes in this prayer about what it means to be in the world, but not of the world.

First, and this may seem like it goes without saying, but it doesn’t:

We are in the world to be in the world:

You have likely heard me say, there is a reason that God does not just bring us up to heaven the moment we believe.

It’s because our faith is not about us.

It’s about Jesus.

That’s why He doesn’t want us out of the world.

We are here for a purpose.

We are here because the world needs to know Jesus.

We are here for all of the things we have seen throughout this series.

We are here to proclaim the Gospel - to proclaim repentance and the forgiveness of sins.

We are here to make disciples.

We are here to spread God’s presence over the whole world - to the end of the earth.

And to do this, we need to be in the world.

And while it is also true that we are here to build each other up and help each other grow in holiness and to serve each other - and that is so very important - but we are supposed to do all of that - and need to do all of that - so that we can as the church carry out our mission in the world.

And here is where we need to avoid extremes.

Because if we tend towards the “not of the world” side of the equation, we can very easily wind up removing ourselves from the world.

We think we have to avoid worldly situations - and worse: worldly people - because we are not of the world.

But Jesus prays to the Father and clarifies that He is not praying that we would be taken out of the world.

He wants us in the world.

But we can be so concerned with our own holiness - and each other’s holiness - that we take ourselves out of the world to avoid sin.

Instead of relying on God to keep us from the evil one - to guard us from or preserve us through the temptations of the devil, which is what this means - we just keep ourselves from those temptations by avoiding them altogether.

My fundamentalist background - plenty of rules Christians followed

You don’t drink, don’t smoke, don’t get tattoos, don’t listen to secular music - men don’t get their ears pierced or grow their hair because that’s for women - women shouldn’t wear pants, that’s for men.

And you do not associate with sinners.

Why?

Because associating with sinners can ruin your testimony.

That is going to the extreme “not of the world” to the point that we were not in the world.

And this is not uncommon.

Fundamentalists in room 8 joke

We laugh, but if we’re not careful, this kind of thinking subtly creeps in to our minds and our church.

And we start to think with an “us” vs. “them” mentality when it comes to the unsaved.

And before you know it, we separate ourselves from the very people we’re sent to.

The Christian bubble - can’t put ourselves in heaven before God does - we are in the world to be in the world

Sometimes, our area is discouraging because it is so un-Christian - but we have more opportunity!

We cannot take ourselves out of the world.

What we need to do, is grow in our faith so that we are protected from the temptations of the devil while in the world.

This is the process of sanctification - being made holy.

Because we need to realize - sin doesn’t come from without.

It comes from within.

That’s why Jesus prayed that we would be in the world, but not of the world.

That our opportunities to be a witness would not be taken away, but that the Spirit would keep us from falling into sin like the world around us.

So we can’t separate ourselves from the world.

In fact, we need to seize every opportunity to be in the world - to be where there are unbelievers.

God is placing us in these situations so that we can be a witness.

Martin Luther on the visit of the Shepherds.

What was their reaction to seeing the Savior the Angel told them about?

The shepherds worked.

They had a mean job watching their flocks by night, but after seeing the babe they went back.

Surely that must be wrong.