Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

We are beginning a new series of messages today around the topic of the questions Jesus asked.

The questions he asks in the gospels, and the questions he asks today through the Holy Spirit.

I’ve noticed this for quite sometime in my own relationship with God.

I find God regularly asking me questions…

There was one morning while I was praying, quite a number of years ago, and I was asking God to help us, as an entire church, become better at evangelism.

We had seen a few people each year make a commitment to follow Jesus with their whole life—a few people a year.

So I was praying that God would allow us to participate in more people making that kind of commitment.

And the question popped into my mind, I believe it was the Holy Spirit… “How many do you want?”

That question to my prayer began this several month journey of actually seeing this community, our church become very engaged in helping people make a commitment to reorient their lives toward following Christ.

The Holy Spirit asked me a question that reoriented me, a question that refocused and reignited a passion in our whole community towards evangelism.

That question, and a few more that followed, deeply challenged me personally, and helped us to reorient around becoming the kind of church God was inviting us to become.

In this new series of messages, I think that God wants to do something like that in each of us, and in our church community as a whole.

I long for us to get really good at hearing the questions Jesus asks of us.

And not just hearing them, but responding to them in ways that reorient our perspectives.

I want us to learn how to respond to the Holy Spirit’s questions in ways that allow us to participate in what God’s doing in our midst.

I find it fascinating that we see the very same thing in the Gospels.

The gospel that we’ve been studying through for the past several months, the gospel of Mark, was the first one written down.

In Mark, we have 67 episodes of conversations or interactions with people.

Even when you carefully count double questions as one…

“whose face is that on the coin?

Whose inscription is it printed with?”

…we have 50 questions of Jesus in 67 interactions…that’s a lot of questions, and that pattern holds throughout the gospels.

Listen to this quote from Conrad Gempf, in his book, Jesus Asked,

[SLIDE] “Jesus was a bit different from other religious teachers.

Moses wanted to tell you the Law of God.

Prophets were always telling you what the Lord was saying.

But apparently if you met Jesus on the street, he was more likely to ask you something than to tell you something.

Even when other people asked him a question, he often replied with one of his own.”

(Jesus Asked, by Conrad Gempf, p.19)

Think about this with me for a moment…[SLIDE] Why do think Jesus asked so many questions?

Here we have the incarnate God-in-the-flesh, the second person of the trinity… I think he probably already know everything!

[SLIDE] Colossians 1:15-17 “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him.

He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

There’s pretty much nothing Jesus doesn’t know, and he’s asking more questions than he is telling people what to do.

Why is that?

Jesus’ questions, as we’ll see in more detail throughout this series, are designed poke at us a bit, to force us into getting off the fence we so often find ourselves sitting on… the fence of wanting to follow Jesus but not wanting to rearrange my life to do so.

His questions don’t let us stay on the middle.

His questions force clarity about who we give allegiance to.

Jesus’ questions people to get at what’s under the surface.

His questions are designed to help us pay attention to what’s really going on inside of us, to where our motivations lie, to what we have really aligned our lives around… his questions are subtly working uncover our deepest longings and to reorient our longings towards him, because that’s actually the best thing for us!

Let me show you an example from one of the very first questions Jesus asks his disciples…

[SLIDE] What do you want?

One of the very first questions we read about Jesus asking is one that Jackson highlighted in his message last week…

In John 1, Jesus is passing by John the Baptist who is with a few of his disciples, and john, pointing at Jesus says, “Here is the lamb of God.”

And a couple of these disciples get up to follow after Jesus…

[SLIDE] John 1:38 “Turning around, Jesus saw them following and asked, “What do you want?”

They said, “Rabbi” (which means “Teacher”), “where are you staying?””

Turns out, Jesus asks this specific question more than a few times…

Jesus asked a couple of blind men following him… [SLIDE] Matthew 20:32 “Jesus stopped and called them.

“What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.”

Jesus asked James and John as they were jostling for position… [SLIDE] Mark 10:36 “What do you want me to do for you?” he asked.”

Jesus asked Bartimaeus, a blind beggar on the side of the road… [SLIDE] Mark 10:51 “What do you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked him.

To be honest, we mostly expect our leaders, our teachers, our experts to tell us what to do, rather than ask us what we want… AmIRight!?

Doc, just tell me what to do so that I don’t have this pain anymore…

To our therapist, just tell me how to not feel stressed all the time

…but when they tell us what we don’t want to hear, then it’s just “fake news”?

I think this is exactly why Jesus asks the question he does…

I think this “What do you want?” question is at the heart of every single thing God asks us… it might be the question underneath every question…

Listen to this from Curt Thompson, MD, in a book called, The Soul of Desire, Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community

[SLIDE] “To consider and answer Jesus’ question in John 1:38 “What do you want?” is a life-altering practice, for it opens our minds to the reality that Jesus is keenly interested in what we want—our desire.

In fact, that question lies at the center of the triune God in whose image we have been made.”

I’m inviting us into the life-altering practice of considering the what-do-you-want?

question, which lies at the center of everything…

[SLIDE] “Jesus’ question eventually draws our attention to our deep longing to be known for the purpose of creating beauty in the world, in whose very places—our politics, our ethnic identities, our painful marriages, our sexual encounters, our histories of interpersonal and social abuse—where it might seem impossible to imagine it could emerge.”

Dr Thompson is highlighting, just as Jesus does over and over again, that we are not just on this planet to pay our bills and spend our weekends in search of psudo-life-changing-experiences.

There has never been a life more stunningly beautiful than Jesus’ life—it’s why it’s still being talked about some two-thousand years later—and we are invited into, we are created for the purpose of creating this same kind of beauty.

And we are meant to live this beauty into all of the seemingly impossible places of our world.

And somehow, the what-do-you-want question is at the heart of it all

[SLIDE] “You might be suspicious that desire has much good to offer us, considering how often our desire can go awry—how often we move from desiring to devouring the very beauty for which we so hunger and thirst.”

that phrase is a gut-punch, isn’t it?

“…how often we move from desiring to devouring the very beauty for which we so hunger and thirst.”

Our desires, our “wanters”—are broken.

We constantly find our desires aimed in hurtful or painful directions.

And so it’s natural for us to distrust any of our desires…even to the point of ignoring Jesus’ What-Do-You-Want? question.

“How could what I want to be helpful at all? Jesus, just tell me what you want!”

To which I hear Jesus responding, “What do you want?”

[SLIDE] “I invite you to join me and to discover and acknowledge that you are a person of deep desire.

You desire to be known in the deepest recesses of your story so that you will be liberated to become an outpost of the new creation—of beauty and goodness—even as you create that same beauty and goodness in yourself, as you practice the kingdom of God that is here and is surely coming.”

(The Soul of Desire, Discovering the Neuroscience of Longing, Beauty, and Community, by Curt Thompson, MD, p.5–7)

This right here is the ongoing invitation of the Kingdom of God.

This is the invitation to the Vineyard community.

This is what we’re about.

Our lives, our lives together, our Vineyard church community is an outpost of God’s kingdom, an outpost of the new creation—still imperfect, yet always being developed under the leadership of the Holy Spirit—an outpost of beauty and goodness as we practice participating with all God is doing in our lives and in the community around us.

[SLIDE] We are people of desire

Saint Augustine once wrote, “The whole life of the good Christian is a holy longing….”

We want things.

We long for things.

This yearning is part-and-parcel of what it means to be human.

We begin at birth with desires for breath, warmth, nourishment, security.

Before we are thinking creatures, we are desiring and habit-forming creatures.

While we’re full of desire, we don’t desire just anything.

We aren’t interested in the unexciting or the painful.

We don’t long to get covid of the flu.

We don’t desire to feel more shame at the end of the day.

Or live unseen, meaningless lives.

Rather, we long for a world of goodness and beauty, of biblical justice, of putting the world back to right—a world governed by kindness and honesty.

We long for deep connections with friends, where the fabric of our relationships can withstand the rigors of real life.

We want to engage in work that is meaningful and where we find ourselves growing as we help to make the world a better place.