Sermon Tone Analysis

This morning’s sermon is entitled “The Welcome of God”.

What does the word “welcome” mean to you?

Last summer, a Congresswoman from California, Maxine Waters, a Democrat, spoke at a political rally in Los Angeles.

When she had the crowd sufficiently riled up, she gave them her instructions.

If you want to see change, she said, you need to, in her words, “harass members of this President’s cabinet.”

She went on to say this: “The American people have put up with this president long enough.

What more do we need to see?

What more lies do we need to hear?

If you see anybody,” she said, “from that cabinet in a restaurant, at a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

And it didn’t take long before someone took Maxine Waters’ comments seriously and acted on them.

Just two days later, news broke that the then-White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was kicked out of a restaurant in suburban Virginia just outside Washington, DC.

When the restaurant owner was asked about why she made this decision, she said she was driven by “certain standards I feel we have to uphold, such as honesty, compassion, and cooperation.”

[https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/christian-hospitality-age-theyre-not-welcome-anymore-anywhere/ (accessed June 29, 2018) & https://albertmohler.com/2018/06/26/briefing-6-26-18/ (accessed June 29, 2018)]

Now, we have come to expect this kind of treatment in the world.

But too often, I’m afraid we find it in the church.

How many churches have some version of the message “welcome” maybe outside on their doors or church signs, but visitors and certain church members find that inside the church it’s a different message?

How often do churches claim to believe in a God of compassion and love and yet refuse that love and compassion to people inside the church?

I’m talking about members or visitors in that don’t talk or dress or act like them.

How many times, in other words, might we run into the trap of believing the gospel but not acting like it’s true when it comes to the actual people we encounter within these doors?

Our text this morning addresses this.

Without hesitation, God has welcomed us into His family

Without hesitation, God has welcomed us into His family.

This necessitates that we kind of reverse order of these first two phrases in verse 7. “Welcome one another, as Christ has welcomed you.”

Let’s take that second phrase first: as Christ also has welcomed you.

That’s the gospel.

Right?

Christ has welcomed you.

What does that mean?

Jesus invites us into His presence.

Why is that an amazing thing?

Because by nature we do not deserve an invitation into His presence.

By nature we deserve to be banished from His presence, as Adam and Eve were banished from the garden or as Israel was banished, exiled, from the promised land.

We do not deserve fellowship with God by nature.

Indeed, because of our sin, we are unworthy to be in His presence, and in fact unless God takes the first step toward us, we are unable to be in His presence; He would be unable to tolerate our presence.

God is holy.

We are sinful.

“Your iniquities,” thundered the prophet Isaiah, “have made a separation bertween you and your God, and your sins have hidden his face from you so that he does not year” (Isa.

5:2 ESV).

God does not want things this way, church family; but it is this way for us until we come to the place where we are willing to confess to God that we are sinners, and ask for His forgiveness, and ask for His help, and plaxe our faith in Jesus Christ our Savior and Lord.

Doing that, we find that God has laid all of our sins upon Him and He has atoned for them, made satisfaction for them, absorbed the wrath of God for them, bore the guilt of them, and carried them away, as far as the east is from the west.

Then, our sins having been dealt with by our Substitute who dealt with them for us in our place, we find that God is not to us a merciless Judge; we find Him to be more tenderhearted toward, more compassionate, more loving, more gracious and kind than we ever imagined He could possibly be; we find Him to be for us and with us, we find Him faithful.

We find Him, in fact, to be not just a good and benevolent God, but a Father - not a divine Father figure, but actually a Father to us, the Father, the Father from whom earthly fatherhood derives its essence.

We find, in other words, that God has not merely forgiven our sin, though that would be more than enough and more than we desercved; we find that God has adopted as sons and daughters; we find that He welcomes us into His family.

We call this the doctrine of divine adoption.

We are not God’s natural children.

God has one natural Son, and that is Jesus Christ.

By nature, we do not deserve and are not able to be God’s children.

We are His children by grace, through faith.

We find this in Scripture:

God forgives us and invites us into His family.

He does so without hesitation.

No questions asked.

Have you trusted in Christ as your Savior will be the only question asked.

Are your past sins too great for most people to accept and forgive you?

God accepts and forgives you beacuse of Jesus’ life and death for you, no questions asked.

Do you still struggle with the sins of the flesh now?

Your Father is not ashamed of you.

He is not disgusted with you.

He is not disappointed with you.

This is not to say that your conduct doesn’t matter, but it is to say that God’s grace is greater than your sinful behavior.

Without hesitation, God has forgiven us and adopted us.

Without hesitation, God has welcomed us into His family.

“Welcome one another…as Christ also has welcomed you.”

What a privilege!

Now, name one privilege that comes without responsibility…Being part of God’s family, being welcomed into His family, carries with it an obligation.

It lays a responsibility upon us.

That responsibility is our next point.

Without hesitation, we are called to extend that welcome to all who come into our church

Without hesitation, we are called to extend that welcome to all who come into your church.

My wife and I have a relative that we see on a somewhat regular basis.

And what’s interesting about this relative is that when we go see them, they would welcome us into their home, but they never, ever thought to actually do the things that constitute welcoming someone into your home.

What do I mean?

I mean thins like not having literally any clean towels or wash cloths.

No bedsheets.

One time there wasn’t even any food.

And what we did manage to scrape out of the fridge we had to prepare ourselves.

That’s fine with me — I’m not hard to please and I don’t mind cooking my own food.

But it’s weird, right?

“Oh yeah, we’d love to have you come and visit us....What’s that?

You need to take a shower?

Well, I hadn’t thought about that.

Here’s a hand towel I guess you could dry off with.

Don’t mind the huge stain on it.

Oh, you’re hungry?

Maybe you’ll find some cheese puffs in the pantry.

What’s that?

They’re stale?

Moldy?”

Such was our experience.

But this relative of ours has changed.

Now this person has everything we could need and more if go visit them.

And we didn’t change them ourselves - we never said a word about those visits.

What changed, then?

We think it might be that this person visited us over the years too, and saw that we always bought their favorite food and drinks for them before they came; we always had a bed already prepared with fresh sheets; always plenty of warm, good-smelling towels and washcloths.

We clean our house for this person.

Is it possible that she learned how to welcome guests because of how we welcomed her? It’s possible.

I don’t know for sure.

But you know what I do know?

I do know that when God welcomes us, He expects His welcome of to be the pattern and the standard for how we welcome others.

In this letter of Romans that we find this verse in, Paul has been writing to them talking to them about how they should treat a certain type of church member in their midst.