Sermon Tone Analysis

I want to start out this morning by talking about fish.

Now, since this is church, you might well expect me to talk about the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

Or about how Jesus pointed His disciples to a great catch after their night of catching nothing.

Or maybe about being fishers of men.

Actually, though, we’re not going to talk about any of those things today.

Today, we’re going to talk about the gold-saddle goatfish.

Anybody here ever seen a gold-saddle goatfish?

Well, me neither, at least not in real life.

I saw some photos of them while I was preparing this sermon.

It seems that part of their name comes from the fact that they have a golden, saddle-shaped splotch behind their dorsal fin.

Where the “goat” part of their name comes from I cannot say.

But I think they’d probably be pretty upset if they knew we called them goatfish.

Surely if they had better PR managers, they’d be known by some name that had a bit more nobility to it.

Be that as it may, they’re gold-saddle goatfish to us and the rest of the world.

“The gold-saddle goatfish is a small fish native to Hawaiian reefs with a distinctive coloring.

[As juveniles, these fish are completely golden in color, but as they get older, blue begins to replace most of the yellow.

They’re really quite pretty, as are many fish that populate the reefs.]

“In the past few years, divers in Hawaii have come across a fascinating phenomenon.

During their regular dives, they’ve begun to notice a large fish with the same brilliant colors as the gold-saddle goatfish.

“Upon closer inspection, the divers realized this wasn’t one large fish, but in fact a school of gold saddle fish swimming together in such impressive unity and in such a perfect fish-shaped pattern as to appear like one imposingly large fish, not to be trifled with.

“It turns out, when the gold-saddle fish feels threatened, they join together, unified in fish formation to appear much larger.”

[https://thepastorsworkshop.com/sermon-illustrations-on-community/]

What I want to suggest to you this morning is that there is something for us as the church to learn from the gold-saddle goatfish, even if it DOES have such an unfortunate name.

We in the West — and perhaps especially in America — have been trained almost to idolize individuality.

We revere those people who have singlehandedly built business and financial empires.

Even the corporate names that are part of our everyday language — Amazon and Microsoft and SpaceX and the like — are associated not with the many people who have made them what they are, but with the people who founded them — Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk.

We might love certain sports teams, but our greatest praise is usually for individuals who have been part of those great teams.

Think of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Wayne Gretzky, or Tom Brady.

And then there’s golf and tennis, which take this concept of individual achievement and celebrate it without reservation.

We even do this in the church, when we celebrate names like Warren Wiersbe or Charles Stanley or Chuck Swindoll.

All of these are men whom God has used in mighty ways, and we are right to celebrate their obedience to their calling.

And we do well to think of that obedience as being a beautiful thing, much like the beauty of one of those gold-saddle goatfish.

But the truth — and I think it’s a truth that each of those great pastors would affirm — the truth is that the church is better compared to that group of gold-saddle goatfish schooling together in dangerous waters in the form of one big golden fish.

We are so much stronger together than apart that I frankly cannot fathom why Christians would ever think they can follow Christ on their own, much less want to try to do so.

Now, you’ve heard me talk about this topic several times during this series on the church.

But mostly the idea I’ve conveyed is that Christians have received spiritual gifts that were given for building up this body of believers.

And that’s absolutely true.

And in that respect, as I have said before, the church needs you, and you need the church.

But today, I want to talk about your sanctification, the process of followers of Jesus being conformed into His image, of their becoming more and more like Him — more and more holy.

As it turns out, the process of sanctification was never meant to be undertaken apart from the Church.

Indeed, I will argue today that individual sanctification CANNOT be achieved to any real extent apart from the Church.

Do you want to be more like Jesus?

If you have truly followed Jesus in faith, then the answer should certainly be, yes!

If you really want to be more like Jesus, it can hardly happen if you are not an active, participating part of His body, the church.

It is largely THROUGH this body that you will be sanctified, that you will be made to be more like Him.

And to the extent that you allow yourself to be separated from the body, you likely will find yourself losing ground on sanctification, becoming LESS like Jesus and more like the lost world.

Let me take you through my logic.

First, we need to understand that each of us who has followed Jesus in faith is being sanctified by the Holy Spirit.

Now, this is a cooperative process.

In other words, we can choose to cooperate with the Spirit, putting off the sinful deeds of the flesh to become more and more like Jesus.

Or we can choose not to cooperate, continuing in those sinful deeds.

But in the end, it is the Holy Spirit who convicts each of us of our sins and empowers us to turn from them.

The Apostle Paul thanked God for this work of the Spirit in 2 Thessalonians 2:13.

Do you see that?

He thanks God for the Thessalonians, and the REASON he is thankful for them is because they have been saved by faith in the truth, in Jesus, and because their salvation continues to be effected through sanctification of the Spirit.

There is a sense in which Christians have BEEN saved by grace through faith.

But there is also a sense in which we are BEING saved by grace through the Spirit’s work in us.

And there is a sense in which we also WILL BE saved in glory — when all temptation, all sin, and all capacity to sin is removed from us.

The truth is that too many of us who have followed Jesus in faith look at it as a transactional thing.

We put our faith in Him and in His sacrifice on our behalf at the cross, and so we are now bound for heaven.

And, while that’s true, it’s only part of the gift of salvation.

When we repent from the sins that every one of us have committed, we receive the gift of eternal life.

In Scripture, the emphasis isn’t on the eternal, but on the LIFE.

And this isn’t just the continuation of our bodies and souls for eternity.

The fact is that everyone — whether they’ve placed their faith in Jesus or not — will one day be raised from the dead and reunited with their eternal souls to live forever.

The question is WHERE they will live.

For those who have rejected Jesus, for those who have rejected the gift of eternal life through faith, what awaits them in eternity is judgment and the just penalty for their sin.

The Apostle John writes about his vision of that terrible day in the Book of Revelation.

For many of us, this is what drove us to the cross in the first place.

One of my professors called it “fire insurance.”

He said he turned to Jesus to ensure he wouldn’t go to hell.

And that’s pretty common among believers.

Much as the fear of going to prison keeps some people from robbing convenience stores, many of us first turned to Jesus because we feared going to hell.

Indeed, that’s part of what we get in salvation.

For those who have turned from their sins and put their faith in Jesus, eternal life will be spent first in heaven and then within the new heavens and new earth that Jesus will create.

But as I said, Scripture puts the emphasis on the “life” part of eternal life.

And what’s behind that word “life” has much more to do with its quality than its location.

“Life” is about being who you were created to be.

“Life” is life lived abundantly, in the presence of and in fellowship with the God who created you for those things.

And here’s the thing: If you have truly placed your faith in Jesus, your eternal life has already begun.

Your body may die, but your spirit — your soul — is already in the presence of God through His Holy Spirit, who dwells within you.

And there will never be a moment for you — not even at the moment of your death — when you will be separated from Him.

Paul talked about this at the end of that wonderful chapter 8 of the Book of Romans.

Whether in death or life, believers are always in the presence of God our Savior.

For me, these are two of the most encouraging verses in all of the Bible.

But when we consider the implications of always being in the presence of a perfectly holy and righteous God, I think these verses present a great challenge to us, as well.

How, then, should we live?

Jesus said He came to give life and to give it abundantly.

And He wasn’t speaking only of our lives in glory.

He came so that we who follow Him in faith can have the PRESENT experience of becoming who we were created to be, of being in continual fellowship with God, even in the midst of the brokenness of this lost world.

And THAT happens as we cooperate with the Holy Spirit’s work of sanctification in our lives.

But how does the Spirit sanctify us?

Well, He convicts us of sin and He chastens us when we grieve Him by continuing in sin.

We see this in Hebrews, chapter 12.

Do you see that?

If you are a Christian, and you’re not experiencing the Spirit’s chastening for your sin, then something’s wrong.

Because the discipline He gives us is for our good, so that we may share in God’s holiness — so that we may be made more like Jesus.

And so, there is, we might say, a negative aspect to the Spirit’s work of sanctification in Christians.

He disciplines us.

But there’s a positive aspect to it, as well, and this, especially, is where the church comes in.