Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction to Me

Good morning.

It is an honor and a privilege to teach you guys this week.

As Willie said my name is Jared Callison.

I actually grew up here at camp.

That house right up there is where I lived for most of my life.

Now my brother Shane lives there.

So camp is kind of in my blood.

I love camp.

I don’t love doing all the work I like coming in and doing stuff like this.

This is much more my speed.

That is my wonderful wife Abby sitting over there you will get to know her better as the week goes on and we love working with teens.

I am the Pastor of Discipleship and Youth at Faith Baptist Church in Mason City just a few minutes from here.

I am a proud Father of Suzy who we adopted a little over a year ago and I am also very lucky to have the privilege to care for these two kiddos Bella and Khalifa for as long as God/the State has them in our home

(Show Pictures)

So adoption holds a special place in my heart and then Willie just starts talking about it with no heads up yesterday and It’s everything I can do to not start balling my eyes out up front.

But a couple things Willie mentioned yesterday that really stuck out to me.

He said we are adopted as Sons into the family of God.

And as he said that shows that we are not second class children in this family but rather first class.

That means so much to me because although we don’t have any other children if Abby got pregnant tomorrow that would not diminish Suzy’s place in our home for a second.

In fact, I actually have a special place in my heart for adopted children.

So we are not simply second class children we are first class.

But then Willie also said that because we are sons of God then God is our Abba, he’s our farther, he’s our Dad.

I love that because I think we have a misunderstanding of who God is and how he feels towards us.

I think we often think of God as this distanced frustrated farther.

Maybe because that’s the kind of farther you have or how God has been taught to you.

But that’s not the God of the Bible.

So Suzy has been in our home for a couple years at this point.

And for the last couple of year my wife and I have been the one taking care of her.

I’d been waking her up in the morning, feeding her breakfast, getting here ready for school, dropping her off at school, cleaning her up when she was dirty, kissing her owies, holding her when she was scared, hugging her when she was sad, reading her bedtime stories and laying with her when she couldn’t fall asleep.

Caring for her every need.

For two years I’ve been doing this for my little girl.

But for the first year she lived with us.

She called me Jared.

Which was fine.

I wasn’t her dad yet.

To her I was this wonderfully nice guy named Jared who was taking care of her.

But I was not her dad.

But about a year into her living with us something changed.

VIDEO

I can’t begin to express how much that meant to hear her call me daddy.

I was so proud.

Proud enough that I showed this video to 70 people I don’t know.

But I don’t care.

Cuz I’m her Dad.

I don’t care what you think of me.

Because that little girl calls me dad.

For a year I watched her struggle.

I watched her hurt.

I watched her cry.

And the whole time I so badly wanted her to turn to me.

To look to me as her her dad.

To look to me as the one who would care for and love her.

The one who would protect and comfort her.

And when she finally did it filled my heart with more Joy than I can express.

I think the same is true about God.

He sits in heaven and watches us make mistake after mistake after mistake.

He see’s us hurting.

He sees us crying in private when no one else can see.

He sees us running from sin to sin to sin hoping to find joy hoping to find satisfaction hoping to find hope.

But everything comes up empty.

All the while God lovingly meets our needs.

He takes care of us in millions of ways that we could never know.

But we just look to him as God.

Not Dad.

And yet here God is waiting patiently for the day when we look to him for the one who will comfort and protect us.

The one who will give us real lasting joy.

That’s my passion.

I am here this week because I want you to know and understand who God is.

I want you to realize maybe for the first time that God is not a distant farther but a loving one.

Who cares for you more than you could possibly know.

And that leads us to the text that we are going to be studying this week Psalm 23.

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I’ll explain this more tomorrow but I think it is incredibly important that we have a proper understanding of who God is and how he relates to us.

Because if we screw this up everything changes.

So we are going to spend four days in Psalm 23.

If you know the Psalm you know that there is only 6 verses in the entire Psalm.

SO we are going to spend 4 days on 6 verses.

But this is my goal this week.

I want to spend the week saturating ourselves in the truth of this Psalm.

In fact on top of studying the Psalm this week I am also challenging you to memorize the psalm as well and for the first 10 people who can quote the psalm to me I have a book on Psalm 23 that’d I’d like to give you as well.

Why do I want us to spend so much time on this Psalm this week.

(use towel cooling towel)

So often we quickly read through verses and we never take the time to let them change us.

We never take the time to just sit in them.

We splash ourselves with a little reading of God’s Word and leave unchanged.

And because we don’t see any effect on our lives from reading God’s Word we give up the practice completely.

And we are as useless to God and others as this dry cooling towel.

So we are going to do something different this week.

This week we are going to sit in Psalm 23.

We are going to soak in everything the Psalm has for until it’s truth changes who we are.

So here’s my challenge for you this week.

Memorize Psalm 23.

Read it every morning and every night.

It’s only 6 verses.

Memorize it and then every day in class we are going to dig deeper into it until it changes who we are and what we believe about God.

You see there will be a time in your life when everything around you seems to be falling apart.

When it feels like your falling and there is nothing to hold onto.

Who knows maybe someday your wife will come visit you on Friday night of Senior High Camp and tell you something that happened with your kids that makes your head spin.

And in a moment your worst nightmare because a reality.