Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

When a preacher gets to a familiar text that the congregation would know well, it is tempting to preach it in a new way.

And so, suddenly the focus changes from the main point of a text to some minute detail in the text.

I hope I haven’t done that this morning.

I hope and pray that I am faithful to Luke’s message in these two verses.

And let me say upfront that yes, this is a great passage to prove the Trinity as we have the Father Speaking, the Son being baptized, and the Spirit descending all at the same time, but that is not the main point of the text.

The main point of the text is to help us to see who Jesus was.

The point of the text is to bear witness as to Jesus’s identity.

And it is shown through three acts of the Trinity—though the focus is not on the proof of the Trinity.

Those three acts are first: The Son Praying.

Secondly, the Spirit Descending.

Finally, the Father Speaking.

I want to speak at length on the first point, and just say a few words on the other two.

The Son Praying

The Spirit Descending

The Father Speaking

The Son Praying

When I was translating the passage for this week, I noticed something in the text that gave me pause.

That’s one of the great advantages of translating a text.

It slows you down.

You read each word carefully.

It’s nearly impossible to just glance over a text when you’re reading it in a different language.

And what I noticed in this text was that Luke was nearly passive when it regarded Jesus’s baptism and Luke’s emphasis on Jesus’s praying.

It was not that Luke skipped over Jesus’ baptism.

Clearly he didn’t.

But notice how he wrote it.

Luke 3:21 (ESV)

Now when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized. . .

That is literally passive.

A passive verb is when the subject receives the action.

Johnny was hit by the ball.

John is the subject and he received the action: was hit by the ball.

We get Luke’s account of Jesus’s baptism in fourteen words in English; it took up eleven words in Greek.

Luke doesn’t even point out that John was the one baptizing him.

Matthew’s account of just the baptism take sup three and a half verses.

Mark was only a verse and a half, but it took 26 words.

Both Matthew and Mark give details that Luke ignores because Luke, while inform us that Jesus was baptized (passive), was not interested in the details of the baptism itself.

He was interested in the details following the baptism.

In the Greek, it literally says, “And it happened—when all the people were baptized, and when Jesus also had been baptized—while he was praying, heaven opened.”

The part about the baptism is background.

Luke wanted us to focus on what came afterward.

So the first thing I noticed was that Luke’s account of the baptism was passive; it wasn’t as important as Matthew or Mark’s accounts.

Yet I also noticed what I had never seen before.

Let’s see if you see it.

Luke is the only gospel writer to mention Jesus’s praying.

Incidentally, John didn’t mention it either.

Luke was a huge proponent of prayer.

He wrote more on Jesus’s prayer-life than Matthew, Mark, or John!

He did not just give lip-service to prayer.

As I was studying this text this week, I was brought under such conviction about my prayer-life.

As I was studying this passage, I came to see that my prayer-life is woefully lacking.

I, more than anything, give lip-service to prayer.

Before studying for this sermon, I would tell you that prayer is an important aspect of the Christian life.

I might even use the word “vital” to the Christian life.

But probably like most of you, I have had seasons of prayerlessness.

I’ve had moments when I’ve struggled to pray, struggled with wanting to pray.

The longer I go without praying, the harder it becomes to pray.

I’ve grown bored with prayer.

I have grown stale in my prayers.

I’d say that prayer is important, even vital, but in my heart I’d have my doubts.

In my life, I could go days without any real prayer time.

And I came across this text.

And I began asking the question about how heaven opening fit in with the praying aspect.

The word “opened” is an infinitive verb.

We often use the word “to” in front of the verb to show an infinitive.

“To open.”

In Greek it could read “praying to open.”

So I was asking how these words worked together.

Was heaven opened as a result of Jesus’s prayer?

Was Jesus praying with the purpose of opening heaven?

I read pretty much any commentary I could get my hands on.

I went to Bruce and asked his opinion.

I read exegetical works and consulted my Greek texts from school.

And in the end, I came to the conclusion that heaven opening was neither the purpose of Jesus’s prayer nor the result of Jesus’s prayer.

But rather correlated with Jesus’s prayer.

You may have heard someone mark the difference between causation and correlation.

One thing may cause another thing to occur.

However, if one cannot find that A causes B, but that A and B continually happen at the same time, then they are related.

There is a correlation between them.

And that is what I found to be true here.

I cannot say that Jesus’s prayer caused heaven to open.

But it is correlated to it.

In essence, there is a correlation between praying and God’s doing miraculous work.

And it is that which Luke seems to want Theophilus and us to see.

“And it happened, while Jesus was praying heaven opened...”

Jesus was praying and about to reveal to them who he really was and what he was about to do.

Jesus was praying and was then transfigured.

Luke, also having written acts, shows that it was not just Jesus’s praying that was correlated with God’s miraculous movement, but also those who followed him.

Spurgeon pointed out, in one of his sermons, that the disciples never asked Jesus to teach them to teach even though he taught as one with authority and not as the scribes and pharisees.

They never asked him to preach though he preached some of the most famous sermons ever recorded.

They never asked him to teach them to heal though thousands were healed by his ministry.

What astounded them the most, and what they really wanted to learn from him is how to pray.

Why?

Because prayer cannot be disassociated from the others.

In Luke 7:12, we read Jesus went up into the mountain to pray and then selected his disciples.

Certainly I believe he prayed about who to have as his 12, but in verse 17, he is coming down the mountain and preaching the sermon on the plain; verses 13-16 are just the naming of the disciples!

When his disciples could not cast out demons from a young man, and Jesus did, they asked why.

And Jesus told them it could only be done through fasting and prayer.

Beloved if you want to see the heavens opened, then pray.

Not literally.