Sermon Tone Analysis
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When was the last time you cried about someone else?
I don’t mean crying over someone’s death.
I mean crying because you have come face to face with someone’s sin and it feels like you have been kicked in the gut.
9 years ago, I heard that a hero of mine admitted to adultery and then a year later was accused of sexual abuse of a young adult.
I felt like I was kicked in the gut.
His ministry caved in and he was kicked out of his church.
Many people in the Southern Baptist denomination are experiencing this feeling.
There are a lot of tears.
A lot of questions.
Many people are leaving the faith because of allegations against prominent pastors.
Allegations which are overwhelmingly true.
Unfortunately, we are all human.
We all have the ability to sin.
And we all are placed in situations where sin is so easy, and sometimes sin is very attractive.
In the situation of my hero, and the situation of these Southern Baptist pastors, men were placed on a pedestal.
They were removed from accountability.
When we as humans are placed on a pedestal and removed from accountability, we forget how we are called to live.
If you sit with me in Membership Class, you will hear me say that Calvary Bible Church does not have a hierarchy.
I am not above you all.
I need you to hold me accountable, and you need me and each other to hold you accountable.
God has placed us together as a church to help each other live this life of following Christ, fighting the sin that so easily entangles us.
When a pastor is removed from accountability, bad things happen.
In addition, when a church stops holding each other accountable, when we stop feeling that gut punch about someone’s sin, bad things happen.
The Corinthian church had forgotten who they were, how Paul had described them back at the very beginning of his letter:
The Corinthians, along with all of us, were called to be holy, even as God is holy.
But, they were not living that way.
Let’s see what Paul says:
God calls his church to holiness.
He wants us to be set apart from the wickedness around us.
So that those outside can see something different, they can see God through us.
Calvary Bible Church.
Let us be holy.
Pray
Two weeks ago, we talked about discipline.
We said that Spiritual leaders, in addition to fathers, must discipline ungodliness, but we must do it from sincerity, out of love.
Paul outlines that disciple as three steps.
Because of the holiness that we are supposed to have, here are three steps to take when there is sin in our midst.
God calls us to holiness, so we mourn
Paul writes:
Culture of sin
The American church, steeped in our society of freedom, have become very flippant towards sin.
We live among, and we have become calloused to it.
So that, people who go to church, who claim to be followers of Jesus Christ, have started living like the world around, because it is what is normal.
In a world that says pre-marital sex is okay, people will start embrace that reality, and pretty soon, pastors and priests will start living that too.
Our culture and the struggles in our churches are very similar to the days of Corinth.
If you remember how I described the city of Corinth on the very first Sunday in this book:
The temple of Aphrodite employed one thousand prostitutes.
Immorality was so engrained in what people thought of Corinth that Greek literature began to coin phrase about it.
Plato would refer to a prostitute, no matter where she was, by the phrase “Corinthian girl.”
Another writer used the phrase: Doing Corinth for fornication.
This city was destroyed by Rome and was later rebuilt by Julius Caesar.
It became of place of cultural and religious pluralism.
Everything was okay there.
We don’t have any evidence of the temples of Apollos or Aphrodite being rebuilt.
However, we know the worship of Aphrodite continued in shrines scattered throughout the city.
Immorality was exulted, along with all sorts of other sins.
The Corinth of Paul’s day was basically New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas all rolled into one.
It wasn’t a nice place to live.
This was not a good place to live.
You were not expected to be faithful to your wife.
In fact, you were regularly expected to visit the prostitutes and have a girl friend on the side, in addition to your wife.
We could talk about other sins.
But, we won’t yet.
The Corinthian church should have been struggling against their culture, fighting the sin, convincing people to change their ways.
But, instead, they decided that we have freedom in Christ, therefore, we must boast in our freedom.
So, they boasted.
Instead of mourning over sin, they boasted.
It got to the point that a man started sleeping with his step-mom.
And not just once, but the grammar here says that it was a standing arrangement.
They had a continued sexual relationship.
Everyone knew about it in church.
Everyone knew about it in Corinth.
Everyone knew about it in the surrounding area.
Everyone was shocked.
Except for the people going to the Corinthian church and the guy and gal.
They all were boasting about their freedom, their inclusion, their love.
They should have felt like they were kicked in the gut, and fallen on their face before the holy God, crying in pain that such sin was in their midst.
We should sympathize.
Because, we live in America.
And so often, sin is in our midst.
Purpose of mourning
What is the purpose of the mourning?
The mourning reminds us and the person who sinned the seriousness of their actions, it shows those who are looking at us that we detest sin, and it protects us from following in their footsteps.
I think about Ezra.
The people of Israel were slowly coming back to Israel after their exile in Babylon.
Unfortunately, they had adopted many of the sinful practices of the nations around.
A contributing factor of this was the intermarriage between the Israelites and the nations around.
Unfortunately, whenever someone who is a follower of God marries someone who is not, more often than not, the one who is a follower of God will begin to change and stop following God.
Ezra heard about these practices:
He started to pray, out loud, in front of these people who gathered, confessing the sins of the people and weeping.
This session of mourning deeply over sin started a revival in Israel, where people turned from their sins.
The nation actually sent representatives to make a covenant before God.
It all started when Ezra and then a group of people mourned over the sin in their midst.
The response is not anger.
It is not hatred.
It is mourning, because we realize the weight of the sin and we realize the result of the sin.
Our heart breaks because of the pain that has been caused and the brokenness in the future.
What to mourn over
What are we to mourn over?
Paul in this passage has several lists of sins.
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