Sermon Tone Analysis

Title:The Jesus Way

Speaker: Jonathan Bailey

Location: Four Corners Church

Plano, Texas

Date: December 30, 2007

One of my favorite seasons is fall.

I love fall.

I love when that first cold front blows in and that hot air blows out and that cold air blows in.

Do you know that feeling I'm talking about?

I love that.

One of my favorite things about fall is the leaves.

I love to watch the leaves turn colors.

You have the reds and the browns and the yellows and the oranges.

It explodes into this amazing color, and you think, “That is so beautiful.”

I just love to watch these leaves.

It's like a beautiful collage.

We live in Dallas, Texas, so our fall is not much of a fall.

My wife, Kori, went to the University of Missouri.

She tells me, “There's a real fall.

The leaves and the trees there are beautiful.”

I think about even maybe going to Central Park in New York City and standing on top of the Empire State Building and looking out at that massive park of green trees, and then watching them just explode into these beautiful colors of red, orange, yellow, and brown.

Even when I was a little kid in first grade, we would go outside and our teacher would make us do these projects where we would collect leaves.

We would take them back into our classroom, we'd set them down on a white sheet of paper, and we'd start tracing around the leaf.

Then we would take our Crayolas, and we would put two or three in our hand – our yellow and our orange and our brown – and then we would start coloring in the leaf, trying to mimic the color.

I just love leaves.

Even if you just went into my apartment two or three months ago, you would see these fall leaves decorated in these glass vases, decorated in our shelves, weaved in between our picture frames.

I love leaves.

I began to think, “What's happening to these leaves?”

They're beautiful.

Then the thought hit me: These leaves are dying.

Then the thought hit me: It's amazing how beautiful death can be.

That's what I want to talk about this morning.

I want to talk about the beauty of dying with Jesus Christ.

I want to talk about how amazing it is to give our lives to Jesus Christ, to die with Him, and ultimately, to live with Him.

When you look at that tree, it looks like it's dying, but it's not dying.

The leaves are what have to die.

So the leaves are dying, but the tree is still alive.

So you see this death is really just a natural cycle; it's just the natural process of this tree.

You have the spring and the summer and the fall and the winter.

The same thing is true for us.

As followers and disciples of Jesus, we have this picture of life and death and living and dying and rising with Jesus.

That's what I want to talk about.

That is the Jesus way.

I want to say a prayer, and then we'll launch right in to the text.

I really just want Jesus to lead us in this passage, because what He does here with the disciples is so beautiful.

It's so great the way He helps them see and rethink who He is, and then rethink their call and their mission.

Let's pray, and then we'll jump right in to it.

Jesus, we ask that You would be our teacher this morning; that You would not let me get in the way of what You want to say; that Your Spirit would forcefully impress upon all of us the beauty of dying with You and rising with You and finding a new life, life like we never knew before – that eternal life You talk about in John 3:16.

I pray that You would impress upon us the importance of going into the year 2008 on this Jesus way.

Thank You for everything You've given us in this past year, and catapult us forward to follow You in this New Year.

In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

I want to read through this scripture verse with you.

There are 11 verses.

I want to read through it so we're familiar with it, and then I want to go through it verse by verse and just take a look at it.

It says in Mark 8:27:

“Jesus went out, along with His disciples, to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way He questioned His disciples, saying to them, ‘Who do people say that I am?’

They told Him, saying, ‘John the Baptist; and others say Elijah; but others, one of the prophets.’

And He continued by questioning them, ‘But who do you say that I am?’ Peter answered and said to Him, ‘You are the Christ.’

And He warned them to tell no one about Him.

And He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders and the chief priests and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.

And He was stating the matter plainly.

And Peter took Him aside and began to rebuke Him.

But turning around and seeing His disciples, He rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind Me, Satan; for you are not setting your mind on God's interests, but man's.’

And He summoned the crowd with His disciples, and said to them, ‘If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.

For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel's will save it.

For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?

For what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

For whoever is ashamed of Me and My words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will also be ashamed of him when He comes in the glory of His Father with the holy angels.’”

It's a crazy passage of scripture.

It's one of my favorites, and it's one that I really wanted to talk with you about this morning.

We see Jesus, in verse 27, going out on a journey.

Just to give you a little context of the scripture, He just got done feeding the 5,000, which turns out to be when you count the women and the children 20,000 or 30,000 people.

So He's going up north to these villages of Caesarea Philippi.

This is on the outskirts of Palestine, so it's a place where He can get away from the crowd.

He often does this.

You read this right off the pages of the gospels when He gets in to this intense ministry with a lot of crowds and then decides to get away from people and just take a break and be alone.

This would have been a two-day journey for the disciples.

I think about how awesome that would have been, just to be on a two-day journey with Jesus, to listen to Him, to hear Him talk, to maybe listen to a parable or a teaching, to maybe ask Him some questions, or maybe He would even ask me some questions, or maybe even see a miracle.

That would have been amazing.

So He asked the disciples, “Who do the people say that I am?” Jesus has been speaking and teaching for maybe about a year or so now, so He's wanting to know, “Who are the people saying that I am?

Some say Elijah, some say John the Baptist, some say one of the other prophets.”

But then He asked the more poignant question: “Who do you say that I am? Peter, disciples, the twelve, who do you say that I am?” That's a question that is for the 1st century disciples, but that's also the question for us, the 21st century disciples.

Who do we say that Jesus is?

Many of us have been traveling a journey with Jesus for some time now.

Maybe some of us have been going for longer than others, maybe some of us are new, or maybe some of us haven't even decided to get on with the journey, but we're journeying, so that question is for all of us.

“Who do you say that I am?” Peter says to Jesus, “You are the Christ.”

Great statement.

Great answer.

But Jesus’ statement right after this is crazy.

He says, “Don’t tell anybody that.”

What?

Don't tell anybody that You're the Christ?

I thought that was the right answer.

I thought that was the thing I was supposed to say.

Don't tell anybody that You're the Christ?

That is kind of strange.

I began to think about that.

The reason Jesus didn't want the disciples telling everybody that He was the Christ is because their conception of who the Christ was, of who Jesus was, of what He came to do and the life that He came to live was totally off base.

It was totally out of whack.

So Jesus has to take this time on this journey to explain to them the true nature of the Messiah – the true nature of the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords.