Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

How do you know you are bring productive in life?

Are the investments your making paying the right return?

There are many metrics to success.

Many of them are not contradictory.

But are the best rewards getting the right attention?

As we examine the background of this years focus passage - Luke 4:18-19 - we will gain insight into the need the world has for God, Jesus’ plan to address that need, and how the plan to implement the solution was planted in the ground of our lives.

Pray

Promise, Planting, Sprout, and Seed

What is our goal in life?

If we listen to the culture, we would get very turned around!

“Live your own truth.”

“You are what you Identify as.”

“Your purpose is inside of you.”

These are others are the mantra of the world.

But they will not set us on the path to the Kingdom of God!

They will not bridge the gap between God and man.

And worse, they will not allow us to share God’s love with the world!

As we turn back to scripture, again and again, day in and day out, we must come to this one conclusion: God is righteous and we are not.

Like stones in the field return every spring, so the Lord will continue to open our eyes to the sinfulness inside us.

He promises to remove those stones, to plant in us the words of life, to grow Himself inside us and to produce seed.

Sometimes that process feels stalled.

Sometimes we are stuck in the mud.

There are four directives scripture gives us that I’d like to call you attention to.

When we make these habitual, we will be free to be used by God.

The first two we will see in:

Desire God

“It is the time to seek the Lord.”

I don’t say this as a condemnation to you - I think as a whole we do a good job of this.

I say this as an encouragement - that we continue and that we increase our desire for God, for His presence, for His effective authority in our lives.

How can we follow His lead when our eyes are not seeking Him?

How can we imitate Him if we do not study Him? Think of the child watching their parent.

Even when we might think they are not paying attention, they are learning always.

We don’t give perfect examples, but God does for us.

This is the child-like faith that constantly pursues our God.

Don’t have a teenager like faith that thinks: “Now the student has become the teacher.”

Desiring God is the first step to moving forward with Him.

Hunt Sin

The second step is also found in verse 12 from Hos. 10.

We can not plant the things of God in a life full of sin.

To plant seed, the ground must be prepared.

Sometimes there are stones in the ground that will hinder the roots of young plants from gaining the depth and nutrients the sapling needs.

These stones are blatant sins.

Greed, anger, lust.

Rebelling against God’s standard and design; reimagining what is right based on our own standard.

These stones will reek havoc on the process of planting.

They must be removed.

We pray that God reveals them to us.

Be active and proactive about removing them.

See them as a hindrance and an enemy to our lives and to God’s plan.

But sometimes it’s not the big rocks of rebelion.

It’s the hard soil of neglect.

When we haven’t been accustom to being used by God, our lives get very set in their ways.

This is a sin of indifference to God’s plan.

Hosea implores us to break up the fallow grounds as a necessary step in participating in God’s goodness.

What dies this look like?

Maybe it means shaking up your quiet time.

If your time in prayer and God’s word has become stale (or on vacation for the last several years!) try something new!

Read through a narrative book.

(I’d suggest Ruth.)

Read through the whole book in one session if possible to get the entire narrative.

Then go back slowly asking God to speak meaning and truth in each detail.

Maybe add a devotional to you quiet time.

Or if a devotional is all you normally do, try reading the Bible without commentary.

Let the Spirit of the Lord who dwells in you give you a soft heart for the Word of the Lord.

Whether it’s an overt act of rebellion that’s pitting you against God’s goodness and righteousness or a hard heart of neglect, treat that impediment as the enemy.

Hunt.

Kill.

Destroy.

Plant the Promise

When we have expressed our desire for God’s working by removing that impediment, we must right away plant the promise in the prepared soil.

This is an ancient promise with immediate implications.

Our focus passage this year is Luke 4:18-19 where Jesus is reading from the prophet Isaiah.

The passage He is reading is Isaiah 61:1-4.

But this passage is the promised fulfillment of a previous prophecy.

“you” here is singular.

There is One who is called is the singular answer to the problem of sin and brokenness.

Is. 42 is the prophetic call.

Isaiah 61 is prophetic answer.

Isaiah tells of God’s call for a redeemer, and then tells of His future coming.

When Jesus arrives at the temple in Nazareth, He declares the He is that fulfillment of this passage!

But Jesus calls us to follow Him.

He promises that He will live in us, transforming us from this world of darkness into the His glorious light.

And so while Jesus IS the fulfilment of this promise, it’s working out is in the body of believers who are being transformed and who have removed the impediments of sin, preparing themselves to desire and be moved by God.

If Jesus is the fulfillment of Isaiah 61:1-4, and if you are in Christ, then YOU are called to fulfill this promise as well.

The world around us depends of it!

So how do we do that?

Run the Race

Desire God

Hunt Sin

Plant the Promise

Run the Race

And at the end of his ministry, Paul writes to Timothy:

What a sorrow it is that so many have panted after God then desired to do nothing for Him.

If we have gotten to this point, there are two errors that lead us astray.

The first is to see the goal is arriving at Jesus.

To be clear, our goal is always to get closer to Jesus.

But when our vision narrows to the point we can no longer see the world that He gave Himself up for, we are not indeed approaching the real Jesus.

The second danger is having gotten to Jesus, we leave Him behind and start planting a different crop.

When the service to others transplants the offering of the gospel, our seed-bag begins to change contents.