Sermon Tone Analysis

Sermon on Genesis 11:1-9

Title:  Babbling Babelites?

No Problem.

Theme:  God confuses the languages of the earth to win over the whole earth by the work of his Holy Spirit.

Goal:  to encourage Christians to live in the scope of the worldwide work of the Holy Spirit.

Need:  Christians often fall quickly into the MEful PRIDEful side of what the Holy Spirit is doing.

Outline:

Introduction

1.

The Babelites thought they could tower up to the level of deity.

2.      The Babelites stood in the way of the worldwide plan of God.

3.      The Babelites language is confused to send them.

4.      The Holy Spirit sends us to gather in all those who need to know Christ.

Conclusion:  the Holy Spirit is all about God and what his plan is in the world.

Sermon:

 

          We only get one life.

This isn’t a trial run or a practice heat.

We get one life.

We get one set of successive moments of life until we die.

We get one chance before we are raised again to stand before Christ.

The one who will judge the living and dead.

We get one chance, and it is a good thing we are saved entirely by our faith through the grace of Jesus Christ.

I don’t think I need to convince anyone that we are all saved sinners, but perhaps we don’t always think about how we are participants in something very disturbing called corporate sin.

Corporate, not as in ENRON or BIG BANK corporate sin.

Corporate as in many people altogether creating a system that runs in a sinful direction or is based on sinful principles.

In our country we are part of corporate sin.

Late term abortion.

Legal in Canada.

Paid for by OHIP.

By paying our taxes we contributed to the funding of a healthy 9 month old fetus’ life being taken.

That’s part of what our tax money did this year.

That would be corporate sin and we have all participated.

The community of believers that gather together for worship here are not immune to corporate sin as well.

For one, I know we sometimes treat this building like it’s a Holy Spirit warehouse.

A humongous warehouse.

You can come here.

You can grab the Holy Spirit here and use it for worship here.

In this building you can be inspired to use the special gifts and talents that the Holy Spirit has given you.

It’s from right here inside this building that we can look out at the other Christian churches around and scoff because our Holy Spirit warehouse is bigger and newer than anyone else’s.

Even if we feel empowered by the Holy Spirit, we often are corporately responsible for being a church that thrives on programs while sinfully ignoring what Christ said, not to the church but to every Christ.

Go to every place and make disciples, teach them Jesus and to live his way.

Is it possible that we have taken pride in settling down?

Do you feel it to?

Have we grown comfortable and set up our towering Holy Spirit warehouse?

Have we ever banked on the success of our church to somehow bring us up to the level of godliness that we can confidently stride into heaven?

When we think that way we are falling into the same corporately sinful behaviour as the residents of Babel.

The Babelites.

The Babelites settle.

They build up internally and completely disregard the worldwide plan of God.

Like us they build up internally and sinful ignore the worldwide plan of God.

Even already here, God’s mind was on the whole world.

How do we know that, its because God said so from the very beginning.

To Adam and Eve he said, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.

*The plan of God from the very beginning was to fill the earth with people that would praise his name and obey him.*

The reason God destroyed everything with the flood was because that didn’t happen.

IN Genesis 6:13 God tells Noah that he is going to destroy everyone with a flood because the earth is full.

But not of righteous people.

The earth is full of violence it says.

So God clears the earth with the flood and as Noah and his family climb out of the ark, God says to them exactly what he told Adam and Eve.

He starts his plan over again!

FILL THE EARTH!!  FILL THE EARTH!!  GO!! FILL THE EARTH WITH PEOPLE THAT OBEY!  That’s in Genesis 9:1

 

          But the plan of God has once again run up against the incompetence of humanity.

Verse 11Now the whole world had one language and a common speech.

2As men moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there.

Settled:  In that you can hear it.

They stopped filling the earth.

They settled.

They retired there.

Keep going verse 3.  We find out more about this corporate rebellion of the Babelites.

3They said to each other, “Come, let’s make bricks and bake them thoroughly.”

They used brick instead of stone, and tar for mortar.”

Any masons people who work in masonry don’t feel bad.

Its not a sin to use bricks and mortar.

But its important in the story of the Babbling Babelites because they started using less sturdy manufactured materials for this building.

In your face God.

We can make our own building supplies.

And to sum up the rebellion in verse four they say:4Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.”

God said fill the earth.

But we are much more comfortable sticking together.

We really value our fellowship.

We are like minded.

We all speak the same language.

And we are good enough together that we might just be able to build a tower up to heaven and tell God a thing or two.

Sinful.

Corporate.

Pride.

That’s the big problem in the passage.

This sinful pride.

It happens to be a massive failure of the entire people of Babel.

But this story about the origin of all the different languages and people of the world has been told over and over again to remind us of something amazing about our God.

What we hear about our God is so much more than he doesn’t like prideful people.

What we ought to hear is that in all God’s goodness all parts of his gracious plan will happen.

God makes plans and then he follows through on them.

In the case of the Babelites, God has some correction to do.

The Israelites must have laughed as this story.

The you see the people who built towers like this one at Babel were the people that they considered there enemies.

The Babylonians built these towers in Holy Places to show their might and strength.

And here the Israelites find out that the biggest tower ever built by these ancient people God had to come down to look at.

Verse 5-6 tell it like this:  5But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building.

6The Lord said, “If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.

7Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.”