Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
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Disgust
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Fear
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Joy
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Sadness
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Language Tone
Analytical
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Confident
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Tentative
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Social Tone
Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Agreeableness
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Emotional Range
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Tone of specific sentences
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Anger
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Paul looks in the mirror and says, “I don’t know this man.”
Stunning admission or cop-out?
The evidence for cop-out grows throughout Romans 7, “It’s not me; it’s sin living in me,” almost giving us a Pauline, “It wasn’t me; it was the one-armed man.”
One could look at these verses and just see hand-wringing pusillanimity.
“C’mon, Paul! Don’t give us excuses.
Don’t give us this, ‘I don’t know what’s going on’ business.”
You don’t accept that from co-workers or children, do you?
“How did this get broken?”
“I don’t know.”
Unacceptable.
“Where’s that report?” “Yeah, well, you see, I don’t really know what happened.”
Unacceptable.
Yet Paul doesn’t stop with, “I don’t know this man or his behavior.”
His words lead to confession, not excusing or explaining away.
By saying, “I don’t understand what I do,” Paul confesses that he shouldn’t be doing these things, because, as Paul just explained in Romans 6, and says repeatedly in Romans 7, this isn’t who he is.
He doesn’t want to do these things.
He wants to do good.
“In my inner being I delight in God’s law.”
Which, according to Paul naturally results in doing God’s law.
Yet it doesn’t.
“For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do….I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out.
For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do – this I keep on doing.”
It’s so easy, you say.
“You want to do good, do good!”
You want to eat this meal, eat it.
You want to read this book, read it.
Except it’s not that easy, is it?
I have a desire to eat this, but don’t always.
Why?
Either I’m too lazy, or I don’t have the time, ingredients, or money.
I want to read this book, but I don’t because I don’t have it, or I can’t keep my eyes open, or there’s something else to do and before you know it break time’s over or it’s bedtime.
Other factors influence behavior.
Ours and Paul’s.
If it were up to him alone, he would do the good.
But it’s not, because sin lives with him.
Sin lives in him.
“Evil is right there with me.”
A law goes to work on his body parts “waging war against the law of my mind…making me a prisoner of the law of sin.”
This factor is that no-good, terrible, very bad thing we talked about last week: the flesh.
“I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature,” “my flesh.”
This is weird, maybe even not right.
Didn’t Romans 6 say we died to sin?
That through baptism our Father killed us with Christ, buried us with him and raised us to new life?
That’s why Paul says, “I don’t understand what I do.”
Dead to sin, yet sinning.
Buried, separated from sin, yet hands dirty.
Walking in new life, yet covered in old vomit that proves I’m not so far removed from sin.
Sin should be unintelligible to me.
In Christ, we speak a new language, a language of the Spirit, of God’s law, of desires to listen to God, to love God, to run to God.
The Spirit filled the psalms and proverbs with words like this: “I will set my eyes on no vile things,” “I hate every wrong path,” “To fear the LORD is to hate evil,” “The righteous hate what is false.”
Seems simple enough, this new life in Christ.
Yet, we feel Paul’s angst.
Sin remains all too familiar.
“I know I should do this or that.”
I know I should be…what?
In church more?
In Bible class more?
Having devotions with my family?
Listening more?
I know I should help more.
I know I should look at my finances more and adjust the offerings I give.
I know I should be more patient, more caring, more loving, more generous.
On and on and on.
We can explore the home, the state, work, and church and find lots of “could ofs”, “would ofs”, and “should ofs”.
And with Paul, as baptized children of God, we can even say, “want tos”.
But we don’t.
We don’t give more generously and cheerfully.
We don’t stop being lazy or selfish.
We do what we hate and don’t want to do.
And in so doing we act against words of God that say, “Do” or “Don’t do.”
We do what we hate, even though, like Paul, we know that God’s Words are good, holy, and righteous.
Like Paul, we know the problem, “It’s not me, it’s sin living in me.”
Our flesh drags us down.
This side of heaven we fight a wretched battle.
The flesh wages war.
The flesh takes us prisoner.
It’s a zero-sum game.
Either the flesh wins or the Spirit wins.
The flesh wants you dead.
The Spirit wants you alive.
For that reason, we ought to hate the flesh.
But do we?
Or do we just “dislike” it?
I know I teach my children carefully about the word “hate” and how to avoid using it.
But have we let our hatred denial – “You don’t hate” – seep into this?
That now we don’t even hate our flesh; we sort of live with it.
“I am who I am.”
I’m a sinner.
I have this flesh.
I deal with it.
And, happily, God forgives.
That puts us in danger.
Functionally, it aligns us with the Reformed-Calvinist churches.
These churches also broke off from the pope during the Reformation.
We often summarize their theology with the acronym TULIP – no, not the flower.
Each letter stands for a chief characteristic of the Reformed-Calvinist theology.
For the moment, we’ll focus only on the last letter, the “P” of the Calvinist TULIP, which stands for “the perseverance of the saints,” or, as it’s also known, “eternal security.”
We sum up this teaching in the phrase: “Once saved, always saved.”
The Calvinist says, “You can’t fall from faith.”
No matter how bad things look, no matter how badly you behave, no matter how much sinning you’re doing, if God elected you for salvation, if you're truly a believer in Christ, then you belong to him.
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