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
0.2UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.5LIKELY
Fear
0.13UNLIKELY
Joy
0.08UNLIKELY
Sadness
0.61LIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.26UNLIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.35UNLIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.9LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.45UNLIKELY
Extraversion
0.03UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.37UNLIKELY
Emotional Range
0.49UNLIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
By Pastor Glenn Pease
People die all the time just to advance our knowledge.
Have you ever wondered how doctors knew the precise steps in the development of the fetus before there was any means of seeing inside the mother?
It came from a team of Harvard doctors who asked a group of women who were scheduled for hysterectomies to stop practicing birth control before their surgery.
This was long before all of the present controversy concerning when life begins, and the abortion issue.
They did not see it as abortion, but simply as a removing of the female organs.
But in doing so they were able to study 30 embryos and see the actual development of the fetus.
Thirty babies had to die to give man this knowledge.
Doctor Lawrence Altman in his book Who Goes First tells numerous stories of doctors who have died in trying to get information on various diseases.
I will share just one.
In Lima, Peru there stands what may be the only statue in the world of a medical student.
It memorializes Daniel Carrion who in 1885 decided to solve the mystery of a strange disease that was killing many of his people.
He took some of the blood of an infected person and tried to inject it into his own arm.
He failed at first, and so a fellow medical student helped him.
He got the disease as expected, but his case was far more severe than expected.
Thirty-nine days later he died.
Some called it a horrible act and a disgrace to his profession.
They young man who helped him was charged with murder.
It was quite a scandal, but three professors came forward and sighted the many doctors in history who risked their lives in self-experimenting.
The charge was dropped and Carrion became a hero.
The medical students sing a balled to his memory, and enough was learned about the disease to bring it under control.
Others live because he died.
This is not an isolated incident.
Every new medicine, every new test, and every new therapy has to be performed on a human being before it can be approved.
If a doctor had not first put a tube into his own heart, which could have killed him, we would not have many of the heart surgeries we have today.
Somebody has to go first, and that somebody often has to die to enable others to follow and not die, but be saved by the procedure.
We are looking at Jesus as our Great Physician who was also the Pioneer of our faith.
He went first into the hell of God forsakenness that you and I, and all who trust in Him, might never have to endure it.
Those few hours of history in which Jesus laid down His life for the world of sinners were the most unusual hours in all of history.
Nothing was normal.
It was the Creator Himself putting Himself through the greatest self-experimentation of all time.
As the author of life He would experience death, and in so doing all of reality is being altered, for He was turning the world of both nature and super nature upside down.
The hours of His death were hours of complex confusion.
Let's look at these strange phenomena.
I. THE CONFUSION OF NATURE.
Verse 45 says that from the 6th hour until the 9th hour darkness came over all the land.
Mark and Luke record this same thing.
Dr. Luke gives us one other word, and he says that the sun stopped shining.
We are not talking about a cloudy day or an eclipse.
We are talking about an event in creation that has never happened but this one time in all of history.
The sun took a break, and for the only time in its existence it ceased to shine for 3 hours.
This is one of the greatest miracles of all time, and Herbert Lockyer in his All The Miracles Of The Bible includes this one, which most of us would miss as a miracle.
Jesus was born in the darkness of night, but it was a natural night.
He died in the darkness, which was a supernatural night because it came just when the day was brightest.
It was from noon to 3 in the afternoon.
That is the least likely time to have darkness, and so the whole thing is being timed by God to give the world a message.
God never turned the sun off before, and He has never done it again.
From God's perspective this was an event without parallel.
It was a once in a history, and a once in a universe, time and space event.
When you add the most unusual earthquake of all time to this darkness, it is no wonder the Centurion and the others were terrified and exclaimed, "Surely this was the Son of God!"
They were observing what was very frightening in nature.
Nobody had ever seen anything like this before, and they knew they were in the presence of the supernatural.
It makes sense why God the Father would turn off the sun for 3 hours while His Son died.
What greater statement could God make concerning the significance of this event.
Isaac Watts wrote,
Well might the sun in darkness hide,
And shut His glories in,
When Christ the mighty Maker, died,
For man the creature's sin.
It was God's way of wearing black for His Son's death, and thereby symbolizing the sadness of heaven at the price that had to be paid for man's salvation.
It was a dark and heavy load He had to bear to see His Son endure separation from Him that man might be reconciled.
There is no symbol great enough to convey how dark and heavy it was other than the sun.
It is the source of light and life for all the world.
For 3 hours it ceased to function as a symbol of the 3 days in which the light of life would cease to function, because Jesus entered the realm of death.
This confusion of nature created confusion in the minds of men as well.
When Jesus cried out, "My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me," the people misunderstood the words of Jesus, and they thought He was calling for Elijah.
The Aramaic word eloi, eloi sounds like Elijah, and so they are confused and hear a message Jesus did not give.
In their confusion they say let's see if Elijah comes to rescue Him.
There is total chaos around the cross as both nature and man are confused, and they are not functioning with the capacity they normally have.
Disharmony reigns, and in all this confusion as the earth shakes that everything is backwards.
People are coming out of the tombs instead of staying dead like dead people always do.
The whole world is wired wrong, and nothing seems to be working right.
The veil in the temple is ripped from top to bottom, and everything is out of whack from what is normal.
You get the unmistakable feeling that God is trying to say something that has never been said before.
One of the things He is saying is that the cross and the death of His Son is the most awesome event of human history.
It is in a class by itself.
It is not one of the many martyr stories of great men dying for a cross.
It is not a Socrates laying down his life for a principle, or a soldier laying down his life for his country.
These are noble and praiseworthy sacrifices, but they do not qualify to be in the same category as Calvary.
Here is an event that covers heaven and earth, all of creation, and all of mankind.
The sun shuts off for no man but the God-Man, and even then only in the hours of His dying for all men.
More miracles happen at the cross than anywhere else in the Bible.
The veil is rent, the earthquake shakes dead people into life, people are converted, the trinity is separated only this once in all eternity, and the sun goes off for 3 hours.
Some see the darkness as the Father's mourning and sympathy for His Son.
Jesus was stripped naked when he was nailed to the cross, and God in mercy lessened his shame by the cover of darkness.
We know that from 9 in the morning until noon the leaders of the people mocked Jesus unmercifully, but when the darkness the mocking ceased, and then there was three hours of silence.
The darkness veiled Jesus and halted the cruel mocking.
The darkness marked a turning point in the atmosphere around the cross.
Nature's expression of sympathy led even cruel men to follow and begin to feel sympathy for Jesus.
The compassion of people was born in the darkness and silence of those hours.
One man ran to fill a sponge and give Jesus a drink.
Others watch to see if Elijah will come and rescue him.
Many felt with the Centurion that this was no ordinary man, and the Centurion said he was the Son of God.
Dr. Luke tells us that the crowds of people who were so cruel began to doubt their dogmatic stand, and they began to smite their breasts as if to say, "What fools we have been."
The darkness revealed to them that Jesus was no mere criminal, but someone uniquely different from anyone else.
In His dying hours nature shocked man into seeing the cross for what it really was.
It was the greatest act of folly and sin the world has ever seen.
Man in his sinful blindness and rebellion was actually killing the light of the world, which was God's greatest gift ever given to man.
The darkness made men see what they never saw in the light, and there were people converted in those dark hours.
The Centurion was the most prominent.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9