Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Martin Luther spent a major portion of his life looking for a God who liked him.

He was devoutly religious from his childhood, but religion was more a burden than a blessing, for his God was not his friend.

He knew God hated sin and demanded perfection and so he was obsessed with trying to be perfect.

As a monk he went beyond the rigorous rules of the monastery.

He fasted and prayed longer than any of the others.

He denied himself the normal allotment of blankets and almost froze to death.

He punished his body and devoted every ounce of energy to being super-spiritual.

He once wrote, "I was a good monk, and I kept the rule of my order so strictly that I may say that if ever monk got to heaven by his monkery it was I.

All my brothers in the monastery who knew me will bear me out.

If I had kept on any longer, I should have killed myself with vigils, prayers, reading, and other work."

Suicide by super-spiritually was the direction he was heading.

It sounds like such deep devotion, but in reality it was all based on fear.

God was not a father he loved and a friend he served.

God was a tyrant he feared.

Luther was so obsessed with his sin that he made his confessor a nervous wreck.

Others would confess their sin in a few minutes, but he would stay for hours, and once even stayed for six hours confessing the sin of the previous day.

On and on he went for everything he did was a sin in his eyes.

He even confessed that he stayed up after the lights were to be out to read his Bible by candlelight.

That was one of his sins.

Staupitz, the leader of the monastery, finally got fed up with Luther and in anger said, "Look here, if you expect Christ to forgive you come in with something to forgive-parricide,blasphemy,adultery,instead of all these peccadilloes.

Man, God is not angry with you, you are angry with God."

When the truth finally sunk into Luther's head and heart, and he saw that he was the problem, he found the greatest treasure a man can find-he found God was his friend.

He was a loving Father who provided for us what we needed in order to be forgiven.

We do not have to earn our salvation, but freely receive it as His gift of love.

When Luther stopped working to save himself, and took salvation as a free gift from God by faith in Christ, he made a lot of new friends, but the greatest of them all was God.

He found a God who liked him.

Luther was losing friendship on both the earthly and heavenly level because he was blind to the fact that he was the problem.

When we are full of misconceptions and misunderstandings, we are in bondage, and only the truth can set us free.

A prominent American writer read the book Forgive Us Our Trespasses by Lloyd C. Douglas.

She wrote to the author and said, "As I read your book I saw myself as I really was.

I finished it late at night and the next day I went out and recaptured five friendships I had lost because of my unforgiving spirit."

The truth had set her free.

The fact is, most of the broken relationships in life, and the loss of friendship with men and God, are based on our false conceptions.

Like Luther, we are often angry with God and with others, and we misinterpret this as their anger with us.

If you examine most of the conflicts you have in marriage or with children and others, you will see they usually start with your rotten inner mood at someone else's behavior.

We create God and others in our own image when we are full of hostility and we blame them for being what we are.

The ancient world is full of myths that portray God as the foe of man.

Zeus, the king of gods in Greek mythology was so portrayed.

Prometheus was a god who took pity on man and tried to warm and cheer his life by giving him the gift of fire.

Zeus became very angry because of this grace and love expressed by Prometheus.

He had him chained to a rock in the Adriatic Sea.

He was tortured with the heat and thirst of the day and the cold of the night.

And then for an added touch of sadistic pleasure he prepared a vulture to tear out his liver.

Zeus was very creative in his bitterness.

He made it so the liver would keep growing back so the vulture could tear it out over and over again.

This was the picture of God that many people had, and, of course, the only reaction to such a tyrant is rebellion and hostility.

When I read the writing of famous atheists like Robert Ingersal, I see this anger at God.

He is so mad at God that he blames God for all that is awful and evil in life, and this justifies his anger.

You have a right to be angry at a God who is responsible for all that is evil.

Believers sometimes fall into this same trap.

They start with a false view of God and His relationship to a world of evil.

It looks to them like God does not care about them and they are angry.

This is where we see the elder son in the parable of the prodigal.

He is mad at his father and his anger blinds him to the fact that he is the problem.

Instead he tries to justify his anger by making the father look like the culprit, and the cause for his hostility.

The first thing we see here is that it is not enough to know that God is our Father to have a right relationship to Him.

The elder brother had no doubt about the fatherhood of his father, but he did doubt the friendship of his father.

In other words, being a father does not guarantee that one is a friend.

The world is full of fathers who are not friends.

Knowing that God is a father does not help many people who have fathers who abuse them, reject them, and refuse to give them love and attention.

Jay Kessler, for years the president of Youth For Christ, says the idea of the fatherhood of God is not adequate to appeal to a generation of kids who have been rejected by their fathers.

He says imagine what it is like to a child who has been abused,beaten, scorned, and rejected by a father to be told by Christians that now what we have is an even bigger and stronger one of these for you to get to know.

Is it any wonder that they would say, no thank you? God as father is not always the greatest truth to reach people.

The elder brother did not need to know that his father was his father.

He needed to know that truth which the younger son discovered, and that was that his father was his friend.

In his anger the elder brother felt like his father was his foe.

The younger son felt the same way earlier.

He felt he had to get away on his own to experience the best of life.

He felt that his real friends were somewhere out there in the world waiting to be found.

It was not until he had lost all and had hit bottom that he came home to discover that his father was his greatest friend.

This is what Luther had to discover about God, and this is what all men have to discover about God.

Joshua Liebman wrote-

In this vast universe

There is but one supreme truth--

That God is our friend!

By that truth meaning is given

To the remote stars, the numberless centuries,

The long and heroic struggle of mankind-....

O my Soul, dare to trust this truth!

Dare to rest in God's kindly arms,

Dare to look confidently into His face,

Then launch thyself into life unafraid!

Knowing thou art within thy Father's house,

That thou art surrounded by His love,

Thou wilt become master of fear,

Lord of life, conqueror even of death!

If this be the peak of truth, and there is abundant of evidence to support it, then, like all other peaks, it is not arrived at with a step, but is a hard climb.

And like any other climb, there are hindrances and helps.

If we are to know God as our friend, we have to be aware of the hindrances to be overcome, and of the helps to aid us in arriving at this pinnacle of truth.

We cannot cover them all, but I think the greatest hindrance and the greatest help can be seen clearly in this Parable of the Prodigal.

I. THE GREATEST HINDRANCE.

The greatest hindrance to believing God is our friend is God's permissiveness.

God as represented by the prodigal's father let him take his share of the estate and set off for the far country.

This is one of man's major problems with God.

God does not run a very tight ship.

He let's men do the most foolish and stupid things, and it fill the world with evil.

If God was not so permissive, the world would not be in such a mess, and so it is basically God's fault.

The father could have said no, but he let his son go off and make a fool of himself.

Sure he would have hated his father had he not let him go, but it would have been for his own good.