Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

George Burns said, "There will always be a battle between the sexes because men and women want different things.

Men want women and women want men."

This is, of course, what God intended, but like all good things that are carried to excess this too becomes an area of life where the sinful nature of man thrives.

Sexual immorality is the first fruit of the flesh that Paul refers to, just as love is the first fruit of the Spirit.

This means that one of the first signs that you are not being led of the Spirit, but are being led by your sinful nature, is the desire to be sexually immoral.

Since everyone is so tempted at some point in life, this confirms Paul's point of the conflict between the flesh and the spirit.

Now this has a direct bearing on the work place.

The one thing I learned in my years of secular work is that sex and work go together like love and worship.

On Sunday we focus on agape love and worship, and then on Monday we enter a world of work where the focus is on sex.

It is no wonder we have a hard time bridging this gap and trying to relate the one to the other.

In the plants I worked in where a secretary came out of the office into the plant, the men would whistle and then have crude discussions about anatomy.

You didn't learn anything about love, but you could pick up some ideas about sex, because that is the theme of the work place.

If that was true 30 years ago, I cannot imagine what it is now.

Sexual harassment laws have no doubt curbed some of the sexuality, but there is no way it can eliminate it.

In the place where I worked men sometimes had pinups by their machines, or in their lockers, and the flirting that went on was a major factor in that environment.

In my counseling over the years I have noted that most of the Christians I am aware of who have had affairs have done so because of their relationships in the work place.

Many a Christian marriage has been killed by the work place morality that exalts sex over love.

Surveys reveal that working wives have twice as many affairs as do non-working wives.

It is not entirely due to a immoral focus on sex.

There are natural factors that add to the danger of the work place.

Work and sex are linked by the fact that they both begin about the same time in life.

Young people are getting their first serious jobs at the same time they are going through puberty, or when they are at the peak of their sex drive.

I didn't have to read about this to know it, for I worked with a gang of teenagers in a theatre for several years, and I know how the theme of sex is never far away if it is not dominating the environment.

Then there is the factor that people who work together often develop a greater intimacy than people who get married.

People who get married often cease to talk, and they lose a sense of a growing intimacy.

But people who work together keep on talking and learning about each other, and sometimes even about their mates.

They have more time to talk at work often than mates do at home.

The result is people develop the inevitable feeling of desire, and the work place becomes a breeding ground for the lust of the flesh.

People at work often spend hours a day in romantic flirting.

This is the very thing that mates are to do, but they don't do because they are too tired after a day of work and flirting.

The work place is a dangerous place, not just because of industrial accidents, but because of its predominant emphasis on sex in contrast to love.

If the Christian is going to have any impact in his work for the cause of Christ, he or she has to somehow bring the love of Sunday back to that Monday environment, and help people to see that love is not a mere hot house flower too weak to survive in the world of the work place.

Christians bring some of the lust of the work place back to the church, but it is suppressed.

You don't walk in and find men telling off-colored jokes, and you don't see them poking one another and saying, "Did you see the legs on that gal in the first pew."

Lust is always latent in our lives, and can surface even in a sacred setting, but we suppress it and say, "Get thee behind me Satan."

But I wonder if we do not then do the same thing at work in reverse.

We suppress the issue of agape love, and then unconsciously say, "Get thee behind me Lord."

Where lust is king it is as embarrassing for us to talk of love as it is to talk of lust where love is king.

So we compartmentalize life, and on Sunday we worship and love, and on Monday through Friday we work and lust.

It is sort of the best of both worlds.

The only problem with this is that it misses the whole point of Sunday's worship and love.

It is meant by God to so fill us with the love of Christ that we want to go into the world and bring to it the fruits of the Spirit that men might see there is more to life than the fruit of the flesh.

The work place is our world that Jesus wants us to reach.

It is our mission field where we can plant the kingdom of God.

If we could only see this, we could see that whatever we do can be our calling, for it can be a key way by which God can use us to open the door to the kingdom for people who may never see the inside of a church.

There, you are on a mission field just as real as the missionaries we send overseas.

You work with these people, and they are just as loved by God, and just as died for by Christ as anyone who has ever lived.

But they are in bondage to the lust of the flesh, and all the evils that Paul lists here as acts of the sinful nature.

We are fighting against these forces constantly says Paul, and the only way we can win this conflict is to be led of the spirit, and to produce the fruit of the spirit.

Let's face it, this is a David against Goliath conflict.

Work and sex gets 8 hours a day 5 days a week, and worship and love gets one or two hours a week.

It is not just the kids who face these odds.

Many watch dozens of hour of secular TV for every hour they are in Sunday School.

No wonder they know more about Hollywood stars and cartoon characters than they do about biblical characters.

But the adults have the same unfair odds, and they are swamped with secular sex all week, and then they get a smattering of sacred love on Sunday.

The only hope for the Christian underdog in this lopsided battle is to do what David did against Goliath.

He came up with a special weapon that was superior to the armor of Goliath.

He took his sling and five smooth stones, and one stone did the job and the underdog won.

In a very real sense Paul is saying that the fruit of the Spirit is to us what those stones were to David.

And maybe in any particular conflict one of them also will do the job and give us the victory.

The fruit of the Spirit are our 9 stones that enable us to counteract the sinful nature.

There are more of them than Paul lists here, and so the list is long.

If we are going to see Christ transform our daily work, we need to be a people who cultivate the fruit of the Spirit, and not just on Sunday, but Monday through Friday in the work place.

You need to carry these fruits into the workplace and let the world see they are not antiques preserved in the museum of the church to be gently touched on Sunday.

But rather, they are hardy life changing fruits that can enter the atmosphere of the workplace, and beautify it and be relevant to daily human need.

The world needs a demonstration that the fruits of the Spirit are superior to the fruits of the flesh, and if they never see it, why should they find anything appealing about being a Christian?

We need to exhibit these fruits for our own sake as well, for they are the weapons that keep us from being engulfed by the acts of the sinful nature.

Many of these acts that Paul lists are just as appealing to the Christian as they are to the worldly person.

They are counterfeits of the fruits of the Spirit, and many fall for Satan's deception and think that an affair will bring love, joy, and peace.

The only way a Christian can stand and have a clear witness for Christ is to have a clear grasp of the distinction between what is of the flesh and what is of the Spirit.

Only the Christian sensitive to the Spirit's leading, and consciously aware of the values of the fruit of the Spirit in the workplace, will be able to have an impact for Christ at work.

We do not have time to look at how each of the 9 can be applied, but as we look at the first 2 we can get an idea of just how precious and powerful they could be if we would let the Holy Spirit use us to display them in our daily work.

First lets look at-

I. THE FRUIT OF LOVE.

The first thing we need to do is break down the wall between the sacred and the secular.

We have a hard time transferring the love of Sunday to the workplace on Monday because it almost seems sacrilegious to take the treasures of Christian love into the pagan temple of the workplace.

It is this compartmentalizing of life that makes it so hard to be a Christian witness.

The fact is, Jesus never had any such wall in His life.

He ate with publicans and sinners.

These were the cut-throat business men of the day.

Jerusalem had about 80,000 people in it, and that meant a lot of people who could be conned out of their money.

The religious racketeers got them in the temple exchange, and the publicans got them by overtaxing them, and then in their despair the prostitutes could offer them some comfort for their remaining sheckels.

My point is, life was not different in the basics than it is from now.

The masses of working people were victims of one injustice after another, and sinful indulgence of the flesh seem to be their only hope for some joy and pleasure in life.

Yet we see that Jesus did not avoid these kinds of people where the atmosphere had to be one of foul talk and sensuality.

We never get a hint that Jesus was embarrassed to talk to a woman who was married to 5 husbands, and who was now living with a man out of wedlock.

Here was a woman sold out to sensuality and the flesh, and yet Jesus does not withdraw, but confronts her with love.

He never ran for cover either when they brought the woman taken in the very act of adultery.

He faced the very things that you face at work with all of the lust, folly, and people damaging their lives and others in a futile quest for happiness by means of sin.

He faced it as a friend of sinners offering forgiveness and pointing to a higher path where people could find what they were seeking for in love.

Jesus loved these people who were slaves of the flesh, and whose two main idols were money and sex.

Yet from these ranks of the publicans and prostitutes Jesus won a great following by the power of love.

We need to get the idea out of our heads that Jesus does not know or understand the atmosphere where we work.

He knew it better than you long before you were born.

There is no chance of shocking Jesus, and we are being foolish if we think we are protecting Jesus from the world by keeping Him in church, and trying to ignore Him through the week.

He has been there, and He knows the heart of man and the depths to which His foul flesh can go.

In fact, Jesus put all men into the same category.

He did not have the system of segregation that we do.

The good guys and the bad guys are how we classify people.