Sermon Tone Analysis

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By Pastor Glenn Pease
O Henry tells a short story of the lad who grew up in a small village and sat next to a lovely young lady so innocent and sweet.
He left that village for the big city where he got in with the wrong crowd and became a thief and a pick pocket.
One day as he was working the crowd, doing quite well, he saw that girl he sat by back in the village.
She was still the same fresh, innocent, and sweet girl.
He did not want to be seen by her, so he hid, but he was overwhelmed by his memory.
He remembered what he had been, and realized what he had become.
He leaned his head against the lamp post and said, "God, how I hate myself."
That was his turning point.
He had the choice to go back to what he once was, or to go on to be more what he was becoming, and that he hated.
The Prodigal Son came to this point and said, "I am going home where I was."
That is what repentance is!
It is responding to what you remember as a better day, and a better way, and choosing to stop departing from it, but to go back to what was.
Repentance is admitting that you once were on a better path that you have now forsaken, and choosing to get back on that better path.
We tend to think repentance is for those only who have never been saved, but Jesus makes it clear, repentance is as much for Christians as it is for those being saved for the first time.
Christians need to constantly consider if they were once on a better road that they need to return to.
They need to ask with William Cowper-
Where is the blessedness I knew,
When first I saw the Lord?
Where is the soul-refreshing view
Of Jesus and His Word?
Revival; renewal, and repentance: They are all the same experience of getting back to first love-to the love that puts Jesus in the center of life.
This is not a rare need, but a constant need, because we, as Christians, tend to decline.
The idea of perpetual growth does not fit reality.
We are usually the best Christians we will ever be when we first fall in love with Jesus.
Maybe we are not very sharp in our theology, and wouldn't know a false prophet if we heard one.
Maybe we would not spot a heresy if it sat on our nose.
But we had a fervent love for our Savior, and we long to make that love known.
The best witness for Christ comes from new converts.
They don't know how often people don't want to hear their good news, and so they share it with enthusiasm.
It is only after a lot of rejection that a Christian tends to withdraw from the sharing of his or her faith.
That is why Jesus says we need to become as little children to enter the kingdom of God.
It is getting back to the simplicity and enthusiasm of our new birth days that is really the high point of our Christian life.
To be childlike in Christ again with a fervant love is the ideal.
Jesus is not anti-maturity, for that is a vital part of the Christian life, but we need to keep going back to that first love and keep it alive as we grow in maturity, or the maturity itself is much ado about nothing.
When we first become Christians we are the most normal.
We soon grow out of this normalcy and become abnormal.
That is why we need revivals to get back to normal.
Vance Havner said it as only he could in his book Repent Or Else!
"Revivals should not be necessary.
God intended that His people
Should grow in grace without periodic spells of backsliding and
repenting.
But so long as we have such a malarial brand of
Christianity, a fever and a chill, a fever and a chill, we shall need revivals.
Nor is a revival a mere emotional upheaval.
The way out of a stupor is not by getting into a stew.
God does not intend that we live in a fever of excitement all the time.
The farmer must break up his fallow ground, but if he did only that he would never plant or cultivate or reap.
Surgery may be necessary at times but it is not normal to live in a hosptial.
What we call revival is simply a return to normal New Testament Christianity.
Most of us are so subnormal that if we ever became normal we would be considered abnormal!"
Older Christians acting like younger Christians would seem abnormal, but the fact is, that is what Jesus is looking for in His church.
He wants mature Christians who still have the fire of their first love.
Jesus does not grow cold in His love for His bride.
He does not love His church less now than when He chose to lay down His life for her.
He loves her fervently, and He wants that kind of love in return.
The idea of love growing dim and fading is based on our weak human nature, and what we experience because we let love slide.
Jesus says this is not only not necessary, it is stupid.
Love is the best thing we have going for us in any relationship.
To just let this decay and grow old and cold is as dumb as catsup on corn flakes.
If you are not so dumb as to put catsup on corn flakes, why would you be so dumb as to let love grow cold?
It is stupid, but we do it all the time.
We do it with marriage; friends, and with the Lord.
We let the most valuable and treasured possessions we can ever have rust away for lack of use, and all because we foolishly buy into the lie that it is normal for love to fade and decay.
Jesus says it is not so.
First love is capable of being kept alive permanently.
You don't have to decline to second love, or third love, and down to a level where love is in the pits.
First love can be last love as well.
The ideal Christian life is one where the old saints love the Lord just as much as they did the first year of their Chrisitan life.
That is what Jesus expects, and not a love that declines so that He ends up far down on the list of priorities.
Jesus is not interested in being one of your possessions you just had to have, and then after the novelty wore off, got stuck in the garage or attic where it sits neglected because your love has found other objects to entice it.
He expects to be on a first love basis with His bride, or she will be set aside.
This is exactly what God expected from His people in the Old Testament, and why many of them were set aside, and only a remnant being used to fulfill His plan.
In Jer.
2:2 God says, "Go and shout this in Jerusalem's streets: The Lord says, I remember how eager you were to please me as a young bride long ago and how you loved me and followed me even through the barren deserts."
God remembered those good old days, but they did not.
They took after other gods and lost their first love, and God had to send them away into exile.
The number one cause for all failure in life is the forsaking of first love.
People fall in love and life is grand, but they don't stay there, or come back to that love when they drift away.
They just keep on going and their love dies.
They fall in love with God and the Lord Jesus, but then they get all tied up with many other things, and their love for Jesus is pushed to the back burner.
The world is full of use-to-be Christians.
They have now found other loves, and have lost their first love.
The strange thing is that they are not necessarily no longer part of the church.
These Ephesians were still going strong in the church, and they had all kinds of qualities, but they had forsaken their first love.
Good Christian people who seemed to be busy as can be in church work can still be a victim of this dread disease of loss of first loveitis.
Love never fails, but lack of love sure does.
In fact, lack of love is sure to fail, and this can happen to the best of Christians.
Here is a good orthodox church.
They were zealous and hard working, and ready to endure hardship for Christ, bu they were about to be set on the shelf because of their loss of first love motivation.
They do not lose their salvation, but they lose the chance to be used, because without love a church is just not a useable channel for Christ.
How in the world can this be?
We can assume it is a fairly common problem, for it is the first problem Jesus deals with, and it has the most servere threat of any of the problems.
The removable of the lamp stand is the most radical warning Jesus gives to the seven churches.
We can assume that over the centuries Jesus has closed up shop in many churches because they forsook their first love.
How does it happen?
Most see the issue here to be one of competition where good things become so dominant they choke out the best.
We are deceived if we think that it is only evil we need to be aware of as an enemy.
The good can be the worst enemy of the best.
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