Sermon Tone Analysis

Christmas:  A Season Of Expectation

Luke 1:5-17

Introduction And

The Expectation Of A Forerunner

 

 

*Looking For Trouble?*

 

One dark rainy night a salesman had a flat tire on a lonely road.

But to his dismay he had no lug wrench.

Seeing a nearby farmhouse, he set out on foot.

Surely the farmer would have a lug wrench, he thought.

But would he even come to the door?

And if he did, he’d probably be furious at being bothered.

He’d say, “What’s the big idea getting me out of bed in the middle of the night?”

This thought made the salesman angry.

Why, that farmer is a selfish old clod to refuse to help me.

Finally the man reached the house.

Frustrated and drenched, he banged on the door.

“Who’s there?” a voice called out from a window overhead.

“You know good and well who it is,” yelled the salesman, his face red with anger.

“It’s me!

And you can keep your old lug wrench!

I wouldn’t borrow it if it was the last one in the county.”

What was this salesman’s problem?

He had negative or low expectations!

His negative or low expectations brought him exactly what he expected, because he didn’t put forth any effort to see if his expectations were accurate.

Some months ago God burned these words into my spirit, “We usually get what we expect!”

If we expect blessings, we usually get them!

If we expect curses, we usually get them.

*/Therefore, it behooves us to cultivate positive, biblical expectations./*

But that begs a question, “Can we order our lives like the world by just adopting positive thinking, or does God have something else in mind?”

And furthermore, “If it’s that easy to facilitate positive results in our lives, why don’t we all just think positive or choose to have positive expectations?”

The answer to these questions is sad, but very obvious to me, we have been disappointed and rejected so often in this sin-cursed world that our expectations are mostly negative.

*/We have murdered our desire and our expectation, so that we won’t hurt any more./*

Therefore, we look with skepticism upon most promises.

We have received so many free offers that turned out *not* to be free that we have given up on free offers.

And now we have seen scandal after scandal among the largest corporations and their executives.

Our expectations are very, very low, if not wholely negative.

*/Disappointment is sad!

But what is sadder, is that/* */we are not just disappointed, but we have gotten used to disappointment and have accepted it as a way life!/*

 

/(Is this the way God meant for His children to live?

Should this be the atmosphere of the Church, God’s community?

Should this be the mood of Christmas?)/

Not too long ago, I read an excellent book entitled:  /The Gate Church/, by Frank Damazio.

In this book, Damazio lists seven basic hinderances to a full release of the supernatural.

The fifth hinderence is particularly appropriate for our present discussion:

 

“5.

There has and still seems to be a suppressed attitude toward expectation for the supernatural.

Perhaps believers are afraid to expect much from God because they have been disappointed too many times in the past.

*This is a stronghold of no expectation*”[1] (/emphasis mine/).

A stronghold of *no* expectation…A stronghold of *no* expectation…A stronghold of *no* expectation.

*/The devil has used shattered dreams and disappointments to fabricate a stronghold of no expectation in the Church of Jesus Christ./*

But, what is a stronghold?

 

“a stronghold is a mindset impregnated with hopelessness that causes the believer to accept as unchangeable something that he~/she knows is contrary to the will of God.”[2]

A stronghold is territory that the devil has captured that does *not* belong to him.

The stronghold of no expectation is a mindset of hopelessness, with respect to our expectations, that causes us to accept as unchangeable something that we know is contrary to the will of God.

God does not want us to live a life of no expectation, but a life of */great Biblical expectation/*.

The Bible word for this */great Biblical expectation/* is “hope”.

Every believer should live with the blessed hope of the glorious appearing of our Great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, but alas…

\\        As I thought about this, I came up with a diagram that depicts two opposite strongholds with respect to expectation.

ß--------------------------------------------------*½*----------------------------------------------------à

 

!!

No or Low Expectation      Balanced or Biblical Expectation      Unrealistic Expectation

*  The Stronghold of                 Spirit-controlled                         The Stronghold of*

!!      Hopelessness                       Full of faith                                 Spiritualism

*                                                                                     (/Burnout &/ /Hopelessness/)*

 

       One of my favorite authors, A. W. Tozer, who lived and wrote about 50 year ago, wrote:  “*/We need today a fresh spirit of anticipation that springs out of the promises of God./*

We must declare *war* on the mood of nonexpectation and come together with childlike faith.

Only then can we know again the beauty and wonder of the Lord’s presence among us” /God Tells The Man Who Cares/ (A.

W. Tozer) 168, 170.[3]

Anticipation, the promises of God, childlike faith are the antecedents, i.e. the necessary prerequistes, to knowing again the beauty and wonder of the Lord’s presence among us.

Tozer wrote this 50 years ago!

So, it would seem that this stronghold of */no expectation/* is not something of recent origin, but a tool that the devil has used before.

Why we could even go back further in history and see this same problem.

“In the years preceding the Civil War, one of America’s leading theologians, Horace Bushnell, summed up the spiritual dilemma of his day, and in so doing, seems to describe our own:  ‘Bushnell observed that Christian souls were falling into[4] ‘a stupor of intellectual fatality….Prayer becomes a kind of dumb-bell exercise, good as exercise, but never to be answered.

The Word is good to be exegetically handled, but there is no light of interpretation in souls, more immediate; all truth is to be second-hand truth, never a vital beam of God’s own light….*Expectation is gone*—God is to far off, too much imprisoned by laws, to allow *expectation* from Him.

The Christian world has been gravitating, visibly, more and more, toward this vanishing point of faith, for whole centuries, and especially since the Modern Era began to shape the thoughts of men by only scientific methods.

Religion has fallen into the domain of mere understanding, and so it has become a kind of wisdom to *not* believe much, */therefore to expect as little/*.’”[5]

*/Surely, we live in a time of dwarfed and dashed expectations!!!/*

 

       But as Tozer exhorts, “We must declare war on the mood of nonexpectation!!!”

And that is what I am doing!  */It’s a New Season and this New Season should be marked by expectation./*

The word “expectation” means

 

*1.*

*anticipation of something happening:*  a confident belief or strong */hope/* that a particular event will happen[6]

 

*1.*

*expectant waiting:*  the feeling of looking forward, usually excitedly or eagerly, to something that is going to happen[7]

 

Again, A. W. Tozer said, “Every great movement of God in history, every unusual advance in the Church, every revival, has been preceded by a sense of keen anticipation.

*/Expectation accompanied the operations of the Spirit always./*

His bestowals hardly surprised His people because they were gazing expectantly towards the risen Lord and looking confidently for his word to be fulfilled.

*/His blessings accorded with their expectations…./*”[8]

“Expectation has always been present in the Church in the times of her greatest power.

When she believed, she expected, and the Lord never disappointed her….”[9]

/(But we have another powerful reason for *great Biblical expectations*:  The Christmas Season.)/

*/Christmas should be, according to the Bible stories, a season of expectation./*

So, God gave me this short series of messages last Christmas.

He knew, last Christmas, where we would be this Christmas.

So, it is with great Biblical expectation and anticipation that we begin a four message Christmas series entitled:  “Christmas:  A Season Of Expectation!”

These messages will point out the expectation that is resident in each of the major Bible accounts of the Christmas story, i.e. the birth of the Messiah.

\\ (We begin today with Lukes account in Luke 1:5-17.

Would you turn there with me please.

May I read this out loud for us?)

The expectation in these verses is the expectation of a forerunner.

In each group of verses that we shall cover, we shall follow the same pattern of expectation:

 

·        The Divine Announcement

·        The Divine Promise

·        The Divine Expectation

·        The Divine Fulfillment