Sermon Tone Analysis

Illustration

Major Fred Hargesheimer was a former pilot of the United States Air Force.

During WWII, he was flying on a special recon mission over Papua New Guinea when his plane was attacked by a Japanese fighter jet.

As a result of the attack, he was injured and his plane was going down.

as he attempted to escape, he found that his canopy was jammed shut.

Despite all of these obstacles, he was able to escape the plane and parachute down to safety.

For a full month, he fought to survive in the jungles of New Guinea knowing that if he were to be found by a Japanese soldier, he would be killed on sight!

After 31 days, he was found by members of the Nakanai tribe and they sheltered him for 5 months, all the while risking their own lives to protect him from being found by the Japanese soldiers.

Eventually, he met up with the Australian Coastwatchers who delivered him to safety.

But after his rescue, he could not help but constantly think about the extreme gesture of love and grace that was shown to him by the Nakanai tribe members.

16 years later, he returned to the island and found out that they were in need of a school.

As soon as Fred returned home, he diligently raised $15,000 over 3 years and had a school house for the tribe built because of the extreme gratitude he had for them.

And the school was named the Airmen’s Memorial School.

Even then, his appreciation for what they had done did not fade.

Over the next 40 years he continued to visit the tribe and continued to invest in the building up of their community.

Out of response for what was done for him by the Nakanai tribe, Fred spent the rest of his life living in gratitude for what they had done.

If he can show this kind of response for the salvation of his life, how much more should we live in gratitude to Christ in response to him saving our souls.

This is exactly what Paul addresses in our text today.

So if you have your Bibles, please turn with me to Romans Chapter 12.

12 Therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God, I urge you to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God; this is your true worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may discern what is the good, pleasing, and perfect will of God.

MANY GIFTS BUT ONE BODY

3 For by the grace given to me, I tell everyone among you not to think of himself more highly than he should think.

Instead, think sensibly, as God has distributed a measure of faith to each one.

4 Now as we have many parts in one body, and all the parts do not have the same function, 5 in the same way we who are many are one body in Christ and individually members of one another.

6 According to the grace given to us, we have different gifts

Let’s pray

Context!

As we begin to look at our Scripture this morning, we see that Paul begins his text with a very important word, “Therefore”.

And I always want us to remember that whenever we are reading God’s Word, the most important thing for us to do is to read it within it’s context!

THEREFORE!

I want to teach you a little trick.

Any time you see the word therefore in scripture, ask “what is it there for?”

This will help you to read the following statement in context.

And context is always the key to rightly observing and interpreting the Word of God.

Those of us that are taking CLASS 201 on Monday nights are learning all about this!

so...

Why is therefore present in ?

Well...

So why is “therefore” present in v.1?

Well Romans Chapter 12 is a turning point in Paul’s letter to the believers in Rome.

Romans Chapter 12 is a turning point in Paul’s letter to the believers in Rome.

Well Romans Chapter 12 is a turning point in Paul’s letter to the believers in Rome.

So before we can truly grasp what he is saying in chapter 12, we have to consider what he has written in Chapters 1-11.

While I would truly love to stand here and read the first 11 chapters of Romans to you, I will instead give you a brief rundown.

is all about the theology of God’s mercy on us.

Paul explains that we are all sinners!

It is part of our nature, and as a result of that sin nature, we all deserve to face God’s wrath.

We deserve eternal separation from God and we deserve the sentence of eternal torment in hell.

Paul explains that there is no amount of good works that a person can do to ever redeem himself from this punishment.

Just one sin makes us guilty before the Holy God!

Of course right now you may be thinking that this sounds pretty hopeless, but here comes the beauty of this letter!

Paul explains that Christ died for us and paid for our sins.

And as a result, when we believe in Christ, that he died to pay the penalty of our sin and then rose from the dead and is alive and living today, we receive salvation!

Salvation from the penalty of sin… which is an eternity in hell, but even worse than that, an eternity separated from God and all his goodness!

We are saved by that faith alone… not by our works!

And as a result of that faith we are no longer slaves to our sins, but we are dead to our sins and alive in Christ!

WOW that is good stuff!

This is the kind of stuff we can and should get excited about… BUT Paul’s not finished!!

In he goes on to tell them that there is absolutely no condemnation in Christ Jesus… We are free!

And if that wasn’t good enough, he gives us his Holy Spirit to live inside us.

And the best news for us here at CBC that Paul lays out in Romans is that God’s salvation is not only for the Jews… but also for the gentiles!

That’s us!

And there is NOTHING that can ever separate us from his love…

neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Wow! we can just close in prayer right here and go home!

This is the stuff that should get you excited if you are a believer in Christ!

So this is the context of where we are heading as we approach which is the beginning of the practical section of Romans.

begins the practical section of Romans

We have the theology of God’s mercy in chapters 1-11… THEREFORE… here are the expectations that flow from that theology.

And...

The practical things we look at in scripture MUST rest on theological foundation!

If not, all we are really getting here is advice on how to get along in a religious community when there is so much more to gather here.

12:1 starts with - Therefore, brothers and sisters, in view of the mercies of God (which we learn all about in ), Our theological foundation.

What Paul is about to lay out is how we are to live in response to God’s mercy.

In short, the only sufficient motivation for the Christian life is gratitude for grace.

Especially in where Paul argues that Christians cannot lose their salvation or their place in God’s love!

If we could lose our salvation or do something that causes God to stop loving us, our motivation would not be in view of God’s mercy… His Grace…

But our motivation would be grounded in fear!

Anything we do in our Christian life will more than likely be based off of 1 of these 2 motivations:

Motivated by God’s grace or motivated by our fear.

And there is not much that is more dangerous than living the Christian life with fear as our motivation.

Here are

3 Dangers for fear based motivation for obedience:

1.

Our motivation will lose it’s power over time.

The emotion of fear is one of the most draining emotions there is! Now, fear will HIGHLY motivate you at first, but eventually it is just exhausting!

People who live in great fear eventually experience a numbing effect.

Slowly you become just too tired to care, indifferent to what happens.

Fear-based religion often tends to be a short lived religion.

The second danger of fear based motivation is

2. It has a great deal of trouble with repentance.

When we are motivated by fear, we believe that there is some sort of line.

If we sin too much, we cross that line and God condemns us.

But we don’t really know where that line is.

And as a result, bringing our sins to God is not a sweet thing to us but very bitter.

We don’t have the security to admit our sins to God for fear of punishment from God.

So we do a lot of rationalizing and blaming

The third danger is:

3. Fear-based obedience will always make it difficult to endure suffering or troubles.

Don’t be fooled!

When you become a believer, your life does not all of a sudden become a perfect life with no hardships or troubles.