Sermon Tone Analysis

Vision Statements

Ford Motor Company - “people working together as a lean, global enterprise for automotive leadership.”

Levi Strauss - “We are the embodiment of the energy and events of our times, inspiring people with a pioneering spirit.”

Google - “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

AMAZON: Our vision is to be earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.

Amazon - "to be earth’s most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online.”

49th WG - “Tight community of Airmen - proud of their service, caring for their people, while remaining mission focused.”

Jesus’ Vision Statement

In Order to achieve That Vision, Jesus Gave an Immediate Mission

As We Prepare For Jesus’ Birth, It’s helpful to re-center on His purpose for coming in the first place.

If Jesus had a mission statement, I think it would have been this…

It’s helpful to re-center on His purpose for coming in the first place...

It’s helpful to re-center on His purpose for coming in the first place...

This passage occurs just before Jesus’ Crucifixion

As we get ready to celebrate his birth, it’s good that he didn’t remain as, one Ricky Bobby offered in Talledega Nights, “Little Baby Jesus In A Manger.”

Jesus grew up, became a man, healed, taught, died, and rose again.

In between, he left some words for us to remember him by.

You might think of this passage as His last Will and Testament for the church.

John 15:

Some of you are thinking that love is just something that happens.

You can’t command it.

You just experience it.

Some of you are imagining that there may be people in your family, at school, in social circles, at work, who are impossible to love.

You might be thinking that

But Jesus doesn’t give us that out, so today we will look at what it means to love like God.

God Commands Us To Love

John 15:

Jesus most certainly had a vision for what success looked like for the disciples, and for the church…He wanted a world of disciples.

The Bible is very clear that no person can love like God, unless they first receive the love of God.

And the mission that would lead to that is the sharing of God’s love in Jesus Christ to the world.

Without the love God, the church has nothing…Nothing.

We cannot love rightly, unless we are in relationship with God.

It’s impossible to love like God, unless you know God!

Love is the means by which a world of disciples is made.

The issue we want to address today is what that love looks like.

The world has one definition of love.

God values other qualities.

Important therefore to know what Godly loves looks like, if we want that world of disciples.

Characteristics of The Love of Jesus

Je 3:

Jesus didn’t love in such a way that people would receive it as a feeling.

He loved in such a way that lives would be transformed.

A person whose life is transformed by God…THAT’S A DISCIPLE!

That sort of transformation has love as its character.

Qualities of the love.

Holiness

He Loves Permanently

He Keeps His Promises

Obedience

Holy and Just

What does that mean to you?

We will explore what it looks like for us to embrace these same qualities.

First Quality of Love: Holiness

God created us individually, and as the church, to live in holy and blameless ways.

God legally views as holy and blameless through the salvation Jesus gives us.

Romans 3:

Our salvation is objectively completed by God through the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

This implies no work on our part, but it is instead the work the God chose to do for sinners, that’s all of us, before the foundations of the world!

Through Jesus, we are both forgiven, and viewed by God as holy because Jesus took our place.

If you fear because you have offended God, remember that Jesus with his own lacerated hands has nailed your sins to the cross, and having satisfied the divine justice for them by his death, he has removed them from your soul.

Courtroom - Not Guilty

Holiness Placed In Us

Holiness Placed In Us

Ritzema, Elliot, and Elizabeth Vince, eds.

300 Quotations for Preachers from the Modern Church.

Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2013.

Print.

Pastorum Series.

But God doesn’t leave it to mere declarations of holiness.

He wants to MAKE us holy, as well and he imparts a Spirit of holiness into us through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

And he then imparts a Spirit of holiness into us through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

To be a believer in Jesus Christ is not to tack just one more thing onto your life.

To love like God, we completely reorient ourselves to the love of things that God deems perfect and righteous.

To be holy, is very simply to love God, and love our neighbor, by the way God defines love.

Not by the way our sinful inclinations might want to define love.

Christians Love Permanently

God’s love never has an escape clause.

Christians Keep Their Promises

God deals with some people like grapes.

He seems to take them in one bite, to take hold of their whole life all at once.

Others are dealt with more like onions.

God seems to take them one layer at a time.

Christians Love Lavishly

Ex

Second Quality of Love…Closely Linked…Obedience

Note, that the love is always there, but remaining, or abiding in that love is not a given.

To remain, enjoy, and experience Christ’s love fully is to obey Christ commandments…most especially to love God and neighbor.

If you’re looking for specific examples of what this looks like, look to the 10 Commandments.

First Three Commandments focused on love for God

Next seven commandments focused on love for neighbor.

Faith and obedience are bound up in the same bundle.

He that obeys God, trusts God, and he that trusts God, obeys God.

He that is without faith is without works; and he that is without works is without faith.

Do not oppose faith and good works to one another, for there is a blessed relationship between them; and if you abound in obedience your faith shall grow exceedingly.

There are times when Obedience may not make sense.

- Peter fishing all night, no luck.

Jesus told him to cast his nets in one more time...

5 Simon answered, “Master,y we’ve worked hard all night and haven’t caught anything.z

But because you say so, I will let down the nets.”

Problem with sin is that God’s ways don’t always make sense.