Sermon Tone Analysis

God at Work!

Good morning!

I want to thank you for the opportunity to come and share God’s Word with you this morning!

I am very happy to be able to be out and visit and share in our churches once again.

For those of you who do not know me, my name is Don Vickers and I am the Associational Missionary for the Yuma Southern Baptist Association.

We have 16 churches in Yuma County and now four partner churches in Mexico who see our purpose of working together to make sure that every person who lives in our region has the opportunity to hear and respond to the Gospel.

If we drew a circle around the four valleys - Yuma, Imperial, Mexicali and San Luis, we would find over a million people living around us.

God calls us to Himself and as His Son’s and Daughters, we are to make disciples, and every person that we come across gives us an opportunity.

With every person we come across, we have the opportunity to either encourage them in a relationship with Jesus that they have already begun, or to encourage them towards a relationship with Jesus.

The Holy Spirit is always at work around us!

He is molding and shaping us into the image of Jesus.

He calls people to repent of their sin and believe the truth about Jesus and God wants us to be witnesses of what He has done in our lives.

This work is really the work of God.

We get to participate in that work.

We have the great privilege of sharing what He has done and what He is doing in us!

Two boys were having difficulty at home and their mother could not take it anymore.

She decided to take the boys to the pastor.

The boys were younger but getting in more and more trouble at home.

The pastor took the two boys and separated them and asked the younger, “Son, where is God?”

The boy did not have an answer and the pastor asked again in a stronger voice, “I am asking you, where is God?”

The boy still did not know how he should respond and he began to sweat a bit.

Then the pastor asked one last time, “Where is God?”

The boy sprung up and ran out the church and back to his house passing his brother on the way.

His brother, not knowing what was happening ran after his brother and when they got to the house, they ran upstairs and hid in their closet.

The older brother asked, why are we running?

The younger brother said, we are really in trouble this time.

God is missing and they think we did it!

Have you ever worried about not having the right answer about God?

Some people think that their job is to convict people about how bad they are or to try to convince people that Jesus is who He claimed to be.

That is not our job.

That is the job of the Spirit of God.

Our task is to simply share what it is that He has done for us.

We are simply witnesses of His work in our lives.

So to begin, we must have a relationship with God.

If we are to share what it is that God has done in our lives, we must have first experienced Him.

Have you experienced Him? Has there been a time in your life when you accepted the truth about Jesus and humbled yourself to trust Him to be your Lord and Savior?

It all begins there!!

I want us to look at a passage of Scripture from this morning.

Luke 5

There are three observations I want you to notice from this passage of Scripture.

First, God wants to do a work when you least expect it.

God wants to do a work when you least expect it.

Look at again.

Jesus was there by the lake of Gennesaret and there is a group of people who are pressing into Him to hear Jesus share the Word of God with them.

We see others in this story - they are not there to hear Jesus, they are simply going about their day and living life.

there is a group of fishermen who were taking care of their nets.

We see Jesus get into Simon’s boat and he asks him to put the boat out a bit so that Jesus could teach the crowd.

What is Peter doing?

What were his expectations for his day?

He was just going along with his life being a fisherman.

But that is not all that happened that day.

What he thought was a normal day, was a day to be called to something much much more.

Do you remember when you were going along in your life and God interrupted you?

Do you remember what it was that you were living for?

What your thoughts about the future was?

God has a way of interrupting our lives and does a work in us when we least expect it.

God speaks to Abraham and calls him to leave his home and travel to a country that God will show Him.

Moses is caring for sheep in the desert when God calls to him to turn aide from the burning bush.

Samuel is resting when God calls his name.

David is tending sheep when the prophet calls him in to anoint him to be the next king of Israel.

And Peter is sitting on the shore taking care of his nets.

God desires to know us intimately and he will call out to us in our normal everyday experiences so that we can know Him.

God desires to know us intimately and He will call out to us in our normal everyday experiences so that we can know Him.

Many of us were not looking for God, but He moved into our space and spoke to us calling us to Himself!

And He still works that way!

There are people in our lives today that God is working on.

He has been working in and around them and he will use us to to either encourage them in their relationship with Go dor to encourage them towards a relationship with God.

There are people in our lives today that God is working on.

He has been working in and around them and he will use us to to either encourage them in their relationship with Go dor to encourage them towards a relationship with God.

There are people in our lives today that God is working on.

He has been working in and around them and he will use us to to either encourage them in their relationship with Go dor to encourage them towards a relationship with God.

Let’s look at our passage once again.

Luke 5:4-1

Jesus tells Peter to take the boat out to get some fish.

Now Jesus was the son of a carpenter.

Peter was a fisherman.

We sometimes read right over a passage of Scripture not thinking much about what was taking place.

Peter and his partners had been fishing all night long and caught nothing.

Jesus teaches the people the Word of God and then instructs the one who is the fishing expert to go catch some fish.

There are times when we refuse to be interrupted by God.

Sometimes we are the expert - what could God know?

Peter could have said - I’m the fisherman here.

You can’t tell me what I need to do.

Have you ever refused God’s interruption in your life?

Too busy?

You have your life to live, your plans to fulfill.

Have you ever been there?

God, let’s wait until I get out of school, lets wait until I have children, let’s wait until the children are grown.

Thanks for the invitation, but no.

Are you refusing His invitation in your life today?

Has he been speaking to you?

Richard Boa writes in Conformed To His Image, “Our Lord invites us to the highest calling of all - intimacy with him - and day after day, we decline the offer, preferring instead to fill our stomachs with the pods of short-lived pleasures and prospects.

What does it take to know God more clearly?

The two essential ingredients are time and obedience.

It takes time to cultivate a relationship, and unless we set aside consistent time for disciplines such as solitude, silence, prayer, and the reading of Scripture, we will never become intimate with our Lord.

Obedience is the proper response to this communication, since it is our personal expression of trust in the promises of the Person we are coming to know.

“

Are you willing to stop, humble yourself today and listen to Him? Peter humbled himself and they caught a great catch!

Here is the second thing I want you to see in this passage.

God will increase your profits to shape you and maximize your purpose.

They caught a great catch and Peter had to call to his partners to help him bring the fish in.