Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Openness
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Conscientiousness
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FIRST-PERSON
A long obedience
By Joe McKeever
NEW ORLEANS (BP)--"I'm quitting," my friend said.
He had held that job two whole
days and now was walking away.
"They want me to work in an office with
unbelievers and I just can't function in that kind of atmosphere."
I suspect it's not that at all.
Jack's problem is he cannot take a job and stay
with it.
You and I live in a culture of quitting.
People try marriage, find it hard, and
quit.
They try jobs, find them difficult, and walk away.
They take up diets and
discover they were expected to exercise their body and their common sense, and
they quit.
They take up fitness programs for a few weeks, then quit.
They start
to church and they quit.
Half the members on many church rolls rarely darken the doors of the church.
What happened to them?
They quit.
*Eugene Peterson wrote a book on the Psalms with the intriguing title of "A Long *
*Obedience in the Same Direction,"* borrowing the line from a German philosopher.
What Peterson calls "a long obedience in the same direction," the Bible calls
variously */steadfastness, faithfulness and perseverance/*.
It means to get on the
road and stay there.
To hang in there.
To keep on keeping on, as the old folks
used to say.
If you start a diet, for example, and don't see any quick results or you go off
the diet at a party or family get-together and feel so guilty that you trash the
whole plan -- bad decision.
God has so built us that we lose weight slowly.
It's
a built-in protection against starvation.
Maybe it doesn't mean much to you, but
countless millions of others owe their existence to God's creative genius in the
way He made us.
Get on the diet and stay with it for the long haul.
Let others
rush from one diet fad to another.
Not you.
The goal should not be to lose so much weight.
The goal is good health.
That
does not come in a weekend.
If you start on a fitness program, visiting the gym or walking or working out,
and you drop it when you don't see quick results -- very foolish.
Physical
changes come slowly, but they last a long time.
Since the goal is good health
and long life, quit looking in the mirror.
Stay with the program.
Give it a
couple of years before you start checking your statistics.
So, you're reading your Bible, are you?
And trying to get started going to
church?
But so far, you're not getting much out of it?
Of course not.
This is a
foreign land to you.
Give it time.
Stay with the program.
A long obedience is
what you are looking for.
Mack and Melissa were new believers.
They were baptized and were bringing their
infant daughter to church.
And they were making an effort to read their Bible
together.
"It's hard," one said.
Mack said, "A lot of the time we read things in the Bible that we don't
understand."
Melissa said, "I just tell him, 'Keep on reading.'"
Great counsel.
When Carole decided she wanted to begin tithing her income to the Lord through
her church, she said to her friend, "But I don't see how I can afford it."
She
was quiet a moment, then said, "But I'm going to do it regardless."
That is how the Christian life is lived: regardless.
*/Regardless of /*
*/circumstances/**/, opposition, feelings, discouragements and hardships.
Regardless /*
*/of/**/ emotions, put-downs, doubts and obstacles.
Day by day, one step at a time, /*
*/persevering/**/ to the end./*
Want to do a quick Bible study on reasons not to quit? */The fourth chapter of 2 /*
*/Corinthians has several.
Verses 1 and 16 state emphatically, "we do not lose /*
*/heart/**/," /*meaning to grow discouraged and quit.
Why do we not lose heart?
*First, because of what the Lord has done in the past.*
In verse 1, the Apostle
Paul said the Lord has a) shown us mercy and b) given us a ministry.
Those two
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