Sermon Tone Analysis

Overall tone of the sermon

This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
0.12UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.1UNLIKELY
Fear
0.56LIKELY
Joy
0.66LIKELY
Sadness
0.15UNLIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.57LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.06UNLIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.89LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.81LIKELY
Extraversion
0.21UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.67LIKELY
Emotional Range
0.7LIKELY

Tone of specific sentences

Tones
Emotion
Anger
Disgust
Fear
Joy
Sadness
Language
Analytical
Confident
Tentative
Social Tendencies
Openness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Emotional Range
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
Don’t let your past define you…part 2
“And when he had come to Jerusalem, he attempted to join the disciples.
And they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe that he was a disciple.
But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles and declared to them how on the road he had seen the Lord, who spoke to him, and how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus.
So he went in and out among them at Jerusalem, preaching boldly in the name of the Lord.
And he spoke and disputed against the Hellenists.
But they were seeking to kill him.
And when the brothers learned this, they brought him down to Caesarea and sent him off to Tarsus.
So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace and was being built up.
And walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied.”
The last time we were together here in the Book of Acts, Saul, was being defined by his past, which caused confusion and compulsion.
The Jews were confusion and amazed by his radial change of heart and behavior cause by his repentance and his accepted of Christ Jesus as his Lord and Savior.
The Jews were also confounded by the fact that he gain considerable strength and power and knowledge of the Gospel and continued to proclaim Christ as the Son of God.
Now because of his past alliance with Judaism they were driven my compulsion to seek to kill him for his betrayal of the Jewish faith.
This morning we are going to see the other side of the coin; the Jews saw Saul as a traitor but the disciples still view Saul from his past, and they saw him as a terror.
They did not trust him, they did not understand how he could change so completely in a matter of just a few days.
They did not fully understand or trust the cleansing power of the Gospel of Christ Jesus to wash our sins away!
Question: "What does it mean that our sins are washed away?"
Answer: When the Bible speaks of our sins being washed away, it means we are forgiven.
Our sins, which had defiled us and defined us are now gone.
By the grace of God through Christ, we are no longer spiritually corrupt; we stand justified before God.
The concept of having our sins washed away is first introduced in the Old Testament.
When God gave instructions for consecrating the Levites, He said, “Thus you shall do to them to cleanse them: sprinkle the water of purification upon them, and let them go with a razor over all their body, and wash their clothes and cleanse themselves.”
().
commands the rebellious people to “Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your deeds from before my eyes; cease to do evil.”
God often used physical illustrations to help us understand spiritual truths.
We understand that washing with water makes us physically clean, so the Bible takes that concept and applies it to our spiritual state.
Throughout the Old Testament, God commanded people to purify themselves by following rigorous instructions about sacrifices, ritualistic bathing, and types of clothing to wear (; ; ).
From ancient times, God’s people understood that sin makes us dirty, and dirty people are unworthy to enter into the presence of the Lord.
Many of the laws in the Old Testament were given for the purpose of contrasting God’s holiness with man’s unholiness.
David wrote of his need to have his sins washed away.
When Nathan the prophet exposes his sin with Bathsheba.
(), David repented with great sorrow.
In his prayer of repentance, he says, “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow” ().
Jesus refers to Nicodemus’s need to have his sins washed away:
“Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God.” ().
Human beings have always needed some way to have our sins washed away.
The New Testament continues the theme of washing sins away.
Ananias told Paul to “And now why do you wait?
Rise and be baptized and wash away your sin, calling on his name”
().
God had demonstrated through the Law that we cannot purify ourselves; only He can.
So when Ananias instructed Paul to be baptized to wash away his sins, Paul understood that, despite his exalted status as a Pharisee, he was as sin-covered as the lowest tax collector.
The Bible makes it clear that every human being is born into this world as a sinner, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” ().
That sin makes us ceremonially and catastrophically unclean and unfit to enter into the presence of God.
The blood of Christ is what washes our sins away, “ But with the precious blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish or spot” ().
contrasts the old methods of cleansing with the new covenant that came through Jesus Christ.
Jesus came to earth to establish a new way of being made right with God.
says, “For if the blood of goats and bulls, and the sprinkling of defiled persons with the ashes of a heifer, sanctify for the purification of the flesh, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.”
When we, through faith, apply the blood of Jesus to our unclean souls, God pronounces us ceremonially clean, because Christ gave us Himself to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for Himself a people for His own possession who are zealous for good works.
Christ saves us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit.
He washes our sins away, as it were; He places our sin debt upon His own Son and declares us righteous in His sight.
God chooses to forget our sin and remove it far from Him, as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”
We are still sinners in practice, but righteous in our position.
An adopted child becomes a son or daughter the moment the judge declares him so, even though he may not know the parents well, understand their house rules, or be deserving of their love in any way.
Over time, he or she grows to know and love them, assimilating into their family life, and becoming in practice what he was already declared to be in position.
So it is with us.
Our sins are washed away the moment we place our faith and trust in the saving work of Jesus on our behalf.
Overtime, we grow to know and love our Father, overtime assimilate into our Christian family, and overtime become in practice what we have already been declared to be in position, overtime we grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
The joy of the Christian life is that, even though we are not perfect, we can live every moment with the confidence that the blood of Christ washes our sins away Jesus and we have been pronounced, “clean” by the final Judge.
, “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect?
It is God who justifies.”
But unfortunately there will be Christians in the church and non Christian outside of the church who will not trust God enough to trust that He has changed us!
This is what Saul has to deal with in this passage, but the passage clearly teaches that we still should not let our past define us.
Don’t let your past define you... trust God to sent a consigner for you.
Don’t let your past define you... trust God to fight your enemies who confront you.
Don’t let your past define you... trust God to multiply His ministry and comforted you.
Let us pray...
Don’t let your past define you…trust God to sent a cosigner for you.
, “And when he had come to Jerusalem, he attempted to join the disciples.
And they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe that he was a disciple.27
But Barnabas took him and brought him to the apostles and declared to them how on the road he had seen the Lord, who spoke to him, and how at Damascus he had preached boldly in the name of Jesus.”
Saul has now left Damascus and returned to Jerusalem, being full of the Holy Spirit, being revived by the strengthening and the power given to him through that same Holy Spirit.
Saul attempted to join the others brothers in the faith, the disciples; but they did not trust or believe that he was a disciple.
They were still caught up in their understanding of who Saul once was instead of who Christ Jesus had not made him.
This is a common problem among Christians who have been saved from a hideous past.
Human forgiveness trails slowly behind the holy forgiveness that comes from Christ.
People, even good people will continue to keep their guard up and their acceptance at bay; until there is some incontrovertible, indisputable, infallible, evidence, that a change has taken place.
Though I’m sure Saul tried to convince them of genuineness of his conversion.
Their attitude seems strange to us, for surely the Damascus saints had gotten the word to the church in Jerusalem that Saul had been converted and was now preaching the Word.
Perhaps Saul’s “disappearance” for almost three years gave an air of suspicion to his testimony.
Where had he been?
What was he doing?
Why had he waited so long to contact the Jerusalem elders?
There were many unanswered questions that helped create an atmosphere of suspicion and fear around Saul.
Saul now Paul begins in verses 11 and 12 in by saying that the Gospel he preached was not devised by human wisdom, nor had he received it from the other apostles; rather, he was taught it directly by Jesus Christ Himself.
He continues by reminding them that he had been trained in and was fanatically devoted to the erroneous traditions of Judaism.
When God called Paul on the Damascus road, he was commissioned to preach the Gospel of Christ.
Paul said that when Christ called him, he did not go to Jerusalem to receive instruction from the apostles.
Rather, he retired into Arabia for a time and not until three years later did he go to Jerusalem.
Even then, the only apostle he met was Peter, and the only other leader he met was James, the presiding elder of the Jerusalem church.
It has often been remarked that Paul clearly implied that he spent three years being taught by Jesus Himself (1:12), either directly or (perhaps more likely) through the study of the Word.
Thus, like the other apostles, Paul studied with Christ for three years before beginning his ministry (compare ).
Thus, Paul established for the Galatians that he received the Gospel by the same means as the other apostles —directly from Jesus.
Fourteen years after his conversion, he had occasion to go to Jerusalem and there he met privately with the leaders, including the apostles Peter and John (2:1–10).
He reports to the Galatians that they compared notes and found that there was absolutely no difference between what he had been teaching for eleven years in Antioch and what the apostles had been teaching in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria.
There never had been a problem, nor was there one currently, between Paul’s message and the teaching of the Jerusalem church.The point Paul is making to the Galatians is that there has never been any question about the content of the Gospel.
The same Christ taught Peter and Paul, and both men were in complete agreement.
Yet with all that being true, what Saul needs here is a consigner.
It was Barnabas who helped the Jerusalem church accept Saul.
We met Joseph, the “son of encouragement,” in , and we will meet him again as we continue our studies in the book of Acts.
Barnabas “took hold” of Saul., brought him to the church leaders, and convinced them that Saul was both a believer and chosen apostle.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9