Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Anyone here a twin?

Anyone have twins in their family?

I have twin sisters and their names are Sherrie and Carrie, and you can probably tell by their names that my parents were into the idea matching outfits and everything.

My sister are not identical twins, they are fraternal and you might say that their birthday is one of the only things that they have in common.

Carrie is more blond, Sherrie is more brunette

Carrie is taller, Sherrie is shorter

Carrie was a bookworm, Sherrie was an athlete

Carrie was Computer Science Major, Sherrie was an early education Major

Carrie is older, which makes Sherrie younger...but not by much

But there were times when that little bit made a big difference.

“Mom!

How come Carrie get’s to do that and I don’t?”

“Mom!

How come Carrie get’s to do that and I don’t?”

Carrie response “Because I am older”

And Sherrie would reply, “Yeah by like 2 minutes”

“Still, I am older”

They mostly just joke about these days, but there are implied privileges with being the older sibling and even though they were born at almost the same exact time, Carrie felt justified in claiming those privileges.

Tension

Tension

We are continuing this morning in our teaching series from the book of Genesis, and the reason I bring my twin sisters up is because we are looking at the first recorded birth of twins in the Bible.

The drama of last weeks love story between Isaac and Rebekah, gives way to the birth of their twins boys today.

My parents were less convinced of the privilege that Carrie thought were present in her birth right, but that was not true for Isaac and Rebekah.

In ancient Biblical times the first born son recieved something called the “Birthright” and it came with privileges that were recognized by everyone in the family.

Your birth order played a very important part in the role you would play in the family.

one of the babies being born stretched out his hand first, so the Midwife tied a red string to that babies hand.

That particular baby came highlights an emphasis on birth order thJacob and Esau, and

we are particularly looking at this book and all of it’s historical stories through the lens of the Gospel.

Today we will be tackling the story of the twin sons of Isaac and Rebekah.

This is the first mention of twins in the Bible and it gives us a picture into the heightened importance of birth order in the ancient world.

The first born son recieved something called the “Birthright” and it camme with privelages and status well beyond anything that my sisters ever argued about.

In fact, the birth order was so important in the ancient world that in about 10 chapters the Bible talks about the only other set of twins being born.

In that episode, one of the babies being born stretched out his hand first, so the Midwife tied a red string to that babies hand.

That particular baby came highlights an emphasis on birth order thJacob and Esau, and

Tension

The establishment of birth order was so important that later on in Genesis, in the only other mention of the birth of twins, one of those twins stuck his arm out first and the midwife tied a red string around his wrist.

It just so happened that the little one pulled his arm back in and the other boy was brought out into the world first.

But the boy with the string on his wrist was declared the first born.

It was serious business, who was born first.

It was serious business to possess the “birthright” in ones family.

Yet in today’s story, the older twin grew up to consider his “birth right” of little consequence.

While there is little made of the privileges of birth order these days, many of us have experienced a time when we realized that we have not been treating some of the most valuable things in our lives as the most valuable things in our lives.

Most of us, at some point in our life had experienced a wake up call of sorts to the reality that we have not been treating the most valuable things in our lives as the most valuable things in our lives.

This wake up call, often happens in the midst of a crisis of some sort and we start to see how over the course of time we have started to take something that we would say were “Truly important to Us” for granted.

We might start to question then what it is that we “truly value”, because what we “truly value” says a lot about who we are, doesn’t it?

Wake Up Calls like this teach us that we can’t determine what we truly value just by what we say we truly value.

So how do we find it out what is truly important to us?

Wake Up Calls like this teach us that we can’t determine what we truly value just by what we say we truly value.

So how do we find it out?

And we know that we can’t find what we “truly value” by just answeringThis is not something that can be determined simply by being asked about it.

Those things that we “truly value” cannot be purchased by our words.

We find out what we truly value in how we spend two other currencies:

You have probably heard the saying that there are two places to look when trying to find out what is important to someone: Their Calendar and their Checkbook.

Our Time and Our Money

It has been said that there are two places to look when trying to find out what is important to someone: Their Calendar and their Checkbook.

We don’t always treat the things that are the most valuable, What we truly value says a lot about who we are, and often times we can’t determine what we truly value simply by being asked.

It is the decisions that we make that really determines what we value.

Typically, we can find the answer to what we truly value by looking in two places: Our Calendar and Our Finances.

We each have an endless supply of words, but our time and money is limited.

So if we want to know what is really important to us, that is where we have to look.

The decisions that we make with the limited quantities of our time and our money will tell us what is actually important to us.

What we truly value.

“Talk” as they say “is cheap”.

This is so true about us, but the question that I want us to grapple with this morning is, “How do we determine what is truly important to God?” Do we check his calander or His checkbook?

Over the past several weeks we have been looking at many aspects of the promises of God, so what happens if we apply that same notion that “Talk is Cheap” to God?

This is something that is never true of God.

His Word is His action.

There are not discrepancies between the two.

We can always trust the promises, commitments, covenants of God because He is not limited in time or any other resource.

God’s Word is His Action, and no matter how unusual his methods might seem, we can trust that he will be faithful in all of his promises.

Let’s discover continue our

That is a question for everyone of us here today, but it is not a question for God.

We can trust the promises, commitments, covenants of God because He is not limited in time or any other resource.

This can make his ways hard to understand at times.

We need to be asking/ challenging ourselves in how we are spending our time and money.

Do they actively reflect the values that we say we have, or have we allowed things like our appetites, or impatience, or distractions or other peoples expectations to govern how we live our lives.

We are fiercely trying to make every sale, hit every promotion, stretch out every retirement dollar in order to

We need to be asking/ challenging ourselves in how we are spending our time and money.

Do they actively reflect the values that we say we have, or have we allowed things like our appetites, or impatience, or distractions or other peoples expectations to govern how we live our lives.

All of us, no matter who we are are going to have times when we are tempted to set aside our true values in order to meet one of these other demands, and the question is what impact will our value confusion have on the promises that we have been given by God.

That is one of the things that we will take a look at this morning from our passage in Genesis, so open your Bibles to chapter 25 (p.

19), I’ll pray and we will learn from God’s Word together.

Things like the tyranny of the Urgent, where we run around trying to put out fires all the time instead of setting up our day according to what is most important.

I have a tendency to spend time and money on things that matter much less than they should, and those things that I would say that really matter to me do not get

Their calendar it boils down to how we spend the big three:

Time

Money

Energy

God follows through on his promises for his own honor, not to honor the behavior of the people who have recieved the promise.

Truth

Our text for today really begins in verse 19 of Chapter 25, but I wanted to briefly walk us up to this from the beginning of the Chapter.