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
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Fear
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Joy
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Analytical
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Social Tone
Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Agreeableness
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Emotional Range
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Tone of specific sentences
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Anger
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DO
There’s Nothing to do.
You never wanted to say that in my house growing up.
You never wanted to say that in my house if you were growing up in my house.
Doing is an important concept.
Something we value and we seek in others.
We greet each other , “How do you do?”
We ask each other, “What do you do?” What did you do before you retired?
So much of what we do is tied to who we are.
It at times is a superficial question, but it always produces a revealing answer.
Every year when I come before my supervisors, the question is asked “What have you done?” in the past year.
What have you done in the churches you have served?
What shows us evidence of your ministry?
It’s all found in the “do”s of our lives.
The evidence of who you are is what you do.
What you do can reveal character.
It can also reveal competency.
What you do can reveal what’s important to you.
What you do tells others a lot.
So is it any wonder that John the Baptist, when approached by a very mixed bag of people who want to be baptized… begins to look at what they’ve done.
What is their evidence?
Brood of vipers?
He may have been able to pick a more civil way of addressing his guests!
Notice that he apparently has not yet understood the notion of hospitality and welcoming.
Make no mistake, John believes they are requesting the right thing.
He jus thinks there may be alterior motives and he wants to get to that.
You have to look back in this passage to verse 3 to get a proper understanding.
Verse 3 says,
A baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
The chief characteristic of John’s baptism was it indicated sorrow for sin and a moral change on the part of the person to be baptized.
A baptism of repentance for forgiveness of sins.
Essentially, John is asking if you’ve received the forgiveness of God, then what evidence is there in your life that you repented.
God has done all of the work in forgiveness, and he always does.
Remember the Pharisees loved to say, everytime Jesus forgave sins- Who can forgive sin but God?
So John is asking, “If you’ve been forgiven of your sins… the next logical step is that you’ve repented- you’ve changed your ways.
That if you’re forgiven you’ve started on a new path.
A new direction.
Because you see, the Jewish religion, up to his point, was purely a one way transaction.
You came to the temple annually, you bought an animal for a sacrifice, it was givne to the priest who sacrificed it and that transaction brought atonement for sin- forgiveness.
It was a transaction.
It had been that way forever.
The Jewish religion was a transaction.
Any meaning in that transaction was lost- it was gone.
There was no emotion in it, no recognition of the individual, no personal relationship implied.
This was a corporate action a corporate religion.
And here’s John, and he’s looking for evidence.
He wants to see some personal evidence of change in the people’s lives before they come for his baptism- which noted that change, in repentance… and he wanted to know if they had begun to go in a new direction.
The problem is , most people liked the novelty of John’s baptism- not necessarily the new meaning revealed in that baptism.
Baptism meant that there was a change in the heart that was being lived out in life.
Evidence.
And so, that’s why Jesus asks for some evidence.
Look at how he speaks in Luke 3.8
Yellow letter “Bear Fruits”
Bear Fruits- show me your change.
Show me the transformation that brings you to me.
Because if you are still on the same path, you are not changed.
You have to start a new direction, a new way of living.
When you see this word, “Bear”, in this passage … you need to look closer at it.
It’s a common word, but not necessarily that common.
But in this little passage in Luke, concerning John the Baptist, it’s actually all over the place even though you can’t see it.
It’s a greek word, “poieo” and it means to do, or to produce.
It has its roots in the creative activity of God.. as in God produces.
And you see it throughout this passage when the crowd, the tax collectors, and the soldiers ask John what they are to “do”.
In other words, “what do we have to do , or produce, in order to show you that we have started down a new path?
And he tells them.
What htey need to do.
So here’s John, and he is telling them to bear fruit.
And typically, he knew what most of them were going to say.
Everybody there, for the most part, were Jews.
They knew the Jewish religion, they were descendants of Abraham.
And so they were going to refer John back to their lineage- to their blood line.
We are children of Abraham.. we have automatic acceptance with God… we are the ones, so whatever "Get Out of Jail Free card” you are looking for , we got it.
You see, John already knew what they were going to respond… They always did.
They went back to the transaction.
They went back to the religious virtue of their blood line- and it was absolutely not what John was looking for.
They were pointing to a transaction- John was looking for transformation.
And we, so many times, do the same thing.
We’ve lost the meaning and the mystique of our relationship with God- if we ever had it.
And our relationship is nothing because we’ve turned it into a transaction to replace the transformation that should be there.
We attend church and believe that’s enough.
We give and/or serve in some way and we believe that’s enough.
And much like these first century Jews, we begin to tell ourselves that we are good people and we do good things.
I always give change at the salvation army kettle.
I teach a Sunday School class.
I belong to the right civic clubs and I’m generally a good neighbor.
My family likes me, I think.
And it almost seems like we are trying to convince ourselves.
And let me tell you something.
You may be fudging on the truth with your wife, your family, and your best friends.
But you can’t do that with God.
There are no mulligans with God.
If there is anywhere that we need to be brutally honest- it’s with God and it’s with our selves.
And I think, sometimes, we can’t be honest with God until we are honest with ourselves.
It’s hard.
Notice how John says this-”Don’t say to yourselves, “We have abraham for our father.”
Don’t lie to yourselves about this transactional religion that you have going on right now.
It’s not enough.
Never will be.
And you’d better be honest with yourself about that so that at some point you can be honest with God about that.
And we do that all the time.
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