Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome

Good morning!

Welcome to Fox Valley Christian Church.

Resolution

Happy New Year!

I mentioned this last week, but I have a completely different New Year’s Resolution this year than I have ever had before.

Sometimes I go all out and I create a plan for how I am going to get physically healthy or how I am going to be a better husband or father.

Sometimes the New Year comes and goes and I don’t do anything at all.

This year, as the New Year approached, I began to get an overwhelming feeling that I have been misfiring with my New Years Resolutions.

In this life, I have one purpose, I have one mission, I have one reason for being here.

That is to know God and to make Him known.

That’s it.

And everything I do either increases my ability and my success at knowing God and making Him known or it doesn’t.

Well what about being a good husband and good father?

Are those bad things?

Absolutely not!

I cannot truly be a good father or a good husband if I am not deepening my relationship with Christ, if He is not living and producing through me.

I am not really loving my family if I am not leading them to know Christ.

What about the desire to be more healthy?

Is that bad?

No.

In fact, God calls me to be a good steward with the resources that He has given me.

The money I have, I am supposed to make it the most effective I can for His kingdom.

The same goes with my physical body.

If I am able to increase the effectiveness, energy, and timespan that my physical body is able to be here and do mission … and it is not causing me to be a bad steward with the other resources He has given me … time, money, relationships, etc. … then I should strive to be more healthy so I think more clearly and have the energy and extended time to be on mission for Him.

So to that end, I have decided that this year my resolution is to be more effectively on mission for God this year than I was last year.

To know Him more, to make Him known to more people, and to make the decisions necessary in my life so that I may continue to be more effective each year in the mission He has called me to.

GamePlan

I have begun to look at my life, each area and ask, “Is this helping me to know God or make Him known?”

I also started looking at my personal evangelistic strategies.

Or a better way to say that might be, I began looking at what I am currently doing to make God known to people that might not currently know Him.

What am I currently doing?

What do I see that Jesus did?

What changes do I need to make?

I want to have an intentional GamePlan for making God known.

As I started looking at Jesus, I noticed that there were certain patterns that He had.

Certain foundation elements to His evangelism.

And if I wanted to reach people how Jesus reached people, then I should try to have these same benchmarks in my personal outreach strategies.

Over the next 4 weeks, we are going to look at each one of these as we develop our personal GamePlan’s to making God known.

What about if you don’t know God?

What if you don’t have a relationship with God, so as of right now you have no plan to make Him known?

I get that.

I am fully aware that not everyone in this room knows God.

That is why it is our aim to make Him known.

But what I hope you see over the course of these next four weeks is that just because you don’t know God, that doesn’t mean that He sits back and waits for you to seek Him.

God is pursuing you.

And the same benchmarks that should be in our ministry … God is already living them out in your life right now.

Whether you recognize it or give Him credit for it.

My hope is that over the next four weeks that as you begin to see how God works in the lives of those He pursues … that you will begin to see how God is already working in your life.

Sick Kiss

My family has been sick these last few weeks.

Just some really heavy chest colds.

If you noticed last week I was extremely dependent on my bottle of water and trying really hard not to cough into the microphone.

Because of this, our house has been on lockdown procedures.

No drinking out of the same cup as anyone else, make sure that you are extra washing your hands, and no kisses on the lips.

Confession, I am not good at that last rule.

When the kids are sick, I don’t care how bad it is.

I don’t care what is wrong with them.

When I lay them down for bed, I give them hugs and I give them a quick kiss goodnight.

If I get sick, I get sick.

Why do I do that?

It’s simple really.

Because when I was sick, my parents would always throw caution to the wind to let me know they loved me.

They never let that get in the way of letting me know they love me.

I have been sick.

I have been the one that people shy away from, put a hand up, cover there mouths not to get my sickness.

But I always knew that my parents would draw me in close.

They would wrap their arms around me, they would let me sleep with my head on the chest knowing that they were breathing in the same air that was mixed with the air I was breathing out.

They always went the extra mile to let me know they love me.

And not just when I am sick.

My parents still to this day will sacrifice so that I know they love me.

Jen and I need someone to watch our kids Friday night.

So my parents said they would take them.

What started with one day, turned into 4 days.

Then they had to take a last minute trip to KY and if they had to do it with the kids, then they had to bring their 15 passenger van and that it just too big of a convenience.

But you know what?

That’s exactly what they did.

Love is a funny thing.

I can tell you I love you, but on it’s own, those words don’t mean anything.

You know I love you by what I do for you.

You know I love you by what I don’t do because of you.

You know I love you by how I sacrifice for you.

The first benchmark in Jesus’ ministry is that Jesus displayed God’s love.

Today we are going to look at one of the moments in Jesus’ ministry where God’s love was on full display through Jesus.

The Leper

In order to understand fully what is going on here, we first need to get a better understanding for leprosy and a better understanding as to how leprosy was viewed at that time.

What we call leprosy now, would not be the same disease that is being referred to in scripture.

When scholars look at Leviticus 13 and 14 and other areas of scripture where they describe leprosy, the descriptions do not match with the skin condition that we modernly call leprosy.

Instead, Biblical leprosy could be best understood as referring to severe and serious skin conditions.

Skin conditions that were so severe, lepers had to live outside of town and in their own communities.

When they would approach people, they had to shout “unclean, unclean” as a warning to others.

In the same way a truck beeps when it backs up a leper had to get accustomed to shouting “unclean, unclean” for all to hear as they approached.

Imagine that for a moment.

Imagine what that would do to your self worth.

You didn’t have to worry about what names anyone would call you or what they would say about you.

You already knew, you are unclean.

And you didn’t just know it, but you had to be always ready and prepared to broadcast this fact about yourself.

We try to hide the fact that we are unclean.

We have these personal, private sins.

We don’t want people to know about them.