Sermon Tone Analysis

Overall tone of the sermon

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I’m so glad to have all of us together this morning.
I’m so glad that you’ve chosen to gather together with this small part of Christ’s Church.
I’m so glad to worship together with you all here and now.
This morning, we’re going to try something different.
Over here, you all are going to sing “Amazing Grace”, hymn #200.
________, you lead them when I tell you all to start.
You’ll sing a few verses.
Over here, you all are going to read out loud Psalm 23 together.
Go ahead and find the Psalm in your Bible and wait for me to tell you to start.
In the back, some of you are going to pray the Lord’s Prayer together and some of you are going to share praises aloud with one another.
Okay now.
When I say go, let’s all of us worship together.
Also, if you don’t want to do what the rest of your section is doing, do whatever you want as long as you do something.
Sing, read, pray, praise.
Go!
Well, what can I say?
That was a hot mess.
Talk about chaos.
Total, complete and utter chaos.
That was a disaster.
A circus of activity.
>There’s a reason we have an order of service: order.
We might change it from time to time, but only slightly.
In the near future, we will probably mix it up a bit more than we have in the past.
We’re not meant to be stale and stagnant, but what happens in the church worship gathering must be characterized by order; it must be orderly.
Paul is addressing the church regarding their worship, their worship gatherings.
As the church there in Corinth gathers together, and they all share—both men and women, possibly children—they are all worshipping the Lord together.
And the goal of all this is the building up of the church, the edification of the church, the strengthening/encouragement/instruction of the church.
He wants to make sure that what they do is intelligible and edifying.
If you read through this chapter (1 Corinthians 14), you’ll come across the word edify and the phrase build up over and over.
In this whole discussion of the gifts given to the individual members of the church, edification and building up are key.
If it’s unintelligible, it can’t edify or build up.
If it’s disorderly, it can’t edify or build up.
That’s the basic caution of 1 Corinthians 14.
>If you have your Bible (and I hope you do), please turn with me to 1 Corinthians 14.
If you are able and willing, please stand with me for the reading of God’s Holy Word.
May the Lord add His blessing to the reading of His Holy Word!
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This, I believe, is the essence of what Paul is getting at:
Disorder doesn’t build up
If the gathering devolves into chaos, the church can’t possibly be built up.
The church is built up—and only built up—with intelligible words and orderly worship.
To some, this sounds little boring, too staunchly conservative, a squelching of the Holy Spirit.
I get where people are coming from, I do.
It seems to them that if every part of the worship gathering is so ordered, so scheduled, so planned then the Holy Spirit can’t possibly move.
But some people trade-in the order, the planning, the scheduling out of a preference for a free-for-all.
To me, that entire thought process smacks of laziness.
I knew a minister who wouldn’t write down any notes—no outline, no manuscript, no Bible references—and he didn’t study the week ahead of his sermon, not at all.
He believed the Spirit would lead him.
And then he told me, straight to my face (I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t hear it straight from his mouth): “If I had notes written down or even an outline, the devil would be able to read over my shoulder and he’d take what I had written and confuse it as I was speaking.”
True stinkin’ story.
To me, it was plain laziness cloaked in a completely whacky, unbiblical theology.
He’s no longer “preaching”, and that’s probably a good thing.
Others say: “We can’t schedule anything or commit to an order of service without squelching the Holy Spirit.”
It’s almost as if some people think the Holy Spirit is the crazy, hippie, free-loving cousin of God the Father and not part of the same Triune Godhead.
God is not a God of disorder…and it goes to follow that neither is the Holy Spirit disorderly or somehow a fan of haphazard spontaneity.
The Holy Spirit works and moves as He will, but it’s clear that the Spirit uses the simple, planned, organized study and presentation of God’s Word to work.
God honors the preparation and planning that His people put into the worship gathering.
In the 1990s, in the wake of the so-called “Toronto Blessing” of a charismatic church, the leader of a religious group contradicted virtually every principle laid out in 1 Corinthians 14.
He actually cautioned people against using their minds and their doctrinal convictions.
“God wants to reach your heart, not your mind.
It is not necessary for you to have a rational understanding of what’s going on here.”
He encouraged people to speak in tongues simultaneously, even though no one interpreted any of those utterances.
And finally, he turned the meeting over to absolute chaos, unleashing a frenzy of noise and activity in the name of the Holy Spirit.
It’s worth asking: “Can God possibly be behind something like that?”
You might think, “Well, yeah, maybe?
It’s possible...”
The Bible answers that question with a definitive “No sir!”
Such chaotic displays in churches must not be attributed to Him.
The Bible speaks with absolute clarity on this.
In different terminology:
God is neither glorified nor is He pleased where chaos and confusion reign.
And if the gathering devolves into chaos, the church can’t possibly be built up.
Verse 26: “Everything must be done so that the church may be built up.”
Disorder doesn’t build up
Disorder can’t preach
Why does the church gather?
Worship, fellowship, and proclamation.
If all of this is chaotic, some level of worship might take place, but will it be worship that pleases God?
If all of this is chaotic, some level of fellowship might occur, but it’ll probably be a sporadic fellowship at best.
If all of this is chaotic, I very much doubt that anything substantive is proclaimed.
And that is a most serious problem.
If the gospel—the Good News about Jesus—isn’t proclaimed, then whatever’s happened in that place isn’t church.
The Good News about Jesus must be the primary focus each Lord’s Day.
Gospel proclamation is paramount.
The way the church is built up is by hearing the gospel—that Jesus came to save sinners like me, that He died, was buried, and rose again, to justify us, making us perfectly righteous, giving us life everlasting; this news needs to be made clear, it needs to be proclaimed plainly during the church’s worship gathering.
This is the task of the Church.
It is the commission that Jesus Himself gave to us.
Disorder cannot possibly lead to a clear proclamation of the gospel.
Disorder cannot begin to build up the church; disorder cannot preach.
Disorder cannot further the mission or the message of the church.
This should be what concerns us most—the mission and message of the church being advanced.
It’s not about our preference, our comfort, our feelings, or our emotions.
It’s about the mission of the church (the building up of one another) and the message of the church (the gospel, the Good News about Jesus).
Paul desires for his brothers and sisters in Corinth to come together in order to advance, not their own individual kingdoms or any earthly kingdom, but the Kingdom of God.
“When you come together…everything must be done so that the church is built up.”
It’s pretty clear.
But it’s also, apparently, easier said than done.
The Corinthians’ misuse of the gift of tongues is leading to disorder.
The guidelines for utilizing the gift of speaking in tongues is laid out in verses 27-28:
The first half of this chapter focused on the clarity and the intelligibility of tongues and other gifts.
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