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
0.1UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.06UNLIKELY
Fear
0.11UNLIKELY
Joy
0.64LIKELY
Sadness
0.59LIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.48UNLIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.3UNLIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.56LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.95LIKELY
Extraversion
0.21UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.92LIKELY
Emotional Range
0.61LIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
Intro
My name is Nathan Colestock.
I currently live in Dubuque.
It’s crazy and so much fun to speak with you briefly tonight (I get about 20 minutes, so don’t worry, I won’t be too long) because I sat where you are now not very long ago.
I graduated from high school in Minnesota in 2016, just three years ago.
So I remember this, and I still think the way you do.
So as I speak tonight, know that I’m telling you the things that I should have heard when I sat in the chairs you are now.
The first thing that I had to hear was that life is about to happen.
You haven’t had to be independent.
You’ve made plenty of significant decisions, your life has been valuable and has mattered all the way to now, and you have been dependent on your parents.
You were able to get to your first job because they filled your car with gas.
And you could afford to buy your car because you didn’t have to pay rent.
We wouldn’t have made it to here without them.
So thanks parents!
And now you’re being launched into independent life, many of you.
You’ll move out, you’ll live a while away, you won’t have to answer to your parents about how much time you spend doing homework or how many Diet Cokes you can have with dinner.
This might happen faster than you think.
I moved to college with my high-school sweetheart, and we were married the next summer.
We had to pay rent, and insurance, and show up at school.
It was crazy, and I thought I was ready.
I was not.
Now, two in my third year of college our first child was born, a daughter, who is three weeks old, and I graduated from college five days ago.
In ten days I move back to my hometown to begin my masters program.
I don’t say this to show off, I say this to scare you.
Life is about to start!
Maybe not as fast as it did for me, but it’s about to get real, and I wasn’t ready for it sitting where you are now.
I needed to hear someone say, “You’re going to be a husband and father in three years!
So grow up!”
The truth is, that we’re all the same.
We want to live significant lives.
We want them to count for something.
We want a cause worth living for, in fact a cause worth dying for.
Have them start undoing the twine.
Why Live Significantly?
You likely take that for-granted.
Take a second and think, “Why does it matter that I live significantly?
Why does it matter that I do good things and not bad?”
What’s the point?
Rope: Two Choices
Imagine with me that this twine is your life.
There’s a lot of left huh?
Tons and tons and tons of time.
Years and years and years ahead of you.
Now here’s the thing.
This little colored part, this is your life on earth.
Your quick eighty years on earth is right here, and then there is forever.
The rest of this twine is ___ years.
But there’s forever and ever after your quick eighty.
So, the way I see it, you have two options.
Live for the now
You can live for this quick eighty years and do everything that you can to enjoy it.
You can look at the rest of this ____ years and say that there’s just nothing there.
You can look around this world and call it a happy accident, you can look at your friends and be happy that the universe, in a big fluke, accidently ended up with earth.
If you want to live for the this quick eighty here’s what you’d be thinking: “I’m going to work hard because that’s what I’m supposed to do.
I’m going to apply to a good school and do my best and then get a good job and work as hard as I can.
I’m not going to cheat, and least not when I have the time to study hard.
And I’m not going to try to hurt anyone.
I’m just going to try to take what I need to be comfortable and happy.
Hopefully I meet someone so that I don’t have to be alone, and at the end of working and sweating and showing up to work I’m going to finally quit.
I’m going to work really hard here so that that this part is really really fun, and then eventually it’s all going to end.
But some of you might see the problem here…what’s the point of this working hard?
Is breaking my back for forty years so that I can take a cruise and catch a flight overseas worth it?
Why am I going to do so much good stuff when it’s so inconvenient?
You’re about to be unaccountable but to yourself right?! So why do all this good stuff?
The only person you have to answer to is the one in the mirror.
So you’ll decide that you don’t have to be a good person, you just can’t be so bad you can’t face yourself the next morning.
Without anything coming next, and with no God you won’t be able tof ind a convincing reason to be courages and lay your life down for others, because then you lose your eighty!
And without a God or anything coming next you won’t find a good reason to live selflessly, you don’t have long!
You need to get everything that you can!
In fact, with no God and nothing coming next, who’s making all the rules about life that says I can’t lie and cheat?
Because I don’t care if you made them!
Who says you get to make rules for me?
And who says that this society gets to make rules for me?
And eventually you’ll turn off the conscience enough to get to do what you really want to, but not so much that you wake up to find a monster behind your own eyes.
You’ll run after stuff and money so that you can get all the pleasure that you can now, and avoid all the pain you can.
You’ll try to get satisfied in the people around you, so you’ll look for them to meet your needs, and you’ll look to try to get satisfied by the stuff around you, so you’ll look to buy all that you can.
You’ll use those people and buy that stuff in the hopes that around the next corner there is a life worth living where you can be as happy as you want to be.
That’s what living for this quick eighty years will be like.
You can probably tell, I’m entirely uninterested in that.
I don’t want that.
I want meaning that goes past this quick eighty into this ____.
Live for the next
So, you could also live for this next part.
This ____ years.
You could structure you quick eighty here around a solid and sure hope that one day it’ll be over and you’ll enter this part.
If you’re living for this, you don’t think that your desires are too strong and you need to tame them.
You don’t think that your want for good food and drinks and sex and satisfaction are too big, you think that your desire for satisfaction is way to small.
You think that you’re like a hungry kid digging in the garbage can when the fridge is right behind him.
So you go looking in this next ___ years and trust in a God who’s there.
You hear :
The LORD reigns, ylet the earth rejoice;
let the many zcoastlands be glad!
2 aClouds and thick darkness are all around him;
brighteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.
3 cFire goes before him
and burns up his adversaries all around.
4 His dlightnings light up the world;
the earth sees and etrembles.
5 The mountains fmelt like gwax before the LORD,
before hthe Lord of all the earth.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9