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
0.11UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.07UNLIKELY
Fear
0.09UNLIKELY
Joy
0.67LIKELY
Sadness
0.45UNLIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.59LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.51LIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.78LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.93LIKELY
Extraversion
0.32UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.91LIKELY
Emotional Range
0.68LIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
Introduction
If you had to guess, what would you say is the most popular tourist destination in the United States?
The top 6 go in this order: 6- Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida.
5- Yellowstone National Park.
4- The White House.
3- The Statue of Liberty.
2- Niagara Falls.
1- The Grand Canyon.
Our nation is full of some remarkable places and attractions!
Having been to Walt Disney World, I can tell you that it truly is one of the most happy places in the world (even whenever the Florida sun is beating down on your skin).
Having seen pictures of the Grand Canyon and how breathtaking it is.
These places are magical and majestic.
They truly show us the might and power of our God.
With that said, we can experience part of what these places have to offer but we cannot experience everything.
You can stand on the top of the Grand Canyon, but you can’t truly understand how massive it is and how miniscule you are.
You can go to Disney World and ride the rides and watch the shows, but you can’t truly understand the things that are going on behind the scenes.
As fun and as breathtaking as these places are, the reason that they are so fun is because of the relationships that we have with the people that we experience them with.
These places are awesome, but they lack a personal aspect by themselves.
What we see in Scripture is that we are able to have a personal relationship with the creator of these breathtaking destinations.
The creator of our planet and the entire universe!
We should feel loved by Him today because He is a personal God.
Not only is He the creator and designer behind everything we see, but He is also intimately associated with His creation.
As Paul shows us in , The life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me [me, personally], and gave himself for me.
This is great news!
As we looked at in last week and in in general, we have seen how we are supposed to live a radically different life because of what Christ has done on our behalf.
Because of our identity in Jesus Christ we are supposed to live for Him rather than for ourselves.
Our text this morning continues that theme, but it is very heavy.
This is a text that hits us in the gut time after time, but it is most definitely a message that our church and the world needs to hear in our current day and age: That Christians are called to Imitate God.
Let’s see what Paul has to say in !
Ephesians 5:15-20
You might be wondering why we skipped over .
We will be looking at that section next week (too much to get through in 1 sermon!).
Today we will be looking at how Paul calls Christians to Imitate God and Walk in Wisdom.
Imitate God (1-2)
Did you know that this generation has been called the “Fatherless generation”?
Many children are growing up in our country and around the world without a Father or with a Father who does not act as a Father should.
According to a recent study done by the US Department of Education, 39% of students in grades 1-12 are fatherless.
To make matters worse, a child is 4 times more likely to be poor if their father is absent.
Fatherless students are twice as likely to drop out versus a student with a father present.
We are facing an epidemic of fatherlessness in our world today, yet the call from Paul is to imitate our heavenly Father in verse 1 of .
Paul has done a very good job of showing us who our heavenly Father is throughout Ephesians, but now he is calling his audience to imitate Him in the way that they live their lives.
You’re probably thinking, how is this possible?
God created the world in 6 days, I can’t do that.
God knows everything, I barely know some things.
You’re exactly right, we cannot do everything that God does and we can’t know everything that He does, however we can reflect His character.
In Paul calls his audience to put on the new self according to God’s likeness” we are to live a holy and compassionate life just like our God.
In the book of Romans, Paul says that God’s love has been poured out on us by His Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit allows us to love others like the Father.
Paul opens up verse 1 by saying that we are to imitate God as His dear children.
How is someone considered a child of God?
We have to go back to where Paul stated that we were adopted through Jesus Christ.
God adopted us.
He not only made us, but He adopted us into His family.
We spent a lot of time talking about the Biblical picture of Adoption and showed how adoption was completely different back then than it is today in many ways.
Back in biblical times, the adopted individual was in some ways more favored than a biological child because this individual was chosen by the parents.
That sounds really harsh to our ears today, but think of the basic idea in this world: you want to leave a legacy and have someone mighty continue it after you pass away.
We see this especially in the lives of the Roman Emperors who were notorious for adopting a worthy successor to assume the throne after their death.
Just as children were not consulted before their adoption, neither were we. says that we were adopted according to God’s will.
This means that it’s not about our works.
There was nothing special inside of us that made God choose us.
If you are a Christian this morning, you were just as much dead in your sins as your brothers and sisters were, however we were adopted into God’s family.
This is a tremendous blessing!
Even for people who did not grow up with a Father, every Christian gets to call God their “Father”.
He has given us a family called the church.
A family of likeminded brothers and sisters who do the work of the ministry together!
This is a tremendous privilege, but it comes with some chores and instructions that we must do.
Think of it like this in we are adopted into the family of God - this is great news and we should rejoice because of it, however we also have work to do because of .
Again, our work does not stop with praying a prayer or getting baptized, that is where it starts!
As verse 1 says, we must imitate God.
The only way that we can imitate God is to know Him.
The only way to know Him is to know His Word and have a relationship with Him.
You might ask, how am I supposed to imitate God? Great question!
We share the Father’s love and compassion for others.
As Jesus said in
We are to live this way as well!
As we have been studying on Wednesday nights in the book of James, we are supposed to live out our faith.
We are not to strive for intellectual knowledge and leave it at that, we are supposed to be a people of righteous action!
We should be known as a people who love others, who perform acts of mercy to the needy, care for orphans and widows as shows us.
We should meet the needs of others in our congregation and in our community.
As we saw last week in , we should be known as a forgiving and kind people.
Why does this matter so much?
Because we reflect our God to the world around us.
We are the bride of Christ.
For us to not be a kind and forgiving people tells the world that our God is not kind or forgiving.
Certainly that is not the case.
Because of that, we must imitate God and be kind and forgiving.
How do we live that way?
By what we see in verse 2.
Walk in Love (2)
We are to live an obedient life.
We see in that
This is a powerful verse for Christians and one that we must understand fully in order to imitate God.
We must understand the cross!
What differentiates a Christian from a non-Christian?
Among other things, a relationship with Jesus Christ and a command to love others like Christ.
Everyone fails at this, though.
There are no perfect Christians who do this.
In the Greek language, “walk in love” is a command - not a suggestion.
This means that we must daily strive to do this, even when we fall short.
The thing that we must realize is that the type of love talked about in verse 2 by Paul is “Agape” love.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9