Sermon Tone Analysis

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The old farmer claimed that he could command his mule with nothing more than a few soft words, no whips or prods necessary.

She would respond, he claimed, with nothing more than gently spoken commands.

So his buddy down at the feed store asked for a demonstration.

“Prove to me that your old mule will respond with nothing more than gentle language.”

Out in the field they went, the farmer, his buddy, and the mule.

As the friend watched, first in awe and then in horror, the farmer took a huge piece of lumber, a two-by-four about six feet long, and swung it with all his might, hitting the mule on one ear!

When the animal stopped braying and bellowing and prancing around, the farmer then said, quietly, “Come here” and the mule came.

“Sit”, and the whimpering creature sat.

“Back up”, and she backed into the harnesses of a waiting plow and waited calmly for him to hook up.

“You see?

She’ll respond to a simple voice command”.

But his friend objected, “Whatever are you talking about?

You said all you had to do was talk to her, but you hit her with this huge two-by-four!

What do you mean, you just command her with words!

That’s not what I saw!”

“Oh, that,” said the farmer.

“Well, first I do have to get her attention!”

It seems to me that God often uses the proverbial two-by-four to get our attention, because without it we would not listen, nor would we follow.

God has to do something dramatic, frequently, because we just don’t notice that He is calling us.

He is calling us to do something.

He is calling us out of our mulish stubbornness and is summoning us to adjust our lifestyles.

And we don’t even notice it until He smacks us hard.

Several years ago Henry Blackaby designed a course entitled, “/Experiencing God”./

We had classes here based on the material contained in his teaching.

Blackaby built his “Experiencing God” teaching on what he calls the Seven Realities:

1.      God is always at work around you.

2.      God pursues a continuing love relationship with you that is real and personal.

3.      God invites you to become involved with Him in His work.

4.      God speaks by the Holy Spirit through the Bible, prayer, circumstances and the church to reveal Himself, His purposes and His ways.

5.      Gods invitation for you to work with Him always leads you to a crisis of belief that requires faith and action.

6.

You must make major adjustments in your life to join God in what He is doing.

7.

You come to know God by experience as you obey Him and He accomplishes His work through you.

The first four realities are not all that difficult to live out.

But beginning with #5 it becomes much more uncomfortable.

#6 says:  “You must make major adjustments in your life to join God in what He is doing.”

You must.

And the adjustments will be major.

Some of us have to be hit hard to see what God is doing and what our response will be.

Some of us are just plain slow to comprehend and slower to adjust.

“You must make major adjustments in your life to join God in what He is doing.”

Saul found that out.

Saul the tentmaker, raised in Tarsus; a privileged young man; exposed to the finest intellectual currents of his day; trained at the feet of Gamaliel, the master of rabbinic Judaism; able to claim Roman citizenship.

He was doing the work of God.

He was defending the faith by hunting down there heretics and turning them over for trial and execution.

* Num.

25:1-15 (READ)

* 2 Macc.

6:13-"it is a mark of great kindness when the impious are not let alone for a long time, but punished at once."

* Dead Sea Scrolls: a righteous man "bears unremitting hatred toward all men of ill repute."

(IQS 9:22 [Rule of the Community])

Saul had purpose, ambition, direction, applause, success.

He had it all.

No reason for him to change his life.

No reason for him to do anything different from what he had been doing all along.

His life was working as it was.

He was doing what God wanted him to be doing.

Why change?

For Saul, however, God’s two-by-four was a flash of light on the road to Damascus.

God’s wake-up call for Saul was a personal encounter out on the highway, a moment of truth that made Saul take notice.

Adjustments?

You want to talk about adjustments, major adjustments?

With Saul you have them.

Just about every adjustment you can imagine, Saul made.

·        What about his reputation?

·        What about his position?

·        What about his income?

·        What about his elite education?

·        What about his companions?

·        What about his marriage?

·        I suspect that there was a great deal of aloneness in his decision making.

The scripture says that his companions saw the light & heard a noise, but did not understand anything the noise said.

There was no one to share the experience with; no one to bounce his thoughts off of.

And why did Saul need to adjust?

Because God in Christ had gotten his attention and had forced him to acknowledge the truth he had so long resisted.

When truth comes, you must make major adjustments in your life to join God in what He is doing.

*I.

**First, let’s recognize that God calls all of us to major adjustments.*

All of us.

Not just those who already want to change, not just those who aren’t doing anything else anyway.

God calls all of us to major adjustments in our lives in order to join Him in what He is doing.

And it is not a one-time thing.

It is a lifestyle of change, in order to align ourselves with what God is doing.

So often I’ve heard people say, “Well, I don’t think you have to have a Damascus Road kind of experience.

I don’t think everybody has to see lights and hear voices.

I’ve just always been a Christian.

I can’t remember when I didn’t believe.

So I don’t think everybody has to go through a Damascus Road conversion.”

I agree, mostly.

I’m sure that if God has created different personalities, so also He provides different response.

But maybe we are discarding too easily the possibility that God may still want to make radical changes in our lives, even though we’ve always been able to take it easy.

Are we throwing away too quickly the idea that God might call for major adjustments in our lives?

Consider this: if God has never, or not recently asked you to make major, uncomfortable changes in order to line yourself up with his will, might this mean that you actually resisting the things God really wants to do in you?

Is it possible you haven’t had it because you don’t want it?

Saul must have found it very hard to change.

·        His personality had been shaped by his training as a Pharisee.

·        He had been steeped in the legalism of that tradition.

·        He was from a privileged home.

·        He was raised in the university town of Tarsus, where the great ideas of the Greek world were all around him.

Why would anybody want to leave all that?