Sermon Tone Analysis

*A MAGNETIC, MASCULINE CHURCH \\ Acts 6:1-7*

 

*Introduction*: The botanical life of most trees is amazing.

Often when a tree is damaged and the trunk is cut down, a new shoot will come up out of the stump or roots.

As long as the roots are healthy, it will try to live.

It will put out new shoots and eventually try to flower and reproduce.

It keeps adapting to its circumstances and tries its best to thrive.

Tree I saw at Metolius, growing out of dead trunk.

Perhaps you have also seen the type of tree that is in the middle picture.

This piece of wood depicted there is no longer alive.

Somewhere thousands of years ago in Arizona, this tree toppled.

It stopped living.

Slowly over the years, chemicals began to take the place of the living tissues and this wood became stone.

We know it as petrified wood, wood that has become stone.

What was once alive and growing and flexible is now dead and rigid.

It can no longer grow.

It can no longer reproduce.

It cannot bear fruit.

It is like many churches.

New churches begin as supple and viable.

They grow and reproduce.

A new church is a risk-taking church.

To begin a new church the members must step out in faith and trust God to bless them.

A lot of what I have to say today comes from the book /Why Men Hate Going to Church/, by David Murrow.

He states: “A growing church is a risk-taking church.”

(p.

76).

This kind of church attracts men.

A new church needs men.

It needs men to help set up and break down after services meeting in a gym or some other type of building.

It needs men to help build the new building.

A church that needs physical activity draws men like a magnet.

Men have a lot to offer start-up churches.

Murrow concludes: “Younger churches seem somewhat more successful in attracting and retaining men.

This suggests that as a church ages, it loses its men and is unable to attract more” (Murrow, p. 56).

Christianity has the heritage of Moses, Elijah, David Daniel, Peter & Paul.

They were lions, not lambs.

(p. 6)

“As a congregation ages,” Murrow continues, “it begins to value feminine gifts such as nurturing, stability, and close-knit community…Women stay loyal because of the relationships they’ve developed, but the less relational men fall away.

While “more than 90% of men say they believe in God and 5~/6 call themselves Christian, only 2~/6 attend church on a given Sunday.

The average man accepts the reality of Jesus Christ, but fails to see any value in going to church.

It is not true that men are less religious.

“Male & female participation are roughly equal in Judaism, Buddhism & Hinduism.

In the Islamic world men are publicly & unashamedly religious—often more so than women.

Of the world’s great religions, only Christianity has a consistent, nagging shortage of male practitioners.“

(p.

8)

Men need vision—not just relationships—to stay motivated in church” (pages 56, 57).

Without a strong vibrant core of male leadership, the church petrifies.

“But when there’s a core of spiritually alive men, the church thrives” (59).

Think about how the church began in Acts 2. Unbelievers saw “A small group of men empowered by the Holy Spirit.

This is how the church grew in New Testament times, and it is no different today.

Men come to Christ, and by extension, to church when they see other men living under the influence of God’s Spirit” (p.

59)

When the question of leadership arises in the church, it often stops at the pastor.

Most members would agree that the pastor is the leader of the church, but it requires the abilities, gifts and talents of more than one person to maintain a healthy church.

\\ \\

*We can learn:*

*I.      **A Lesson from the Early Church (vv.

1-2)*

*READ TEXT*

A division arose early in the life of the church that could have brought the whole movement to a halt.

The number of disciples was multiplying.

Whenever that happens, the devil gets nervous.

He tries to do something to stop forward momentum.

The first obstacle that threatened to divide the church was murmuring.

Satan had tried persecution and threats, but that did not divide the church.

Instead he used murmuring.

The word *γογγυσμός*-/gongusmos/ here means grumbling.

This was the same attitude that the children of Israel had back in the desert.

They grumbled about the way God took care of them.

They complained about the manna.

They complained about the lack of leeks and onions.

They complained about the lack of meat so God sent quail.

He sent so much that the Bible says it came out their nostrils (Numbers 11:20).

Satan used the same kind of problem in the early church.

It was about food again.

Someone began complaining about the other widows.

She began to say, “Hey, Doris, look how much food those Hebrew-speaking widows are getting.

Look how much we are getting.

Hey, Apostles, I’m not being fed here.

You better do something about this.

You need to stop spending so much time studying the Scriptures and spending so much time leading prayer groups that you neglect your widows.

You need to take care of us or we’ll go somewhere else to be fed.”

She probably never talked directly to the Apostles.

She probably talked to everyone else in her circle of friends except the Apostles.

Satan has not changed his tactics much today.

We have not changed either.

We get so hung up on our biological side that we neglect our spiritual side.

It never says that they asked the Apostles to stop doing what they were doing, so you must read between the lines.

Look at their reaction.

The Apostles responded by keeping a balance.

They could have reacted in a pure masculine spirit and said, “Just get over it.”

Or they could have done what most pastors would do, try to make everybody happy and take on more than is humanly possible.

Instead they called the group together and established a boundary.

They looked at the job that had to be done and they said, “It is not right for us to neglect what God has called us to do when somebody else can wait on the tables.”

If they had succumbed to the demands of the people, they would have had no time to *wait on God*.

They would have had no time to lead the disciples.

Churches place too many demands on pastors and elders these days.

They want the pastor to be with them at the hospital while they are having surgery and be in the office studying for a great sermon on Sunday while he is witnessing to a prospect so the church will grow.

They want him to be at every committee meeting so that he will know what is going on and be able to emphasize it from the pulpit.

Then they want him to spend time at home with his family so they can have a healthy family life.

In small churches the people become accustomed to the pastor being able to meet everyone’s personal needs.

If a church has over eighty members then it becomes virtually impossible for the pastor to spend time with all of them.

If he spent just ½ hour a week with every member, that would be forty hours and nothing else would have been done that week.

Instead of being a pastor, he is nothing more than a personal chaplain.