Sermon Tone Analysis

*Intro*

I think I am going to have to resign from EFCC.

I have just been told of the deal of the century.

I want to read an email to you:

Beloved in Christ,  

It is a priviledge to hear from God and it gives me joy to relate my testimony to you…  I was a Moslem and a retired military top officer in the Nigerian Army that served under the past military regime…With my position as a financial secretary, I was able to divert up to $45,000,000.00

(Forty Five million U.S Dollars, into my personal Bank Account, hoping to invest the money when I’m retired.

Immediately I got retired, I was converted from Moslem to Christian when I was preached the words of God through my cousin Pastor Paul Osakwe.

I then gave my life to Christ and became a born again Christain.

Since I gave my life to Christ, I had no rest of mind.

Some times I think of the souls I killed when I was a soldier and the dubious ways I diverted my country’s money into my Personal Bank Account.

I then decided to seek the face of God for forgiveness and after fasting and prayer through Divine Revelation, the Almighty God revealed to me that the only way I could have rest of mind is when I used all my money to do the work of God.

I immediately disclosed my revelation to my Pastor and he was happy with me… 

My Pastor has adviced me to sneak out of the country with the money to sow it into a ministries abroad.

I have decided to invest this money into Gods ministry with you.

I am making arrangement to come over to your country but you need to receive this money from the finance and security company in which i deposited the money in cash before I come over.

The cash has been packaged by the security company in consignments and ready for shipment but the security company requires the address of the receiver.

Please kindly send to me your names, address where you wish to receive the consignments that contains the funds, your telephone and fax numbers for easy communication.

I will be coming over to your ministry with my family for thanksgiving as soon as I sent out this money to you.

Please act fast because I dont want the panel to know that I want to leave the country, they might suspect my intention to leave now that the probe is going on.

I look forward to your response.

God bless you.

ELDER(DR)OKWUNUDU PAUL

TEL:234 8033011541

E-MAIL: okwundu4christ@yahoo.co.uk

Hopefully it should have taken you about two seconds for you to realize that this email and many like these from overseas are scams!

Total rip offs!

I got this from a website helping people recognize scams.

There are people out there probably sitting in some internet café just prowling around the web looking for the right prey to come around so that they can take them for all that their worth.

If we are not careful, we can get duped and have our money and sometimes even our identities stolen.

From experience, perhaps we are quick to recognize any fast money making schemes.

We may have seen the elderly man or woman trusting the friendly, persuasive salesman at the door selling an all-too-good-to-be-true-product.

We may have heard of the divorced, lonely single mom lured by an online Romeo with promises of love, romance and security if loaned some money; or the person struggling for years with cancer or some disease or paralysis spending thousands on bogus medicine.

I hate scammers and con artists.

When I hear of these, I want so badly to scream, “Watch out!

It’s a scam!

Don’t sign that paper!

Don’t withdraw that money!” Don’t you?

However, did you know that so many believers are getting ripped off and scammed spiritually?

The devil is a liar and the master scammer.

He has his workers out there taking something more than our money, but our very own soul, by twisting the Word of God, alienating us from the Lord, luring us with ways of thinking that causes us to lose our identity, our minds, our hearts, our hope, our joy and everything we have!

I don’t want to get scammed.

Do you?

Just as we are vigilant with email fraud, we ought to be just as vigilant at these “sufficiency scammers” of our soul, who seek to kidnap us from finding all that we need in Jesus Christ.

This is what we are going to look at this morning from Colossians 2:8-10.

How do we keep our souls from getting scammed by false teaching?

One of the joys and challenges of studying Scripture verse by verse is that you will have the opportunity to study the whole counsel of God.

I don’t think I would ever pick this portion of Scripture out of the blue to preach on, but I committed myself to the book of Colossians and now here we are!

Notice, the first way:

*I.  **Be vigilant against soul scams **(Col.

2:8a).*

Paul is on the defensive in chapter 2 of Colossians.

Anytime you get up and come forward declaring Jesus Christ is totally supreme, you can be sure you will get opponents, especially the devil, ready to see if that is really true.

True in Paul’s day and true in our day.

In verse 8, Paul says “see to it,” which is literally, “Beware!” or “Watch out!”

It is an imperative, meaning a command, not a suggestion.

He is sounding the trumpet.

The fire alarm is going off.

All flood lights are working in full strength.

Turn on the monitoring radar.

Pull up the antennae.

It is a call to vigilant watchfulness of every believer.

What is the call for?

Spiritual scammers have intruded in the camp!

They do not invade with flashing colors or big bright lights.

They move in very subtly, creeping in the darkness like roaches under the refrigerator and termites beneath the floorboard.

And it does not come natural for us to notice them, hence why Paul uses the urgent command here.

He says, “see to it that no one takes you captive!”

The word, “captive” is only found here in the New Testament.

RSV: “makes a prey of you”

KJV: “spoil you”

NLT: “capture you”

The Message: “drag you off”

 

Paul continues to use military imagery here (not surprising as he is defending the Supremacy like a solider fighting in an army.)

He uses the word “captive” which means literally, “to carry off as spoil or as a prisoner of war.”

So he is saying there are thieves coming in to kidnap you if you are sleeping spiritually and not alert to what is going on around you.

They are not out just take your money or your property, but they want to take you!

He had just told us that Jesus Christ, our great Commander-in-Chief and liberator, delivered us from the kingdom of darkness and transferred us into His Kingdom and sets us free (Col.

1:13).

Now he says do not get captured again and be carried off.

The gullible will be about to be enslaved again and back in the domain of darkness.

How does this happen?

Paul says it is through “philosophy and empty deceit.”

Now be careful here.

Paul, a philosopher in his own right, is not anti-philosophy, which means “lover of wisdom.”

The Bible is all about pursuing wisdom and knowledge.

Actually the way he has phrased it here is “the philosophy, which is empty deceit.”

Paul has in mind the specific teaching of the false teachers.

So he is not addressing the academic discipline of philosophy, like perhaps the classes that some of us probably slept through in college.

It is much broader than that.

Actually, any school of thought or understanding of God, the world and~/or life was put under the umbrella of philosophy.

Here he probably has in mind the so-called “wisdom” that these people were teaching.

Have you ever heard little kids in the playground say, “I know something you don’t know!” or “I have something you don’t have!”

Well, that was what these people were doing.

They boasted of a secret, superior knowledge of getting to God.

Remember in doing so, they shrunk the identity of the Lord Jesus and made him into something like a created being, perhaps an angel.

They called their knowledge the epitome of wisdom, but Paul debunks it as empty, hollow, deceit, a word meaning a fraud, trickery or a scam!

It is like chasing bubbles or trying to fill up a pitcher with water that has serious cracks in it or blowing up a balloon that has a hole in it.

IT WILL LEAVE YOU HOLLOW AND EMPTY.

When you kidnap someone, you are taking someone who was free to a state of being a slave again, gaining complete control over them.

The way these scammers kidnap you is by taking you away from the truth and by diluting your thinking and diverting you from God and all that He has for you in Christ.