Sermon Tone Analysis

INTRODUCTION:

Interest:

Since our son and daughter-in-law, Daniel and Maria were here over the past week, Thursday, I along with Grace, David, and Katie went to Greenfield Village for the day.

We had a good time together going through all the historic buildings.

One place that always fascinates me is the weaving building.

They have one loom in there from the late 1800s that creates a pattern in the cloth based on a system of punchcards and spring-loaded metal hooks…essentially an early precursor to the computer.

Since I worked in the computer field for several years, I find that history fascinating.

I am also fascinated though, by the simple fact that these various strands of thread can be woven together in such a fashion that complicated patterns result in the final cloth.

You see white threads and color threads intersecting all together in a loose area, but then the crossing thread is pulled tight to the thread that come before and over several iterations of that activity a pattern emerges.

I know Donna Hobson has a loom in her house so she understands how this all works, but to me it remains a mystery even as I stand there and watch it unfold before my eyes.

One thing that struck me though is how ever single thread plays a role in creating the pattern in the cloth.

When that thread is on a spool and then coming down into the loom it doesn’t seem like its position is that strategic; yet by the time all is said and done that thread plays an important point in the grand scheme of creating a beautiful piece of cloth.

Involvement:

We will see this morning that our lives as Christians function in a rather similar manner.

We may seem like we exist all on our own, but as our lives interact with the gospel message, we find that they are woven together to form a grand tapestry that displays the grace of God; we all have a role in that gospel process.

Context:

We are returning to our series through 1 Thessalonians, as you can see.

Two weeks ago, before the Labor Day weekend break, we began looking at the 2nd chapter of this letter.

We saw that Paul had begun this chapter by reminding the Thessalonians as to what kind of men he along with Silas and Timothy had been when they first brought the gospel to their city.

Apparently since the Jewish opposition against them had forced them to leave Thessalonica so quickly and since Paul had been unable to return and visit the young believers again, some of the opposition had begun accusing Paul and the others of actually being religious charlatans.

It was rather common for people of that day in the Roman Empire to use religion for personal benefit.

Paul and the others were being accused of that.

In the first 4 verses of the chapter Paul has already given two lines of defense…we had two sentences, both begun with the word “for” indicating that he was explain something through contrasts presented with the word “but” in the middle of the sentence.

Essentially he has for we were bold because we were not afraid to suffer for the sake of the gospel and we were faithful because we only cared about pleasing God.

Of course, we observed that we must strive to be the same in our presentation of the Gospel message—bold and faithful.

Preview:

This morning we are going to look at a third line of defense that Paul gives.

In the previous verses Paul has really demonstrated that the proclamation of the gospel is our sacred duty as Christians.

Today, we will see that performing that duty will impact how we go about living out every aspect of our lives.

You see, the main point we will learn in our four verses this morning is that The gospel message is intertwined with our lives as its messengers.

The message itself—the gospel message—cannot be separated from our lives; the two are necessarily intertwined.

Illustration

I believe that this is something that is becoming increasingly important for us to realize as believers.

Obviously, the fact that Paul made this point nearly 2,000 years ago indicates that it is not a new concern.

Still, we live in a day in which the culture is continually promoting the idea that personal lives can be held independent from a person’s official view on nearly any topic.

We have seen countless politicians claiming that marital infidelities really have no bearing on their fitness to hold office.

We have recently witnessed a great number of celebrities flying personal jets to a climate change conference…we were told that the incredible carbon footprint that they were willing to leave behind through their mode of travel should have no bearing on the authority by which they promote their convictions regarding global warming.

The list of goes on and on of examples in which the actions of people do not match up to the message they are giving.

We shake our heads as such inconsistencies…but I fear, we also absorb some of the worldview that enables such inconsistencies to be held side by side…it is the postmodern world that we live in…and the danger is that such thinking can tempt us to rationalize holding the gospel message in one mental hand—carefully and purely defined and articulated—while holding our lives in the other mental hand—indulgently living at a minimalistic level of Christlikeness.

We need the message contained in these verses.

We need the wakeup call to carefully and fully line our lives us with the vital message that we carry.

The gospel message is intertwined with our lives as its messengers.

Our verses this morning have some typical Paul-type convoluted grammar, but in general they pivot on the word “but” at the beginning of v. 7 in order to give us two contrasting ideas.

We are going to follow that simple outline this morning as we look at our passage.

Transition from introduction to body:

The gospel message is intertwined with our lives as its messengers.

Let’s go ahead and read our 4 verses together.

BTW…I want to point out the little indicator in the bottom right corner of the slide right now.

If you happen to be using the Faithlife Bible app to read from this morning, this indicator will also show up at the bottom of your screen.

All you have to do is tap on it and it will automatically take you to 1 Thessalonians 2 verse 5.

This indicator was also there earlier for our Scripture reading, but you may have not noticed it at the time.

It is just one way in which the integrated software tools we have started using can help out during our services.

Of course, turning to the chapter and verse in your physical bibles is a tried and true approach as well.

1 Thessalonians 2:5…<read vv.

5–8>

The gospel message is intertwined with our lives as its messengers.

That means that first of all, the idea that we see in verses 5 and 6 is that…

BODY:

I. We must not undercut the gospel message

We must not undercut the gospel message.

The gospel itself is powerful.

As we have discussed already in this letter, the gospel does not receive its power from us; it is, as Paul says in Romans chapter 1, “the power of God unto salvation.”

Still, we have to realize that there are things that we can do which will undercut its message.

Illustration

Rather like the case of all those celebrities flying personal planes to a conference to express their concerns about climate change, it is rather hard to take a message serious if the person presenting it does not seem to even believe it.

As I said earlier, in Paul’s day there were a lot of people traveling around the Roman Empire presenting various religious ideas for their own personal benefit.

In general, such people could generally be identified by their actions.

In fact, these actions were so common that they had become stereotype behavior for the religious charlatans, a bit like kissing babies is a stereotype for of politicians in our day.

Transition:

Paul goes on to list three such stereotypical actions which he and the other men carefully avoided so as to not undercut the gospel message that they were presenting to the people.

Again, we must learn from Paul.

First of all, we must not undercut the gospel message…

A. Through flattering speech

Paul reminds the young believers in Thessalonica that they had never come “with flattering speech.”

The idea behind the word “flattering” is that of using the kind of acceptable speech that lulls another person into a false sense of security so that the speaker can get what he wants.

Illustration

As sinners, this is something we instinctively seem to know how to do…a child doesn’t have to be very old before he will attempt one day to come to mom and say, “Whoa, Mom, you look so beautiful today.”

Mom, looks at her son and says, “Why, thank you” only to have said son follow up with, “May I have an ice cream cone?”

Well, we may get more sophisticated in our approaches as we age, but the instinct is the same.

In the ancient world, this term “flattering” was well known as people tried to advance their cause by buttering up their listeners with their words.

But Paul says, “we never” did this.

Never…not once!

Application

One of the things we must avoid doing as we present the gospel—a message that will be rejected by many, as we have discussed many times—is to try to make ourselves accepted by using flattering speech.

Let’s be aware of the inherent desire to try to position ourselves so that we will be accepted through our words even when the gospel might be rejected.

Such effort will undercut the very gospel message we are to boldly and faithfully communicate.

Transition:

We must not undercut the gospel through flattering speech.

Secondly, we must not undercut it…

B. Through greedy motivations

Greed is always a destructive motivation.

Frequently, it is the motivation that actually causes the flattering speech that we just talked about.

The hard part, though, is that greed can be pretty well hidden as people can act very genuine and caring.

In fact, the word that Paul uses that we have translated as “pretext” perfectly describes this reality.

It was a word used in the theaters of the day for the masks that actors would wear to indicate that they were playing various characters.

The audience was to look at the mask and not the actor behind the mask in order to identify the character in the play.

The idea was that it is not that hard to put a mask on that covers the motivation of greed that is actually below the service, ultimately driving the actions.

It was money which drove many of the religious charlatans who came through the cities.

Yet Paul denies that greed had any part in the actions that he and the other men took.

He denies it strongly.

He says they never put a mask on to hide their greed.