Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction:

Tonight, I know that I’m talking to a group of people who will understand this reference, but when I was growing up, I remember watching a movie called E.T.

Some of you are very fond of that movie.

The most memorable line was.... you got it!

“E.T. phone home.”

E.T. was an Extra-Terrestrial that “ain’t from around here!”

He was dressed up like a little kid with them long Charles Stanley fingers and had a little red hoodie on him.

The little boy in the movie would put him in his basket and he had a Santa Clause like moment when the bike lifted up off the ground and he rode through the moon one night.

In the movie many people were fooled by E.T. disguise and didn’t know he was really from another planet.

There are a lot of movies about aliens in disguise, like Superman, and others.

Maybe you have wondered about some people you’ve seen walking around and thought, You know they might be an alien.

That would explain so much!

Well, the truth is all of us were once a type of alien and some may still be.

Tonight we are going to find out if you are an alien or not as we jump back into our study we started several months ago through the Book of Colossians.

I know that your memories are probably like mine, so you may not even remember starting Colossians together, but I want to give you a quick recap of the first chapter and then we will get to our passage tonight.

Chapter Review:

How the Gospel Came to Colossae (vv.1-8)

Paul’s Prayer for the Church (vv.9-14)

A Portrait of Who Christ Is (vv.15-20)

Who We Are in Christ (vv.

21-23)

Paul’s Ministry to the Church (vv.

24-29)

Tonight we are going to look at Who We Are in Christ.

First, in order to see who we are in Christ, we have to first see who we were; and if you are not a believer, you are not in Christ and this is not a description of who you were, it is a picture of who you are!

1.

Everyone Starts Out Alienated from God (v.21a)

After taking time to discuss how wonderful Christ is and how He is the one that holds this whole world together and is the one Who reconciles us to God, Paul takes a minute to explain why we need to be reconciled to God in the first place.

You see, we were not indifferent to God.

We were not laissez faire about God.

We were actually alienated from God and hostile to Him!

We will come back to the hostility in a moment, but let’s look at what it means to be “alienated” from God.

We are not aliens in the since of UFOs, but we are aliens in the sense of foreigners.

Now, this a very politically loaded term today, but to be an alien means to be a foreigner with no claim in the land you now are in.

You have no rights in this new land you are in.

That is why God actually commanded the Israelites in the Old Testament to care for the rights of the alien.

What Paul means here is not just that we don’t have an inheritance in God because we were aliens, but also that we were not His people.

We belonged to someone else.

We belonged to the world.

However, once we accepted Christ, things changed.

Peter described it this way.

Did you catch all of that.

There is more to it than just what flag you pledge to.

Being a part of God’s family means we inherit salvation.

We get mercy.

We have a stake in the kingdom of God.

It is not earned, but is given to us as a gift.

Paul wants to point out to a church of Gentiles who would have understood very clearly the concept of Jew vs. Gentile that they once had no claim in God, but now through Jesus, they have been made joint heirs with Christ.

They now are a people that belong to God and have an identity in Christ.

How does it make you feel to know that even if you don’t matter to anyone else, you matter enough to God to be invited into His family?

2. Everyone is Hostile in Mind Towards God (v.21b)

I mentioned earlier that we are not lassez faire towards God.

That means we are never neutral towards God.

A lot of people may think they are.

They may think that they don’t really have a problem with God, but really what they are saying is this.

“If God will play by my rules and do what I want Him to do, then I can be okay with God.”

That is really making yourself more important to God.

It is blasphemy!

It is saying, “God I matter more than you do so you need to do what I want.”

The natural mindset of the world is not neutral towards God, but is AGAINST God.

They don’t want God raining on their parade.

I believe this is why so many college students walk away from the faith.

They want to party and have a good time during college and if God exists and has expectations for their lives, then they can’t go live however they want to live.

The world doesn’t care who your God is, as long as that God is only your personal God and doesn’t require anyone else to behave a certain way.

Notice that it is the mindset of the world first that is against God.

Sin starts in the head....in the mind.

That mindset is hostile to God.

The word for “hostile” here is the word that means enemies or foes.

It means our mindset is set against God’s ways.

We naturally rebel against God.

Think about for a moment many of the ways that our culture rebels against God.

Personhood - Abortion

Sexuality

Morality

Marriage and Family

These are just a few of the ways we have a hostile mindset towards God.

But these are not just the way that some other people feel, we also feel this way by default.

These were our thoughts towards God.

Paul describes it this way in

Paul says that we know the truth internally and we willfully suppress it.

2. Do you find yourself struggling with accepting God’s standards of living over what you want to do?

3. Do you ever find yourself trying to play with the Scriptures to make them say something that allows you more permission than what God has given you for a particular matter?

3. Everyone Practices Evil Deeds (v.21c)

Not only were we separated from God and hostile towards Him in our thinking, but we also acted out on those thoughts.

Now it’s bad to think evil things, but it is even worse to act out on those thoughts.

Paul told Titus in speaking of unbelievers

Many people claim to be Christians.

They will check that box on the survey form or casually claim that they are Christians, but it is only lip service.

Their hearts are far from God and it is evident by their actions.

You want to see if a person is a Christian?

Look at their lifestyle!

Our actions are a mirror of our thoughts.

We act out what we think.

When we have a mind that is hostile to God, we are going to have lives that are lived in hostility to God.

Think about for just a moment some of the movies that are coming out these days, particularly horror movies.

These movies are ideas conceived in someone’s mind to try to illicit shock and awe from the audience.

How gruesome can we make this scene.

How can we rattle this person watching the movie.

In order to do that, you have to push the envelope of what they are comfortable with.

Is it any wonder that as people have gotten more and more comfortable with sin, the envelope of what scared us has been pushed?

I mean think back to how Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds used to be considered horror shows.

Today, Hitchcock is tame compared to what we see even on prime time television!

And all of these ideas are dreamed up by the human mind.