Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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Reality Choice: Realize I’m not God, admit I’m powerless to control my tendency to do the wrong thing and my life is unmanageable.
Hope Choice: Earnestly believe that God exists, that I matter to Him, and that He has the power to help me change.
Last week’s message was the hinge point for the series.
Because it was about faith… Commiting ourselves to Christ.
It was about surrender.
Giving God au
Commitment Choice: Consciously choose to commit all my life and will to Christ’s care and control.
I’m taking off this week in order to work in our house on KI.
We had renters move out and when I got there the first time, I thought… well OK, it’s not destroyed…
That’s how many of us look at our lives, we aren’t so bad.
But as you look closer you begin to notice things… the windows are filthy.
The walls are all scuffed up.
There is trash around.
The blinds need to be replaced.
As you look closer and closer, you begin to see how much you really need to do in order to get it right.
That’s what this step is all about.
I’m sure most of us feel like our lives are OK.
We aren’t perfect, but I’m a lot better than him or her.
Well Scripture puts this thinking in it’s place.
WE all have some house cleaning to do.
That’s what this step is all about.
House Cleaning Choice: I openly examine and confess my faults to myself, to God, and to someone I trust.
I believe God wants every one of us to take this step, but it’s one many of us are terrified to take because we want to be clean…it’s just that we don’t really want to come clean with someone else.
It’s hard to trust other people with our “junk”.
For me, it was hard.
I grew up in a pretty dysfunctional family.
My dad worked a lot and my mom seemed angry.
I don’t remember seeing them ever share much emotion… or signs of affection, even with us kids.
There was a lot of expectation… but little recognition.
WE were expected to have good grades, but when we got B’s we could have gotten A’s.
When we got A-’s we could have gotten A+’s.
There was always more I could have done.
This has affected me in becoming a bit of a pleaser.
I want to meet people’s needs.
I look for recognition.
Then my parents got divorced and my relationship with both of them went south.
Because of this I’m pretty guarded.
It’s hard for me to let people get too close… it’s hard to trust people, in fact I have often told myself, well of course they let me down.... that’s what people do.
I’ve got more issues, trust me.
That’s what makes this choice so important, because it’s about healing from our past.
The things that affected us then and still affect us today.
But I don’t have to accept this as the way things have to be.
I have a choice.
Some of you have experienced some things that you wish you hadn’t, just like I have.
Divorce, addictions, infidelity, abuse, abortion, you have let people down, people have let you down.
Pain and guilt enter our lives in all sorts of ways… it’s one thing we can count on in life.
But just because we go through it, doesn't mean we have to live in it.
How do we find God when the world us such a mess?
This choice is grounded in the 4th Beatitude:
It’s that simple… have a pure heart.
Problem solved... Now let’s go eat.
It is that simple, but it’s not easy.
Pure in heart … sincere… sifted
Sifting is a process
Being sifted doesn’t sound like a fun process, but what if I told you it was a necessary.
What if I told you that the sifting was God’s plan for his disciples to live the life they were created?
Jesus wants us to have this life…
This sifting that Jesus wants to take us through is what we talk about in church world as sanctification.
It is a move of God to clean us up, from the inside out.
We call it God’s grace that cleans us up.
But too often we don’t want to experience this, instead we settle… for just cleaning up the outside.
We come to Jesus, we get religion.
I’m not saying religion is a bad thing, but I am saying that it is a poor substitute for what God wants to do in us.
Think about it… in the Bible, who is it that gives Jesus a hard time?
Sinners or religious folks?
It’s the religious folks… those who are bound to their religion who Jesus has a hard time with.
Jesus doesn’t want me to be RELIGIOUS, Jesus wants me to be FREE.
Whether we settle for being religious or we settle by telling ourselves that our hurts, habits, and hangups are no big deal… both of these lead us to being bound to our past.
But Jesus wants to set us free.
Jesus set us free from our sins so that we wouldn’t be bound to religion.
He wants us to experience true freedom, as John wrote, Jesus wants us to be free indeed.
That was his whole point for coming.
to set us free from the penalty of our sin, and that we would remain free, not substitute our freedom for religion.
Where does this sanctification begin.
It’s God’s grace.. Like all grace, it flows from the heart of God.
In fact, this heart cleaning happens as we live into our relationship with God
The basis for a pure heart is not HOW GOOD YOU’VE BEEN, but how GOOD GOD IS.
Our heart… not the one beating in our chest, but our spiritual heart.... our core is exactly what God looks at.
The process of SANCTIFICATION.
Does that mean that God doesn’t care what we do?
How we live?
Absolutely not.
He cares.
He knows everything about you and he loves you… how about that?
But in order to experience life in it’s fullness, in order to be healed from our past hurts, our hangups, our destructive habits, are things we must do in this process of healing.
The first is to experience forgiveness.
Confess
This forgiveness comes by the grace of God, in response to our confession.
That’s where house cleaning starts, confession.
Repentence
Then repentence: Turn from our ways, and to God.
He welcomes us back because he loves us… he hates sin though.
God forgives in equal proportion to our sin in order for us to experience total forgiveness....
If you have big sins…then you have experienced big forgiveness.
That’s why we love hearing those stories of transformation.
People who were drug addicts and prostitutes one day, someone told them about Jesus and BAM their lives were changed.
It happens.
Big sinners experience big forgiveness when they meet Christ.
So we are done right?
Grow
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