Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
0.12UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.11UNLIKELY
Fear
0.14UNLIKELY
Joy
0.59LIKELY
Sadness
0.54LIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.5LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.42UNLIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.76LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.42UNLIKELY
Extraversion
0.17UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.45UNLIKELY
Emotional Range
0.58LIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
!! Longing for the Lord
For the director of music.
According to gittith.
Of the Sons of Korah.
A psalm.
{{{"
How lovely is your dwelling place,
O Lord Almighty!
My soul yearns, even faints,
for the courts of the Lord;
my heart and my flesh cry out
for the living God.
Even the sparrow has found a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may have her young—
a place near your altar,
O Lord Almighty, my King and my God.
Blessed are those who dwell in your house;
they are ever praising you.
Selah.
Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
who have set their hearts on pilgrimage.
As they pass through the Valley of Baca,
they make it a place of springs;
the autumn rains also cover it with pools.
They go from strength to strength,
till each appears before God in Zion.
Hear my prayer, O Lord God Almighty;
listen to me, O God of Jacob.
Selah
Look upon our shield, O God;
look with favor on your anointed one.
Better is one day in your courts
than a thousand elsewhere;
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God
than dwell in the tents of the wicked.
For the Lord God is a sun and shield;
the Lord bestows favor and honor;
no good thing does he withhold
from those whose walk is blameless.
O Lord Almighty,
blessed is the man who trusts in you.
}}}
Psalm 84
One of the most popular modern pastimes is looking back.
We live in a haze of nostalgia, longing for another time.
As illogical as it may seem, many in their twenties and thirties feel a longing akin to homesickness for a time they never knew.
Students of nostalgia tell us that people in the 1970s looked back with longing to the forties and fifties.
In 1971 more than fifty thousand copies of /Buck Rogers /were reprinted and three hundred radio stations brought back the serials from the thirties and forties such as "The Shadow," and "The Green Hornet."
The forties seemed faraway and romantic to people growing up in the seventies.
Now there is a nostalgia for the fifties and sixties, shown in the current popularity of hair cuts, slang, and the music of that earlier time.
Similarly, in Psalm 84 the psalmist showed a longing for an earlier time.
This was no shallow escape, however.
With something akin to homesickness, he longed to return to the place where he used to meet with God.
He wanted to get back to the time and place where he could know God again.
He acknowledged that such a return is a pilgrimage, a journey that has obstacles and difficulties.
Yet he longed to get back to the place where he could meet the living God.
When you desire to return to the place where you meet God, faith overcomes every obstacle until you arrive.
Are you homesick for God? Here's a map to find the way back.
!!! Longing for that Place
Once there was a place, a setting, a situation, a location where God was real to you.
God was not real /because /of that place, but the place is significant because God was there.
For Abraham it was Bethel.
For Moses it was Mt.
Sinai.
For Jesus it was Gethsemane.
In this psalm the writer longs for the place where he used to meet with God.
Now he is a prisoner, or in exile, or is ill, or for some other reason cannot get back to the place where he used to meet with God—the temple in Jerusalem.
Can you identify with the man who is away from the place where he used to meet with God?
He expresses this in the language of a love poem: "How lovely is your dwelling place."
The temple, the place where God was dwelling, was worthy to be loved.
It is difficult to understand the impression that the temple of Solomon made on the Hebrew worshiper.
David proposed the temple and amassed the materials.
A hundred thousand talents of gold and a million talents of silver were collected from the people.
When he had donated gold from his own fortune and that of the other princes, the building contained something like the equivalent of $4.9 billion in precious metals.
It took seven years and six months to complete.
Thirty thousand Israelites and 150,000 Canaanites were impressed as hewers of stone, carriers of water, and builders of the building.
God's presence in the temple was overwhelming in the dimensions of the place.
In the Old Testament world you met the living God in the massive, gold-covered cedar beams and the stonework of that building.
We no longer yearn for a physical temple, a building, an edifice in the same way as the Old Testament person did.
Today, the gathering of believers individually and collectively is the temple of God (1 Cor.
3:16; 6:19).
In the Old Testament, God had a temple for His people.
In the New Testament, He has a people for His temple.
What is the equivalent longing today for what the psalmist felt for the temple in Jerusalem?
It is the longing to be with the people of God in the place where they assemble to meet the living God.
The modern equivalent of Psalm 84:1 is to long for an experience with the living God in the very midst of others who long for that same experience.
Longing for God creates an intensity of spirit.
A modern-day example of intensity might be illustrated by the amateur athletes who compete every four years in the Olympic games.
We wonder how people find the drive to achieve such records.
One such athlete is Andy Sudduth, who competes in rowing— pulling the oars in a single scull, a slight crimson shell of a canoe.
Even though he has injured his ribs, he rows on.
Even though he has had to cut back his job as a computer analyst at Harvard University, he continues to press.
He postponed working on a master's degree at Harvard in order to train.
"You put your life on hold," he said.
"It happens to everyone in rowing. . .
."
We often find such intensity in those who compete.
But do we expect the same intensity in ourselves when we want to come back to God? Are we willing to "put everything on hold" until we find the place where we meet God again?
The psalmist's words express this kind of passion.
Listen to the language of a man who wants to get back to God.
He "yearns, faints, cries out for the living God."
The word "yearns" depicts someone who longs and pines to the extent of growing pale.
Would you characterize the intensity of your desire for God with those words?
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9