Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

If you want to drive a car, what do you need to do? (Learn the road rules, get a learner’s license, practice for >100 hours, do drivers test, save money, buy car.)

If you want to drive a car, but you only want to spend an hour a week learning to drive and earning money to buy the car (so half an hour learning and half an hour earning, say).

Do you think you’ll get to drive that car soon?

In terms of how much learning and practice and investment is required, which do you think is harder: driving a car, or being a good Christian witness?

For reflection: how much time and effort do we put into getting to know God and his Word, and obeying them?

And that’s what we’re talking about today: priorities.

Or, more specifically, our Christian priorities.

Not abstract

But before we dive in, I want to make sure that you understand that this is not an abstract discussion about theoretical ideas.

Priorities matter, and we often don’t realise just how they matter.

I’m going to be talking about Atalia, my daughter, in relation to gifts today.

But before I get to that, I should mention that she has been reminding me of how she felt last Christmas when we gave her the same gift as her cousins.

It was rather generic—a Koorong gift card—and it hurt her that we couldn’t give our daughter something with more thought and knowledge put into it than our gifts to our nephews and nieces.

She’s right.

We didn’t prioritise her when we should have, and we hurt her, and I’m sorry.

So priorities matter.

They are how we show love.

Loving God vs Loving the World

Our Bible passage today is from 1 Jn 2:15-17.

The apostle John, who wrote the gospel of John and was one of Jesus’ three closest friends, wrote this letter to one or more local congregations to warn them against dangerous theological mistakes.

Let’s read our passage now.

The letter of 1 John is notoriously difficult to read.

It is so dense and multi-layered.

Stephen and I almost lost ourselves in this letter for a while last year.

But this passage seems fairly straightforward, doesn’t it?

Nonetheless, let’s unpack it a little.

What is the world?

First, what is the world?

John refers to “the world” 23 times in first John alone!

It can actually have three different meanings, depending on the context: the place we live in (such as in “God sent his Son into the world”); “worldly” attitudes or behaviours that are opposed to God; or the world of people who are opposed to God or who refuse to obey him.

In this case, as verse 16 makes clear, John is talking about desires and priorities that are opposed to God.

Notice that verse 16 isn’t talking about actions.

Indeed, in this whole passage John is talking about attitudes rather than actions.

For John, as for Jesus, it is the heart that is the source of our actions, and God, who sees the heart, judges our attitudes, not our actions.

Getting our attitudes in line with God is crucial.

How do we love the world?

So how might we love the world, as John warns against?

What are these desires or priorities?

John focuses in on three attitudes: the craving for physical pleasure, the craving for visible things (in other words, materialism), and pride in what we own.

That pretty much describes Australian society, right?

We love our food, our beer and wine, our holidays and sports, not to mention our gyms and hospitals.

We crave a great house and nice gear to put into it, not to mention a good car, good clothes, and nice gadgets.

And we are proud, in an appropriately Aussie low-key way, of all this stuff, not to mention our jobs and achievements (including our kids).

Why are loving the world and loving God mutually exclusive?

Now you might think that all these things I mentioned are perfectly good and healthy (in moderation).

And indeed they are.

In themselves.

That’s because these things themselves—kids, cars, gyms, houses, food and so on—are not the problem.

It is our attitude towards them that is the problem.

Imagine that, for her 18th birthday, I gave Atalia a lovely new car.

(Now this is not going to happen, so don’t get excited Atalia, this is just a sermon illustration.)

How would you expect her to react?

[Wait for some answers.]

Yes, you would expect her to be grateful, right?

But what if she reacted by snatching the keys from me, jumping in the car, and disappearing from my life!

I would be rather upset.

It would be cold comfort to know that she is really enjoying the car.

Yet this is what we do to God when we love the world.

We crave the good gifts rather than the gracious giver, and so the gifts become a horrible barrier between us.

Just as Atalia would miss out on my friendship as well as all the future gifts and opportunities she might receive from me, so we miss out on God’s friendship and all his blessings when we prioritise the good things of this world over his presence.

John emphasizes the long-term impact of this when he says:

I would hope that I am of more value to Atalia than a car, and that I will still be around long after the car has been relegated to the trash heap.

I hardly need to say how much greater God is than me, and so how much more we miss out on when we prioritise the world over God.

You might wonder how we do what pleases God.

It’s not difficult, he just wants us to make him our number one priority!

How do we prioritise God?

Now, it’s easy to say “make God number one,” but surely the Bible has some practical pointers to how we prioritise God?

The two great commandments (and John’s take)

Well, let’s start with the basics.

Jesus gave us two big priorities with the two most important commandments:

That first commandment seems to consume everything, right?

What do you have left to love with after you’ve used all your heart, soul, strength and mind?

What are you supposed to love your neighbour, or yourself with?

John actually explains this quite beautifully in the letter we’re reading.

In 1 Jn 4:20-21 he explains:

You see, we love God by rightly loving both him and all that he creates, does, and gives us.

Let me say that again, we love God by rightly loving him and all that he creates, does, and gives us.

We don’t love God in the abstract, we love him by loving the concrete things he treasures in this world: human beings.

And we love human beings, by using the things of this world God has given us to serve them.

To continue my example, Atalia would best show her appreciation for my generous gift of a car by both loving me and expressing that by caring for the car and using it appropriately (i.e.

driving safely and responsibly).

Well, that helps us to understand how to interact with people and things.

But I think there is another wonderful guide from Jesus that explains how we can prioritise God day by day.

It is called the Lord’s prayer.

The Lord’s prayer

The Lord’s prayer is Jesus’ model for how we interact with God.

We often think of it as just words to guide our prayers, but it’s so much more than that.

It’s a pattern for our lives.

Let’s work through it.

We start by focusing on God.

That is hardly surprising, given that he is supposed to be the centre of all our attention.

But we need to recognise two things about God.

First, he is our Father.

That tells us a lot about him.

He is personal, he is our origin, where we come from.

He is our teacher and guide and disciplinarian.

It also tells us that we are now part of God’s family—Jesus, the eternal Son of God, tells us to call God “our Father.”

“Our” as in the Father of both Jesus and us.

Jesus can call God his father by right of his sonship, but what right do we have to call God our father?