Sermon Tone Analysis

Sermon for Sunday, March 18, 2007 – EKG Sermon #2

Title: When You Become a Kingdom Person, You Belong to God

Text: Exodus 19:4-6 (HCSB) /4 You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me. 5 Now if you will listen to Me and carefully keep My covenant, you will be My own possession out of all the peoples, although all the earth is Mine, 6 and you will be My kingdom of priests and My holy nation.

These are the words that you are to say to the Israelites.”/

When I was in high school, I was in the ROTC at Lowell High School in San Francisco.

In the ROTC, we had a drill team, which I was in.

So, for many months, a group of about six of us practiced almost everyday after school, drilling and practicing our routine.

We were practicing to be in one of the parades in San Francisco, I think that it was the St. Patrick’s Day parade.

We would spin some M1 rifles around and throw them up in the air, catching them and then spinning them around some more.

But there were only six of us, because there were only a few of us that wanted to be in the ROTC.

This was the time of the Vietnam War, which was not a popular war.

Our drill sergeant and some of the senior ROTC leaders were always encouraging us and helping us learn our routine so that we could become better.

But we knew that we didn’t have much of a chance to win anything because we were such a small group and we couldn’t really do any real fancy and intricate routines.

We just did the basics.

But we were rev-ed up because we were going to perform in a parade in competition with some of the other high schools like Balboa High, our rival and Galileo High.

But they had large and fancy teams and even though we didn’t have a chance, we were excited anyway just to be in the parade.

Before the parade, we huddled together, put our hands in the center of the huddle and gave a shout.

We were ready.

So, finally came the day of the parade.

In front of us were all the high schools with the big team.

Each of their teams had at least twenty students in it, and their uniforms were custom made with their school colors, and they wore berets.

They were very impressive, and their routines were extremely intricate with a lot of flipping of their light show rifles along with wonderfully choreographed march steps.

We had to watch them through the whole parade, while our meager group got only laughs because of the size of our group.

Then came the judges stand at the end of the parade.

The other high schools really outdid themselves.

We were a little heartbroken and discouraged when we saw them.

The crowd loved the routine and gave them a great shout and applause afterwards.

Then it was our turn.

And we did our number the best that we could.

No one messed up and our simple routine went through without a flaw.

I could see some of the judges smiling at us after we finished and we even got a few claps from the crowd.

They were just being polite.

Isn’t this true for a lot of us and for a lot of our churches?

We are great in the huddle, and we encourage each other so much, building the Body of Christ within our church walls.

But sometimes we feel that we are really too small to make any kind of significant impact.

We look at the big churches around the country, and we say to ourselves, “The things that I do can never compare with what they are doing.

We’re just too small.”

So because of this, we go into our holy huddle.

We look good in our holy huddle and we do a good job of ministering to each other.

We become comfortable.

We have wonderful vision and mission statements of reaching the world for Christ, but we don’t see it happening.

/The challenge for us/ is to break out of the huddle, not just talking about doing great things for His kingdom, but actually doing these things.

But how do we do great things for His kingdom?

How do we get involved in empowering kingdom growth?

Sometimes we spend so much time being in the huddle that we’ve forgotten God called us for a kingdom cause bigger than us.

I think we spend a lot of our time debating how big our salt shaker is and how much salt we have in it on Sunday morning rather than worrying about whether the salt is impacting the culture surround­ing our church and the people in the pews of our church.

We talk about the size of our sanctu­ary and how to give us more room.

We talk about the attendance in Sunday School and worship on a Sunday morning, but no one is begging to ask the question, “Is it changing our community; is it impacting the kingdom of God.”

If I were to tell you that John the Baptist initiated the ministry of Jesus with the simple phrase, “Repent, because the kingdom of heaven has come near!” (Matt.

3:2).

If I were to tell you that Jesus, in response to Satan’s last temptation, focused Himself, and began from that moment on to teach the kingdom of God.

If I were to tell you that most of Jesus’ parables related to the kingdom.

If I were to tell you that Acts 1 says that after His resurrection He spent that time teaching His disciples concerning the kingdom of God.

If I were to tell you that in the last two verses in the Book of Acts the Apostle Paul in prison spent the time explaining the king­dom of God and preaching Jesus.

If I were to tell you all those things, would you agree that this is a topic we ought to consider seriously?

I invite you to open your Bibles this morning to the beginning of the story.

I want you to go back to Exodus 19 and read verses 4-6: /“You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I carried you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me.

Now if you will listen to Me and carefully keep my covenant, you will be My own possession out of all the people, although all the earth is Mine, and you will be My kingdom of priests and My holy nation.”

/

OPENING PRAYER: /Father, this morning, we ask that the Spirit of God would apply the Word of God to the hearts of His people.

Lord, You tell us it is good seed; it never returns void, but You do remind us that the receptivity of the heart can impact the fruitfulness of the Word.

Lord, if there’s a hard heart, I pray that You will break through it.

If there’s any disturbance caused by the thorns and thistles of sched­ules and agendas, Lord, that you would root them out.

We pray that the seed this morning would land on fertile soil and bear much fruit.

In Jesus’ name, Amen.

/

I.

The foundation of kingdom activity is God’s REDEMPTION.

In Exodus 19, three months after Israelites had left Egypt, they came into the wilderness of Sinai.

They camped in the wilderness in front of the mountain.

The Lord had a word for Moses and His people.

God said I want you to remember how I redeemed you.

God reminded them that not only had He redeemed them and brought them out of slavery, but He brought them into a dynamic relationship with Himself.

Verse 4 says, “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians and how I carried you on eagles’ wings,” but it goes beyond that.

He said, “I brought you to Me.”

Here is a reminder that God has not only redeemed His people, but He was the One that came to them and brought them to Him.

But many of the people sitting in our churches every Sunday do not have a kingdom vision because they do not have a kingdom relationship.

You cannot have a kingdom vision if you don’t know the King.

If in your life there is not a point in time where kingdom redemption activity took place and you know that you were brought out of the bondage of the slavery of sin and into the light of relationship with Him, you don’t know the King.

But once that transformation has occurred, once that redemption has been accomplished, a transformation of heart and mind puts us onto a different agenda and it is not our agenda but the King’s agenda.

This is what EKG is all about.

It’s about remembering how you were brought out of slavery of sin and how Jesus brought you into a relationship with a Holy God, the King.

Ask yourself this question, “Do I really believe that I was in the bondage of slavery of sin before I was saved, or do I believe that I was basically good, but had not yet received Jesus into my heart?”

“Do I truly know what Jesus had to do to redeem me and choose me as one of His own?”

Just as God redeemed the people of Israel out of the bondage of slavery from Egypt, so too, for those of us that received Jesus, did He redeem us out of the bondage of slavery from sin.

II.

The results of our redemption is OBEDIENCE.

Redemption and obedience go together hand in hand.

A nation has been redeemed, and because of their redemption, they are committed to serving the King who has redeemed them.

God clearly outlines what He expects from those in covenant relationship with Him: “If you will listen to Me and carefully keep my covenant.”

Please note that the “if” clause is not related to their redemption.

Their redemption had already occurred.

They couldn’t go back through the Red Sea.

They could not enter back into the bondage of slavery.

They could not lose their redemption.

That’s the same for us; the “if” clause is not related to our redemption.

If you received Jesus into your heart, you can no longer go back into the bondage of son.

You cannot lose your redemption.

So we are God’s own possession.

Some translations have “unique possession” or maybe “peculiar treasure.”

The Hebrew word for peculiar means “movable possession.”

At this point, people typically had only two possessions: either real estate—that is land or property—or jewelry—gold, silver, precious stones.

Many preferred jewelry because they could sew it into the lining of their clothes and take it with them.