Sermon Tone Analysis

Welcome

Good Morning!

I’d like to welcome you all to the first gathering of Ephesus Baptist Church in this decade, our first gathering of 2020!

I hope your new year is off to a great start!

We survived Christmas and New Year’s as we journeyed another time around the sun!

I am hoping the 2020’s will be our best decade yet!

Why are we going to be gathering on Sunday’s in the 2020’s?

(Pause)....That’s right!

The same reason we have gathered on Sunday’s since August 14th, 1880!

We gather to worship and exalt the name of Jesus Christ, our risen King.

Today, provides us another opportunity to fall more in love with Jesus Christ as we seek to follow Him as His disciples.

If you are visiting with us this morning, we want you to who we are here at Ephesus...

We are all one family of faith: “giving our all to love God, love people, proclaim Jesus, and make disciples in our generation.”

That is our mission, our purpose, why we exist as a church.

We have a connect card in the pew in front of you.

I invite you to take one and fill it out!

If you have prayer needs, you can let us know about those as well.

I promise, our prayer team will lift you up your request confidentially.

You can place those cards in the offering plate when it comes around.

Church, I pray this year will be a year of abundant life for our entire church family!

Who’s Your One?

Scripture Memory

Opening Scripture Reading

Prayer of Confession and Invocation

Introduction

Last week, we discussed our need to move out of survival mode; to move from surviving to thriving!

Today, we are going to begin our first new sermon series of 2020, THRIVE 2020!

We Were Created To Do More Than Survive!

We’ll be creating a new acronym for our church family to get a practical handle on how to move from surviving to thriving at God’s house and your house.

Each week we will work with a different letter of the word THRIVE.

This week we begin with the letter “T.”

T stands for “Trusting God In All Things!”

This is a sermon about trusting God, about faith in God!

Opening Illustration

I’m sure you’ve heard the story which Christian apologists have told for years involving the French philosopher and playwright Voltaire (1694-1778).

Voltaire was a prolific French Enlightenment writer who published over 20,000 letters and over 2,000 books and pamphlets in his 84 years on earth.

Voltaire’s hatred for the Bible and Christianity was unmatched.

He believed he was “living in the twilight years of Christianity.”1

He even ended every letter to his friends with “Ecrasez l’infame” (crush the infamy — the Christian religion).2

In his voluminous writings against Christianity and the Bible, he predicted in 1776,

“One hundred years from my day, there will not be a Bible on earth except one that is looked upon by an antiquarian curiosity-seeker.”3

As history confirms, within fifty years after his death, in an ironic twist of Providence, (Yes, this confirms that God has a sense of humor) the very house in which he once lived and wrote was used by the Evangelical Society of Geneva as a storehouse for Bibles and Gospel tracts.

And get this: the printing presses he used to print his irreverent works was used to print Bibles by the thousands.

Bible trumps Philosophy every day!

Have you heard of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche?

He was a German philosopher whose works became associated with Fascism and Nazism in the 20th Century.

He was another godless man who had no trust or faith in God or the Bible.

He died in 1900 after suffering from mental illness.

He was greatly influenced by another German philosopher named Arthur Schopenhauer.

Do you know what his philosophy was?

Well toward the end of his life he said he believed life was “a curse of endless cravings and endless unhappiness.”

How would you like to have that philosophy for the way you live your life?

All three of these men were philosophers.

All three of them were godless men.

All three of them were antagonistic and hateful toward the Bible and Christianity.

All three of them died apart from any faith or trust in Jesus Christ!

Let me share one more philosopher with you.

This philosopher got it right!

Blaise Pascal.

Pascal was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, philosopher, and theologian.

Pascal saw life differently, he said,

“There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of each man which cannot be satisfied by any created thing but only by God the Creator, made know through Jesus Christ.”

Pascal understood that we were created for more than this world can offer.

This world can provide us with a temporary existence.

It can meet our needs for survival.

But apart from Jesus Christ, we will never achieve the greatness we were created for.

Apart from Christ, we can only survive for a short time then comes death!

But with Christ, we can not only survive, but we can thrive and we can do that for eternity.

Last week we talked about

Jesus gives us an abundant life unlike anything we can imagine.

He wants us to thrive!

But, the first step, if you will, of thriving is trusting.

We have to learn to believe God!

We have to trust Him!

We have to have complete faith that what He says, He means!

Three of the four philosophers, all of whom were looking at the same world, the same history, the same truths, but their calculations were wrong because they left God out of the equation.

Today, we are going to look at a familiar passage of one of the most famous miracles Jesus provided to bolster our faith.

The Feeding of the Great Multitude!

Find your way in your Bibles to John chapter 6.

We will begin reading in verse 1.

Let’s stop reading there for a moment.

In this portion of our passage we find our first truth.

1.

We Can Trust That No Problem is Too Big For God To Solve!

If you don’t believe that this morning, then you are living life simply surviving.

You surely are not thriving!

The scene is the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee during the spring time, just before the Jewish Passover.

Interestingly, of the three Passovers in John’s Gospel this is the only one where Jesus did not go to Jerusalem.

He stayed in Galilee, specifically in these mountains on the eastern shore of the Sea of Galilee, also known as the Golan Heights region today.

While sitting on the hillside with His disciples, Jesus saw the large crowd coming toward Him.

The crowd had been following Jesus for a while now.

As John tells us in verse 2, they are following because “they saw the signs that (Jesus) was doing on the sick.”

They are drawn to Jesus, not because of His glory and majesty, but because of His miracles, as they are mired in confusion and ignorance.

Mark tells us in Mk 6:34

Matthew says in Mt 14:14

When Jesus saw these people, He had compassion on them.

He realized they had no Shepherd.

They were mired in ignorance and confusion.

So He began to teach them and heal them.

After teaching and healing for hours, everyone started to recognize a problem.

Here is the problem: There is a great multitude of people.