Sermon Tone Analysis

Overall tone of the sermon

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Happy New Year, everybody!
In the immortal words of Barbara Walters, “This is 2020.”
Today, in churches around the world, pastors are standing at their pulpits delivering messages about 20/20 vision.
The combination of the vision-casting opportunity of the first sermon of the year, along with the coincidence of the denomination of the year, makes such a sermon a unique temptation for pastors.
I promised myself that I would stand against this temptation, but the chances are good that some vision puns will nonetheless creep into today’s message.
You have been warned.
Frankly, what has been weighing heavier on me during the past week is the relentless tide of those who are celebrating a new decade.
I’m a bit of a stickler about these things, so let me tell you why this is not a new decade.
The short answer: There was no Year 0. We went straight from 1 B.C. to A.D. 1 without a 0 year in between.
So the first decade — the first 10-year time span after the birth of Christ — consisted of years 1-10.
The second decade started at A.D. 11, and the third started at A.D. 21 and so on.
In the same way, we did not enter the 21st century until 2001, regardless of how many New Millennium parties were held on Dec. 31, 1999.
I recognize that much of the world — and perhaps many of you — consider these points to be silly and unimportant, but I can assure you that many newspaper editors — both current and former — have lost a lot of their hair during the past week as they’ve watched print and television reporters prattle on about the new decade.
I also recognize it’s a lost cause, so I’m not challenging anybody to a duel over the whole thing, but one of my jobs here is to speak truth, so there it is.
And speaking this truth in front of this group is probably safer than putting it on Facebook.
The battles over this matter on social media have been merciless.
One thing I have enjoyed during the past week is watching my friends post about the course of their lives during the past 10 years.
Some of the stories have been amazing.
For some reason, the turning of the calendar encourages us to look both backward and forward.
The new year becomes a time for taking stock of where we stand and how we got here, and it nudges us to consider how the place where we stand can lead us to the place where we want to be in a year — or in the next decade.
This can be a healthy exercise.
Frankly, there is never a bad time to recall how God has blessed you or delivered you, to remember how He has been faithful and to see how much better His plans are for us than any of those we make for ourselves.
And there is never a bad time to take stock of our standing before Him, to see where we fall short and to ask Him to make us more like Jesus Christ, the author and perfecter of our faith.
Unfortunately, most of us tend NOT to have 20/20 vision when it comes to looking forward OR looking backward.
For that matter, we tend not even to clearly see where we stand at any given moment.
And that’s where the problems start.
We do not see ourselves clearly, so we start this process from a bad position, and then when we look ahead, we do not have enough faith to ask God to change the things about us that most need changing.
Too often, we’re squinting into the future because our glasses don’t give us 20/20 vision.
And when we look back over the past, we tend to do so with rose-colored glasses that improve the picture of who we used to be, while obscuring the view of what God has done for us.
We do not have enough faith to ask God to change the things about us that most need changing, and so we squint
And if we’re not careful, then what happens is that we begin to have a longing to return to what we had left.
Think about the people of Israel after God had delivered them from captivity in Egypt.
They had been slaves in that land; they had watched their children be killed and had been forced to help build temples to false gods.
But God had afflicted the Egyptians with 10 plagues, and the people of Egypt had given them vast treasure to take along with them, just to see them gone from their country and an end put to the plagues.
And yet, even as they stood on the banks of the Red Sea, the people of Israel began to complain, longing to go back to Egypt.
We see this in Exodus, Chapter 14.
They had been sent on their way by the Pharaoh, but when he changed his mind and sent his troops out to try to retrieve the Jewish people, they suddenly lost their faith, and everything they had been through in Egypt now looked much better to them than it had actually been.
Sadly, this was not the last time the Israelites would clamor to return to Egypt.
In fact, I counted at least eight different places where Scripture records them complaining about having been delivered from their captivity before they had even arrived in the Promised Land.
Today, we’re going to focus on one of those episodes of rebellion against Moses and against God in the Book of Numbers, Chapter 20.
But first, I want us all to take a quick, prescription-corrected look at the spiritual growth in this church during the past year or so.
I want us all to see clearly where we stand today, and I want those of you who were here a year ago to compare where God has led us to where we started.
This morning, before Sunday school, a small-but-faithful group of believers gathered in the church library for corporate prayer.
They prayed for this service and for me and the message God would give through me.
They prayed for the spiritual growth of the church.
They prayed for the ministries of the church.
And they prayed for those among our fellowship who are sick or shut in.
I believe that all of the other things I will talk about in the next few minutes have happened because of these prayers, sent up each week in the confidence that God listens and that the fervent prayer of a righteous person has great power and works wonders.
Today, we have a renewed reverence for the Lord’s Supper.
It is sad that so many churches today look at this observance as simply something else to tick off each week or each month or each quarter.
The Lord’s Supper is our monthly opportunity to reexamine the covenant that we have in Jesus Christ.
It is our reminder of the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross to save us from the penalty we deserve for sinning against His perfectly holy Father.
And it is a reminder to we who have followed Jesus in faith that His death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven are the only source of hope we have in this world that has been cursed because of our sins.
We who deserve death because of our rebellion can have eternal life in Christ.
In an effort to help retrieve some of the reverence that had been lost for this observance, you have heard me dedicate more than 16 monthly sermons to the topic, teaching about its meaning, its significance, its foundations and its evangelical application.
And that leads me to the teaching ministry of Liberty Spring Christian Church.
Many of you enjoyed another edifying lesson this morning from the Beatitudes, prepared by one of the two most godly women I know.
I never worry about what is being taught in Sunday school, because I see just how much time Lynn Spears dedicates to studying God’s word — and not just for Sunday school, but for herself.
Those of you who have been faithful to our Wednesday night Bible studies have benefitted from a long series on prayer, a short series on missions and the beginning of a series on the Book of John.
We have gone deep into God’s Word in these studies, and it has been a joy for me to watch as people’s spiritual lives have been changed.
But it’s not just the adults who have benefitted from godly, Spirit-filled teaching.
Our children’s church program used to consist of setting up some Christian-y videos for kids to watch on Roku during the church service.
Today, they enjoy a custom-tailored curriculum that takes them into God’s Word to teach them about Jesus Christ.
In the nursery, children used to spend all their time playing with toys.
Today, they, too, have a custom-designed, age-appropriate curriculum that teaches them the basics of our faith, while demonstrating that following Jesus brings joy and richness to life.
Today, we are discipling — not simply entertaining — people of all ages here at Liberty Spring Christian Church, and as part of the Great Commission that Jesus gave us, we have, by God’s grace, made missions and evangelism our priority.
The members of this church have committed to devoting at least a tenth of the church’s tithes and offerings to missions and evangelism, and even more importantly many of you have committed your time and talents to our Lord’s command to go and tell.
One of our members is personally involved in the work of the Crisis Pregnancy Center, and the church has supported that work financially and by collecting gifts for the women and children the CPC serves.
We will soon host the homeless of Suffolk for the second time, and we have increased our financial support for CAPS, the organization that administers the Night Stay program, and another member serves on the CAPS board of directors.
We visit the mostly forgotten elderly residents of Autumn Care Nursing Home each month and are working with the administrators there to find more ways to show the love of Jesus Christ to the least of these.
Our muffin ministry is a monthly outreach by which we show various groups of civil servants around Suffolk that there is a church in this city that cares very much for them and appreciates the work they do.
Our free community dinners have fed hundreds of guests and have given us a way to do outreach to the community without even leaving our facility.
And finally, we have a number of new families that have either joined the church or become regular visitors.
Look what God has done here!
Look at how He has delivered us!
We stand on the banks of the Red Sea today, with God having done something miraculous at this church, but I wonder just how many of you are wishing you could go back to Egypt.
That’s exactly the situation we see in today’s passage from Numbers, Chapter 20.
Let’s read the first 13 verses, and then we’ll talk about some lessons we should take from them.
READ .
Now, the first thing you need to remember is that Moses was the man whom God Himself had chosen to lead the people of Israel out of Egypt and into the Promised Land.
He was God’s spokesman first before the Pharaoh and then before the Israelites.
But he was also a man, and as we see in verse 1, he was a man who had just lost his wife, Miriam.
You see, your spiritual leaders — pastors included — have their own problems, their own heartbreaks and their own tragedies.
But Moses was still the leader whom God had chosen, and so what we see in verse 2 should be somewhat shocking.
When the congregation assembles itself against God’s chosen representative, there are serious spiritual problems afoot.
And as with most spiritual problems, this one grew out of a lack of faith.
God had provided for His people all along — in fact, He had provided water from a rock in a similar situation in the Wilderness of Sin before they had even crossed the border out of Egypt.
But they had no faith that He would continue to provide for them.
So the people assembled against Moses and Aaron, and they began to complain.
Now, the statement about their brothers who had perished before the Lord is a reference to an event in Numbers, Chapter 16, when Korah, one of the Levites, rose up against Moses, along with 250 other leaders of the congregation, and said, essentially, that Moses had no right to tell them what to do, since, as he put it, “All the congregation are holy, every one of them.”
Korah and the others believed they should be priests and leaders of the congregation, even though God had not called them to that work.
This did not end well for this group.
God opened the earth, and Korah and the leaders of the rebellion were swallowed alive.
Then God sent down fire to consume the 250 men who had followed them in the rebellion.
And now, the people of Israel were saying they wished they had been allied with these apostate Levites, and they ramped up the complaints.
Here’s the thing: Egypt ALSO wasn’t a place of grain or figs or vines or pomegranates, and that’s about the nicest thing that could have been said about the people’s time of enslavement there.
But the people of Israel weren’t seeing things with 20/20, faith-corrected vision, and so they wanted to go back to Egypt.
So Moses and Aaron did what all of us — and especially pastors — should do: They took their problems to the Lord.
Now, this was a different thing than God had called Moses to do when the people had found themselves without water in the Wilderness of Sin.
Back then, God had told Moses to strike the rock, and water had come gushing forth from it.
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