Sermon Tone Analysis

Doug Butler

 

We typically are looking for a maximal return with minimal investment.

It is in surrender to our current set of circumstances assuming that they will never change but determining to respond to them as best we can that we will begin to experience the ever-present presence and help of God.

There are many who are afraid to surrender things to God

 

n      Holding tightly to past hurts as if you were the only person in the world who were ever cheated or hurt or swindled . .

.

n      Holding tightly to intellectual pride, convinced that the act of trusting regardless of the realities of life is merely frivolous or escapist

 

n      Holding tightly to the secrecy of concealed sin which causes you to assume that everyone else in the world is a criminal because you may know yourself to be one

 

Many of the virtues of the Christian life are qualities that may never be called forth except in times of testing.

What are some action principles that you can offer the people?

If you want to find the fruit you need to get out on the limb.

Joy is a totally unnatural response in this world.

Uninhibited joy is something that I look forward to expressing when I stand before Him and no longer have any reputation to protect or any dignity to preserve.

I want to know Him and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings.

If I have to guarantee your comfort – don’t come.

If I have to guarantee your safety – don’t come.

If I have to guarantee that you will be better off by coming then stay at home.

Kaufmann Kohler states in the Jewish Encyclopedia that no language has as many words for joy and rejoicing as does Hebrew.

In the Old Testament thirteen Hebrew roots, found in twenty-seven different words, are used primarily for some aspect of joy or joyful participation in religious worship.

Hebrew religious ritual demonstrates God as the source of joy.

In contrast to the rituals of other faiths of the East, Israelite worship was essentially a joyous proclamation and celebration.

The good Israelite regarded the act of thanking God as the supreme joy of his life.

Pure joy is joy in God as both its source and object.

The psalmist says, "Thou dost show me the path of life; in thy presence there is fullness of joy, in thy right hand are pleasures forevermore".

(Psalm 16:11)

 

The Lord desired that His people take Him seriously but that they not take themselves too seriously.

He wants them to wipe off their grim looks, put smiles on their faces, and let laughter flow from their lips.

In light of this counsel, many of us would do well to ponder these comments from the pen of Helmut Thielicke:

   Should we not see that lines of laughter about the eyes are just as much marks of faith as are the line of care and seriousness?

Is it only earnestness that is baptized?

Is laughter pagan?

We have already allowed too much that is good to be lost to the church and cast many pearls before swine.

A church is in a bad way when it banishes laughter from the sanctuary and leaves it to the cabaret, the nightclub and the toastmasters.

Christians, it is your duty not only to be good, but to shine; and, of all the lights which you kindle on the face, joy will reach farthest out to sea, where troubled mariners are seeking the shore.

Even in your deepest grieves, rejoice in God.

As waves phosphoresce, let joys flash from the swing of the sorrows of your souls.

n      Beecher

 

C.H. Spurgeon in his book Lectures to my Students has some wise, if caustic, advice.

"Sepulchral tones may fit a man to be an undertaker, but Lazarus is not called out of his grave by hollow moans."

"I know brethren who from head to foot, in garb, tone, manner, necktie and boots are so utterly parsonic that no particle of manhood is visible.... Some men appear to have a white cravat twisted round their souls, their manhood is throttled with that starched rag." "An individual who has no geniality about him had better be an undertaker, and bury the dead, for he will never succeed in influencing the living."

"I commend cheerfulness to all who would win souls; not levity and frothiness, but a genial, happy spirit.

There are more flies caught with honey than with vinegar, and there will be more souls led to heaven by a man who wears heaven in his face than by one who bears death in his looks."

See:  Prov 15:30

 

She was famous among her friends for her happy attitude toward life.

No one every heard her sitting back complaining over the darkness of her days.

A friend in England thought she knew the reason Miss Crosby could be so happy and brave and she wrote the following:

 

   Sweet blind singer across the sea,

   Tuneful and jubilant, how can it be?

That the songs of gladness, which float so far,

   As if it fell from the evening star.

Are the notes of one who never may see visible music of

   flowers and tree?

How can she sing in the dark like this?

What is her fountain of light and bliss?

Her heart can see, her heart can see!

May long she sing so joyously!

For the Lord himself in his tender grace

   Hath shown her the brightness of his face.

Happiness is caused by things that happen around me, and circumstances will mar it; but joy flows right on through trouble; joy flows on through the dark; joy flows in the night as well as in the day; joy flows all through persecution and opposition.

It is an unceasing fountain bubbling up in the heart; a secret spring the world can't see and doesn't know anything about.

The Lord gives his people perpetual joy when they walk in obedience to him.

Dwight Lyman Moody (1837-1899)

 

 

I have met people so empty of joy that when I clasped their frosty fingertips it seemed as if I were shaking hands with a northeast storm.

Others there are whose hands have sunbeams in them, so that their grasp warms my heart.

It may be only the clinging touch of a child's hand, but there is as much potential sunshine in it for me as there is in a loving glance for others.

Helen Adams Keller (1880-1968)

 

Joy has something within itself that is beyond joy and sorrow.

This something is called blessedness ... is asked for and promised in the Bible.

It makes the joy of life possible in pleasure and pain, in happiness and unhappiness, in ecstasy and sorrow.

Where there is joy, there is fulfillment.

And where there is fulfillment, there is joy.

Paul Johannes Oskar Tillich (1886-1965)

 

Joy is distinctly a Christian word and a Christian thing.

It is the reverse of happiness.

Happiness is the result of what happens of an agreeable sort.

Joy has its springs deep down inside.

And that spring never runs dry, no matter what happens.

Only Jesus gives that joy.

He had joy, singing its music within, even under the shadow of the cross.

Samuel Dickey Gordon (1859-1936)

 

True joy is not a thing of moods, not a capricious emotion, tied to fluctuating experiences.

It is a state and condition of the soul.

It survives through pain and sorrow and, like a subterranean spring, waters the whole life.

It is intimately allied and bound up with love and goodness, and so is deeply rooted in the life of God.

Rufus Matthew Jones (1863-1948)

 

Dr.

Viktor Frankl, author of the book Man's Search for Meaning, was imprisoned by the Nazis in World War II because he was a Jew.

His wife, his children, and his parents were all killed in the holocaust.

The Gestapo made him strip.

He stood there totally naked.

As they cut away his wedding band, Viktor said to himself "You can take away my wife, you can take away my children, you can strip me of my clothes and my freedom, but there is one thing no person can ever take away from me--and that is my freedom to choose how I will react to what happens to me!"

Even under the most difficult of circumstances, happiness is a choice which transforms our tragedies into triumph.

If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi desert.

He will not be searching for happiness as if it were a collar button that has rolled under the radiator.

He will not be striving for it as a goal in itself.

He will have become aware that he is happy in the course of living life twenty-four crowded hours of the day.

W.

Beran Wolfe

 

1.

Make little things bother you: don't just let them, make them!

 2.

Lose your perspective of things, and keep it lost.

Don't put first things first.