Sermon Tone Analysis

\\ Scripture: Matthew 4: 1-11

 

1.

Knowing when you are full.

(vs.

1-4)

 

Matthew 4:1 ¶ Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.

2  After fasting for forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.

3  The tempter came to him and said, "If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread."

4  Jesus answered, "It is written: `Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.'" {Deut.

8:3}

 

The temptation to step ahead quickly in my own resourcefulness rather than learning to depend on God

 

o       Waiting means waiting.

It is always difficult to wait for God’s provision.

For most of us, it becomes even more difficult once we are assured of an answer or the arrival of someone or some particular thing.

Or you take in the case of Christ’s temptation doubly difficult.

He had gone without food for 40 days and survived.

One might think that the testing would have been merely surviving the fast but the scripture tells us that the Devil never came to him until he was hungry – after the 40 days.

So what was to stop him from satisfying his own need?

He certainly had the capacity to do what was suggested.

No one else would have had to know.

That is one of the modern day tests for each of us.

We are many times tempted more greatly by the things that we can easily hide or by the things that only God knows.

Strange that the little inhibition that we have comes from the knowledge that people would gain of our true selves – especially so because we have to answer to no man on earth.

We do however have to give an answer to God and He does know – everything and we will answer to Him someday.

Perhaps it might have been that Jesus did not want to draw on resources that we do not have because he wanted to show us that He did it without advantage.

The playing field was level when it came to meeting temptation.

/Hebrews 4:12  For the *word of God is living and active*.

Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it *judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.*

*13  Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight.

Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.*

14  Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, {Or gone into heaven} Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess.

*15  For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are--yet was without sin.*

16  *Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence*, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

/

 

 

o       Easier when we have no other option.

When I have no other choice, I find waiting much easier.

When my ability to effect the outcome is removed then I wait differently.

I find a greater peace in my heart once I know that I can place no trust in myself.

!

THE SERENITY PRAYER

 

God grant me the Serenity to accept the things I cannot change

Courage to change the things I can, and the Wisdom to know the difference.

Living one day at a time;

Enjoying one moment at a time;

Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace.

Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.

Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will;

That I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with Him in the next.

Amen

 

Reinhold Niebuhr

 

A person who reads a book or who watches television or who glances at his watch is not usually interested in how his mind is organized and controlled by these events, still less in what idea of the world is suggested by a book, television, or a watch.

But there are men and women who have noticed these things, especially in opur own times.

Lewis Mumford, for example, has been one of our great noticers.

He is not the sort of man who looks at a clock merely to see what time it is.

Not that he lacks interest in the content of clocks, which is of concern to everyone from moment to moment, but he is far more interested in how a clock creates the idea of "moment to moment".

He attends to the philosophy of clocks, to clocks as a metaphor, about which our education has had little to say and clockmakers nothing at all.  "The clock," Mumford has concluded, "is a piece of power machinery whose `product' is seconds and minutes."

In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.

Moment to moment, it turns out,  is not God's conception, or nature's.

It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.

In Mumford's great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers.

In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded.

Indeed, as Mumford points out, with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events.

And thus though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God's supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser.

Perhaps Moses should have included another

/commandment:  Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time./

This is a great lesson for us to learn.

God has struggled to teach His people  this lesson over the years.

I know that Elaine and I have had our own struggles with it.

The scripture tells us:

 

Romans 8:28  And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.

When I start thinking that way it is good.

When things don’t change quickly enough I begin to reason in my own mind once again to better affect the desired result or to bring about change.

And then I do it, many times leading myself away from God’s approaching answers to my self-inflicted problems and difficulties.

When you are lost in the woods there is a cardinal rule.

Stay where you are.

When we try to find our own way out of the woods we walk in circles.

Let God find you in your confusion – don’t make it more difficult by trying to find Him.

Isaiah 30:1 ¶ "Woe to the obstinate children," declares the LORD, "to those who carry out plans that are not mine, forming an alliance, but not by my Spirit, heaping sin upon sin;  2  who go down to Egypt without consulting me; who look for help to Pharaoh's protection, to Egypt's shade for refuge.

3  But Pharaoh's protection will be to your shame, Egypt's shade will bring you disgrace.

4  Though they have officials in Zoan and their envoys have arrived in Hanes,  5  everyone will be put to shame because of a people useless to them, who bring neither help nor advantage, but only shame and disgrace."

6  An oracle concerning the animals of the Negev: Through a land of hardship and distress, of lions and lionesses, of adders and darting snakes, the envoys carry their riches on donkeys' backs, their treasures on the humps of camels, to that unprofitable nation,  7  to Egypt, whose help is utterly useless.

Therefore I call her Rahab the Do-Nothing.

8 ¶ Go now, write it on a tablet for them, inscribe it on a scroll, that for the days to come it may be an everlasting witness.

9  These are rebellious people, deceitful children, children unwilling to listen to the LORD's instruction.

10  They say to the seers, "See no more visions!"

and to the prophets, "Give us no more visions of what is right!

Tell us pleasant things, prophesy illusions.

11  Leave this way, get off this path, and stop confronting us with the Holy One of Israel!"  12  Therefore, this is what the Holy One of Israel says: "Because you have rejected this message, relied on oppression and depended on deceit,  13  this sin will become for you like a high wall, cracked and bulging, that collapses suddenly, in an instant.

14  It will break in pieces like pottery, shattered so mercilessly that among its pieces not a fragment will be found for taking coals from a hearth or scooping water out of a cistern."

15  This is what the Sovereign LORD, the Holy One of Israel, says: "In repentance and rest is your salvation, in quietness and trust is your strength, but you would have none of it.

16  You said, `No, we will flee on horses.'

Therefore you will flee!

You said, `We will ride off on swift horses.'

Therefore your pursuers will be swift!

17  A thousand will flee at the threat of one; at the threat of five you will all flee away, till you are left like a flagstaff on a mountaintop, like a banner on a hill."

18 ¶ Yet the LORD longs to be gracious to you; he rises to show you compassion.

For the LORD is a God of justice.

Blessed are all who wait for him!

o       Flashing the sword.

Jesus quotes scripture in response to the tempter.

Al three quotes come from the book of Deuteronomy.

They were the words of Moses the deliverer of God’s people.

He lead them under God from bondage in the land of Egypt.

The scripture is the only weapon of offense in the arsenal of the Christian.

We read of it earlier.