Sermon Tone Analysis

Overall tone of the sermon

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Emotion
Anger
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Analytical
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Social Tendencies
Openness
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Anger
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Transfiguration
Matthew 12:1-9
*Jesus Gives Us a Preview*
 
            Don't you just love a good preview?
When I go to the movies, I like the previews.
I even like it when you rent a movie and they put previews on the tape.
Why do they show previews?
To sell the movie, right?
The guys who make previews take all best parts of the movie and put them together to make you want to buy a ticket.
Sometimes the previews promise more than the movie delivers.
But I like a good preview, because it gets me excited about the movie.
I like watching movies.
Almost two thousand years before movies were invented, Jesus invented the preview.
In our text for today, we have the first audio-visual, three dimensional preview in history.
We call it the transfiguration.
But it might be easier to just say *Jesus gives us a preview.*
*            I.
A preview of divine glory.*
*            II.
A preview of pastoral care.*
*I.*
I would really like to have seen a film of the preview Jesus showed.
But God didn't preserve it for us that way.
Instead, he had Matthew, Mark and Luke all describe the preview for us.
It must have been something to see.
When you compare the three accounts, all three writers grasp for just the right words to describe what happened.
They describe how *Jesus gave a preview of his divine glory.*
*            *Jesus had often gone off by himself to pray.
Peter, James and John had probably spent the entire day climbing that mountain thinking that this was going to be the same.
But Jesus had a surprise in store for them at the top.
Matthew says "he was transfigured before them."
The Greek word that Matthew uses literally means "his shape was changed."
Matthew explains that a little more.
He says that Jesus' face "shone like the sun" and his clothing became "white like the light."
When I was growing up, my father worked for a small town newspaper and part his of job was picture taking.
He used have these big, silver lights that he would set up at times to take pictures of us.
I remember looking into those lights and being blinded by them.
I imagine that Jesus' face and clothing dazzled something like that.
That light from his face and his clothing meant something.
God didn't just throw it in so that we can ooh and ahh over his special effects.
When light erupted from Jesus, his disciples saw who he really was.
Jesus was God hidden in the flesh and blood of a human being.
He gave us a preview of what he would be like when his work on this earth was finished.
He needed to do that because while he lived on this earth, he hid his glory and his power in rags and human flesh.
Suddenly, two dead men, Moses and Elijah, appeared with Jesus.
Many people have wondered why these two men appeared.
Why not Isaiah or David or Abraham?
Maybe it was because God had used Moses to establish the covenant and Elijah to bring his people back to it.
Maybe it was because Elijah had ascended physically to heaven in a fiery chariot, and after his death, Moses' body also may have been taken to heaven, although we don't know that for sure.
Maybe there was another reason.
Jesus never tells us.
But it doesn't matter.
When the disciples saw Moses and Elijah, they saw what we all are looking forward to: eternal life.
God had one more clip to show the disciples.
Suddenly, a bright cloud enveloped them and God spoke from inside it.
The cloud represented God's glory.
In the Old Testament, when God came down on Mt.
Sinai, he came down in a cloud.
When Solomon dedicated the temple, God filled it in the form of a cloud.
The Old Testament calls this cloud "the glory of the LORD."
That glory represents God's physical presence with his people.
When that cloud covered the mountain top, God himself covered it.
Then he spoke: "This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.
Listen to him."
The Father didn't point to himself.
He didn't give the disciples ten new commandments to bring down from the mountain.
He pointed them to Jesus.
Up until this moment, when the disciples looked at Jesus, they saw a man.
They may have realized he was also God, but they hadn't seen it yet because Jesus came down from heaven and hid his glory in the stable and the strips of cloth, in the poverty of a man who depended on others to supply his needs, in the need to eat and drink and sleep.
Not long after our text, Jesus' would hide his glory behind the gruesome death on the cross.
But after he rose from the dead, Peter proclaimed that God the Father had declared him to be both Christ and Lord by his resurrection.
After all those years of humiliation, God the Father pointed to Jesus as his true Son and our Savior.
On the mountain, Jesus gave us a preview of the honor that the God the Father gives him now.
Today the rags are all gone, although the flesh is still there.
Today Jesus sits at God's right hand and rules over all things for our good.
But we are still looking forward to the day when we will stand with Moses and Elijah, and Peter, James and John, and see Jesus as he is.
We are still looking forward to the day when we will hear the Father's voice and join him in praising our Savior.
We are looking forward to life in heaven, and to our own resurrection.
To put it in human terms, we are still waiting for the movie to come to a theater near us.
But God has given us a preview of Jesus' divine glory, to rev us up and get us excited about what is coming.
We need to be revved up because we live in a world in which Jesus' true glory is still hidden.
When we look around, we don't see Jesus' rule.
In fact, an honest appraisal of our planet is just the opposite.
Presidents lie and get away with it, and congressmen and senators try to get whatever political advantage they can from the situation.
The Christians that the world knows best are the ones with the TV shows whose teachings are a far cry from the Bible and whose repeated falls into sexual immorality and greed make a mockery of all that Christ came to do.
The media and the educational establishment attack all that we believe is right, and advance in their place abortion as a virtue and homosexuality as merely an alternative life style.
When we look around us we don't see the glory of Christ.
We need the preview of what is coming.
God gives it to us today.
Jesus is God and Lord.
He is ruling over all things for the good of his church.
One day, we will stand with him in heaven.
One day, he will return and set all things right.
*II.*
Jesus knew that very soon the disciples would face the greatest trial of their faiths that they would ever  know.
They would have to watch him die.
He knew that they wouldn't understand his death yet.
So when he gave them their preview of heaven, he also gave them something else: *Jesus gave a preview of pastoral care.*
I mentioned before that I even like watching the previews that come on rented movies.
There is one exception however.
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