Sermon Tone Analysis

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An Undeniable Experience with God

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When God Shows Up!

 

 

       Today, I need to do something that I try *not* do:  i.e. to take a whole sermon to introduce the next series and talk more the way that I talk!

I.

Understanding The Preacher Helps You Better Understand the Word S~/he Is Professing To Preach.

*Preachers and preaching are never neutral!*

The study of the Word and the dissemination of an interpretation of the Word of God is filtered through and delivered through the background, experiences, values, motivations, etc., etc., etc. of a preacher!

Just as education cannot be values free, because the teacher cannot be values free.

Preaching cannot be values free, because the preacher cannot be value free.

*Most people never think about this!*

They listen to sermons and take the preacher and the sermon at face value and attribute values and motives to them that they want them to have.

*Additionally, most preachers generally don’t purposefully reveal their values and motivations for a sermon.*

Because I understand these variables and the difficulty that they can cause in getting at an accurate presentation of the Word of God, I often share my values, motivations, etc., so that those listening to me can get an accurate understanding of my interpretation of the Word of God as possible.

*Consequently, I am going to take today’s sermon to give you my thinking that underlies this new series of messages entitled “An Undeniable Experience with God” or “When God Shows Up!”*

 

       I really had a hard time naming this series, because of a number of recent interactions that I have had with people.

The Spirit impressed me to preach on close encounters with God, because they are notably missing from the lives of modern, American Saints!  *We can easily talk about a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” but we actually mean “an intellectual relationship with Jesus Christ”!*

We are generally referring to how much doctrine or how many Bible verses we know.

*However, in the Bible, the word “know” denotes deep, personal communion and social intercourse, and often denotes sex.*

\\ So, we are actually talking about two different things.

·        *In America, “to know” is intellectual!

In the Bible, “to know” is comprehensively personal!*

·        *In America, rational and technical knowledge is valued, but for the persons who people the pages of the Bible, social, relational, emotional knowledge is valued!*

So, I immediately knew that God wanted me to update and re-preach an older series entitled “Close Encounters of the God Kind!”

However, because I am Human, I struggled with some recent criticism that I received about remixing messages and series.

I was *not* struggling over God’s assignment or the power of what He had given me to do, but *the pain of the perception of one person* and the attack of the devil that was concealed in their criticism.

I’m glad that I had just read the book /Breakout Churches/, which points out that leaders of Breakout Churches, were 1) often very sensitive, but that didn’t stop them from doing what God called them to do, because they were 2) determined and tenacious about doing God’s will!

While responding to the psychologist who was taking my psychological history for the SPECT scan, she asked me these questions, *“You’re sensitive aren’t you?”  “You’re stubborn aren’t you?”*

The answer to both questions is, “Yes!”

These are the characteristics of pastors of /Breakout Churches/, which is based on Level 5 leaders in the book /Good to Great/!

Additionally, I was struggling with how to package the series so that it would be the most effective.

*You see, I try to extract the truth or suggestion that I can gain from criticism, and discard the rest.*

I was struggling with this at the Joint College of Bishops Congress, when a presenter began to talk about “an undeniable experience.”

I wrote that phrase down and began to ponder it, because I was sure that God was saying something to me.

The more I thought and prayed about the phrase, the more I began to become settled in my spirit that this series should be called “An Undeniable Experience.”

 

\\ /(Now, I had God’s leading, but I also had a problem:)/

 

II.

The Trouble With Experience In America.

While I was gone to Reston, Virginia to get my SPECT brain scan, I gave this subject more thought and prayer.

While I was gone, I was reading a book that Dr. Pilch, my Mediterranean Culture professor, told me about.

The book is entitled /Human Development in Cultural Context:  A Third World Perspective/, by A. Bame Nsamenang.

He is a West African from Camaroon.

He writes about Human development from a much different perspective than the one taught in American psychology.

In the book, he writes about “experience.”

Nsamenang wrote,

 

“‘Experience is conscious awareness’ (Leff, 1978, p. 4).

In a more global sense, experience connotes apprehension or feeling; a conception that includes intuition.

Experience arises and operates within an interdependent complex of biological, behavioral, sociocultural, psychological, and environmental inputs.

In one sense, ‘the quality of your life over the long haul may be conceived as a weighted composite of all your experiences’ (Leff, 1978, p. 4).

We, however, weight experiences differently.”[1]

“We, however, weight experiences differently.”

Who weights experiences differently?

Every society or culture weights experiences differently!

·        America weights experiences differently than France!

·        France weights experiences differently that Italy!

·        African-Americans weight experiences differently than Europeans, and

·        Europeans weight experiences differently than Hispanics or Asians!

 

*Furthermore, Americans weight experiences differently than those who populate the pages of the Bible and they weight experiences far differently than we do!*

The American perspective of an experience is very rational, cerebral, and scientific.

We expect science to be able to solve all of our problems with mathematical precision.

(/Katrina example/)

       *It never dawns on us that science does not have all the answers and some things do not lend themselves to scientific study or solutions!*

We, i.e.

Americans can certainly relate to the first sentence,

 

“Experience is conscious awareness.”

This lines up well with our rationalistic, scientific culture.

However, the next sentence causes us all kinds of trouble:

 

“In a more global sense, experience connotes apprehension or feeling…”

 

We hardly know what to do with feelings in America and in the conservative part of the American church.

*Our relationship is more with our thoughts about God than with God himself, and we hardly know what to do with the accompanying feelings.

*However, Nsamenang said,

 

“…in a more global sense.”

*Try not to fall off of your seat, but America is not the globe or the world!*

In fact, America is a very small part of the world, even though she has exerted tremendous influence throughout the world.

*Yet, our influence is shrinking and our worldview never has been and never will be the predominant worldview of most of earth’s cultures.*

Nsamenang continues,

 

“…experience connotes…a conception that includes intuition.”

*Americans are almost completely unaware, unfamiliar, and distrusting of intuition.*

Only recently, with the work being done in the field of E.Q., i.e. emotional intelligence, have we begun to understand the reality and importance of intuition or *knowing* through our *knower*.

·        We are excellent in thinking with our thinkers.

·        We seldom feel in our feelers.

And,

·        We have little understanding or practice with knowing with our knowers.

*However,* *there is a part of us that can know without rationalization or contemplation!*

\\        Nsamenang continues,

 

“Experience arises and operates within an interdependent complex of biological, behavioral, sociocultural, psychological, and environmental inputs.”

In other words, experience arises and operates within an interdependent combination of complex inputs.

If you haven’t understood anything that I have said in the last couple of minutes, let me summarize it for you like this:  *we all weight experiences differently, because of all of the variability of all of these inputs!*

So, the people of the Bible weight their experiences differently than we do, *not* to mention the fact that we are looking back at the Bible from a distance of 2,000 years and a very diverse culture.

Therefore, when we read these encounters, we are mostly reading our culture into the encounters.

This would cause us to view the experiences of people in the Bible much differently than they viewed them.

/(These are the things that impacting my:)/

 

III.

Choosing A Title That Communicates And Proceeds From The Bible.

The more I thought about this, the more I realized that my title “An Undeniable Experience” was inadequate, because American people can readily deny an experience that does *not* meet their cultural experience.

*So, I began to think about new names again.*

·        I thought about these experiential encounters being what they really are, i.e. alternate states of consciousness, but used that terminology before and I’m *not* yet sure of the results.

·        I thought about “Close Encounters of the God Kind (The Remix),” but the criticism I received and the fact that the typology of the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” is outdated, caused me to rethink that.

·        I thought about “A Unique Experience,” but there are parts of these experiences that are very common to people who serve God and are open to them.

So, although they are personally unique, in some ways they are common.

·        I thought about “Encounters and Experiences with the Eternal.”