Sermon Tone Analysis

ATTENTION

Chase Wright is pitching in a Double-A Baseball game in that picture you are looking at.

Yet, it wouldn’t be long until he got his big break: He was called up to a major league baseball team, and not just any major league team.

He was called up to the New York Yankees.

How did he do?

Well, he tied a Major League Baseball record in his first week on the mound.

On April 22, 2007, Wright gave up 4 consecutive home runs to the Boston Red Sox, allowing them to sweep their division rival Yankees in their first meeting of the season.

He worked hard, it seems, but he didn’t accomplish much, except to serve up basketball-sized pitches to obliging Red Sox.

You can’t help but feel a little sorry for Chase.

After all, we’ve all had the experience at one time or another.

We get a big breack of some kind and want, in the worst way, to capitalize on it, yet no matter how hard we might try, we find ourselves walking the familiar road of failure.

This has been true in the church as well.

People have taken note of the fact that the organization identifying itself with the Kingdom of God seems more ineffective and irrelevant than it ever has.

As far back as the early 90's Gallup was reporting that fully 70% of Americans believe that most churches and synagogues are not effective in helping people find meaning in life.

7 out of 10!

Do you ever stop to ask why?

Do you ever question why the one body on this earth which should be the most effective is often the least?

Do you ever why the group of people who should be the linchpin of progress is often the laughingstock of people?

Why is this true?

NEED

And, the truth is, you and I as believers often reflect the same futility.

We get up Sunday in and Sunday out and teach our lessons, and no one seems to be moved.

We reach out into the community and people seemed to be helped phyiscally, but never moved spiritually.

We get up on Sunday and sing our solos, but the music doesn’t penetrate the hundreds of hearts that find themselves present.

We finally get up the courage to “Share Jesus without fear” with our next door neighbor and they yawn through our presentation, looking for their first opportunity to escape.

Most of the time we can find an excuse for our impotence.

We blame it on the hardness of men’s hearts or the weakness of their wills; we may blame ourselves for prayerlessness or spiritual weakness; we may blame the devil and vow to redouble our efforts at prayer and spiritual warfare.

Yet, while all these things may have impact upon our ineffectiveness, I really don’t think it’s the primary reason our work is so ineffective.

As a matter of fact, I think I may know the greatest part of the answer.

I believe there is a disconnection when it comes to our work.

I believe what so many Christians are missing today is a “Love Connection.”

Simply put, your ministry and your calling must be exercised in the context of love for it to really be effective.

Paul said it like this:

But earnestly desire the best gifts.

And yet I show you a more excellent way.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

These verses describe disconnected ministry.

They herald the futility of ministry without love and they also by their negative example, show us how our ministry can be effective.

You see, effective ministry is connected ministry.

There is a “love connection” which must be present if you are to have power.

Why is that?

Well in the first place, Love makes ministry effective because it:

DIVISION 1: BRINGS MEANING TO OUR WORDS

EXPLANATION:

The Corithians were great at words!

On the one hand they valued what they considered to be deeper spiritual mysteries, so they loved to multiply their words in explaining some “deep” truth of the faith.

Thus they spoke prolifically in the “tongues of men.” O but the tongues of men were not good enough for them.

There is good evidence that they actually believed that they could speak in the tongues of angels too.

It is this church which “spoke in tongues.”

That is, they believed that they could express heavenly truths in a language known only to the angels in heaven.

They took pride in the display of the spiritual ecstasies.

Whenever the worship service started the language began to flow, and it became a point of “one upsmanship”.

They each tried to outdo the other, and it quickly degenerated into a cacophonous free-for-all.

Onlookers who didn’t have the “gift” were left out, put down, and confused.

Now Paul tells them, here, that this kind of exercise was not loving and that, in fact, to speak all kinds of truth, whether in the tongues of men or of “angels” and not have love, was futile.

In fact he says that to speak this way makes you like “sounding brass or a clanging symbol.”

One person writes of this:

Paul is not simply saying that if love is absent, tongues are hollow and mere noise.

He is suggesting that in cases where a tongues speaker might be without love in his or her lifestyle, the persons themselves would have become merely a resonating jar or a reverberating cymbal.

The tense of the verb would literally say it like this “If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, look at what I have become!

I am nothing but empty noise reverberations going on and on andon.

I am nothing but mere wind and rattle.

When I tell someone the truth to show them how much I know or to put them down for what they’ve done wrong or for how their lives do not “measure up” I sound to them like the teacher on Peanuts.

You know if you’ve watched the TV version of the cartoon.

The teacher is talking but it all sounds like “Wah, wah, wah, wah, wah wah.”

That’s us when we speak truth without love.

O, but the opposite is also true.

My words begin to have impact when they are connected to love.

When I say what I say for the welfare of another, my words have meaning.

They really begin to connect and what used to be an empty lesson has meaning; what used to be a yawner witness begins to land; what used to be a “here-we-go-again” message suddenly penetrates.

Love gives meaning to my words!

ILLUSTRATION

As many of you know, I grew up in a great home with parents who loved me and God too much to let me get away with foolishness.

Many of you had that kind of home too, and you, like me, have often thanked God for it.

My father was a disciplinarian.

He knew how to apply the strap of wisdom to the seat of knowledge if you know what I mean.

But it wasn’t his application of coporal punishment that reached me at the crucial moment of my life.

It was my sophmore year in high school.

I had always kind of grown up enamored with cigarrettes.

They had been glamorized back then and didn’t have the stigma attached to them that they do today.

The truth is, I didn’t like smoking as much as I just liked rebelling.

I started going to the smoking area at our high school, thinking that I could get away with it and that no one would ever find out what I was doing.

Now you’ve got to be pretty stupid to be in the only public High School in town and think that your dad, who pastors one of the churches in town, isn’t going to find out about it if you decide to take up such an obvious habit.

So he approached me.

He asked me if I had been smoking.

I said “yes.”

He asked me if I was planning to keep on doing that.

I said “yes.”

At that point, he could have tried what I expected to try.

I expected him to begin preaching his sermon about the body being the temple of the Holy Spirit and bombarding me with the truth that I had heard over and over again at church.

He didn’t.

In fact, he didn’t say anything that day.

He let me stew in my own sin for a while.

That afternoon he picked me up from school and took me to his office.

He told me he loved me too much to let me get away with doing this and in the middle of the conversation, he began to cry.

I didn’t remember seeing him cry before.

You know he could have cited the statistics about smoking and lung cancer, and I would have laughed them off.

I was 16; I was going to live forever.

He could have talked to me about how this was hurting my testimony and I would have hardened my heart.