Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
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Emotion Tone
Anger
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Analytical
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Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Tone of specific sentences
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Anger
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Happy New Year!
It’s 2022.
The last two years have been difficult times.
We have a world-wide pandemic with restrictions.
We had a very difficult and divisive election.
Our economy is lagging with inflation.
People are more polarized in their beliefs and opinions than ever.
Last year we talked about redeeming the time.
It was all about making the most of a difficult situation.
We talked about making disciples.
We put out a new vision and a process to follow.
We talked about Daniel who stood for God in Babylon.
I fielded your “hot topics” - that was making the most of a difficult situation.
We studied Paul’s letter to the Galatians who were experiencing opposition to their spiritual transformation.
And we recapped our vision again at Advent.
Perhaps you thought like I did, that if we just make the most of it, things will go back to normal.
I now suspect that things will never go back to the way that they were.
There will always be another variant of COVID; even if it isn’t that strong, they will make something of it.
People are afraid in ways that they were not before.
People are using this opportunity to make the changes that they desired to make but lacked the courage or the opportunity.
With the job market so wide open, people are quitting the jobs that they didn’t like and trying for better ones.
A lot of people are going back to school online.
People are leaving more populated states with higher taxes and tougher restrictions for more open states with natural settings.
A few months ago, as I was seeking the Lord for where to go and what to do next, I heard the words, “begin again.”
On one hand it sound like, “start over” as if to mean, “scrap everything and just begin again.”
On the other hand, if I said, “this is to be a year of new beginnings” we would be like, “yeah, we love new beginnings!”
New beginnings mean change, some things are going to end.
But not everything has to end for there to be a new beginning.
In the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day” starring a young Bill Murray, He plays a reporter who gets stuck in a time loop and lives the same day over and over again.
Except, that he begins each repeating day with the knowledge that he has gained from living it over and over again.
At first he goes crazy and experiments with living life without consequences.
But eventually, he applies that knowledge and begins to use his ‘superpower’ to do good and it culminates with his learning what it truly means to love.
I’m glad we don’t have to live either of the last two years over and over again.
But the point that I am trying to make is that when we go through changes, at least we bring with us the knowledge and experience that we have gained from previous seasons of our lives.
What are the lessons that we have learned?
What skills have we gained?
How are we better for the challenges that we have faced?
Now take all of that and begin again.
Don’t just give up; but start over.
Begin to do what you know you need to do.
It’s a new year, so make a new start.
But begin with fresh vision, fresh energy and fresh perspective.
Begin to live again
Live life with vision.
The Bible is full of new beginnings.
How many times do we see in the scriptures that God helped mankind start over?
After the fall.
After the flood.
God called Abraham out of Ur after the Babel incident.
God brought Joseph to Egypt to save Jacobs family from famine.
Then He brought the Israelites back out of Egypt.
He brought them from the wilderness into the Promised Land.
He took them out of the promised land into exile.
And he brought them out of exile again.
I read for our leadership team an excerpt from a book about passover written by a Rabbi and a friend of Robert Stearns.
He says that the Torah is full of new beginnings and that God gave mankind a secret: the ability to begin again.
“Why is beginning again the secret of the Torah and a theme that emerges in seemingly everything Jewish?
For perhaps the same reason that we are invited to the Seder in our capacity as broken.
Our world is composed of broken individuals, relationships and communities.
This brokenness does not happen at the beginning of a relationship.
The permission to begin again is the only way that broken can be made whole.”
“This is so with broken people.
A person may have damaged himself in infinite number of ways.
In the process, he certainly will have disappointed and hurt many people- including those he loves and possibly profoundly.
How, reflecting on the damage that he has done and caused, can he have the self-respect needed to live productively and fully?
How can he continue?
By knowing that the eternal and insistent invitation from God and through Judaism is to begin again.”
God invites us to begin again.
You may wonder, “what right to I have to start over?’
You have God’s invitation.
God knows that you can not continue in your broken state, so He invites you to start over.
Jesus had this conversation with a member of the Pharisees, the elite religious sect of Judaism.
I don’t think that Nicodemus disliked the idea of starting over; he just thought it to be impossible.
And in the natural, it is impossible!
You don’t get to go back and enter the world again.
But there is a spiritual world all around us that we fail to live in when we only live in the natural.
Begin to live on a new level.
So Jesus uses terms like “born again” and “born of the spirit.”
What does he mean?
When God created man, He breathed into him His own breath.
So we have physical life - that part belongs to the dust.
Jesus calls it flesh - the merely physical part of our being.
But what about the spiritual part - do we even pay attention to it?
Jesus says that unless we are born of water and the spirit, we don’t perceive the Kingdom of God, the spiritual part of life.
Water would be symbolic of baptism or cleansing.
But a baby born into the world also comes through water.
Water is the environment for the formation stage.
Being formed in water prepares us to live and breath the air.
This physical life is also a formation stage for our spiritual eternity with God.
You can experience all of the good things that life has to offer.
But until you begin to realize that you are a spiritual being, meant to breath the air of life with God, then you haven’t begun to live.
This earthly life is a womb - it is a formative stage for the life that we are really mean to live.
The brokenness and failures that we all experience in life are meant to teach us that there is something more.
We are going to keep on repeating our failures until we figure out that there is a life beyond what we know.
The good news is that we retain those lessons each time we begin again.
How many times are we going to start over in our own strength and determination until we learn that it’s not about that?
Remember the lesson of Ground Hog Day?
It didn’t end until he learned how to love.
Begin to love again
Put your energy into loving God and others.
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