Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

By Helene Schumacher 5th April 2018 [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180403-inside-the-world-of-instruction-manuals]

Maybe you diligently read an instruction manual from cover to cover before you even turn on a new product.

Or perhaps you ‘file’ the information in the kitchen drawer never to be found again – preferring to rely on instinct (and perhaps a degree of stubbornness) in assembling a new piece of furniture.

Either way, and even if it’s only months after your purchase, there is almost always a time and a place when instruction manuals come in handy.

While we may think of them as the dense paper booklets that fall out in a tumble of bubblewrap and polystyrene when we are unpacking our new bedside cabinet, instruction manuals are much more.

They exist for a multitude of purposes and take many different forms.

What’s more, they are not an especially modern invention: they have, in fact, been around for at least two centuries.

Paul Ballard, Managing Director of 3di, a company that specialises in technical writing says:

“Wherever you are in life, there's always a manual somewhere, hidden behind the scenes,”

Some user manuals are a frustration, some are a pleasure – and all reveal more about us than we might think.

PRAYER

God in Heaven

Message

We are...

Made For Unity

Paul an apostle to the gentiles and in prison in Rome

Walk = life of practice

Worthy = scales / equivalence

What type of calling are you called to?

Humility = lowliness - NT = bad meaning… slavish / menial

In Christ this became a virtue

Gentleness = meekness - domesticated animal

power under control

as Mitton (NCB) puts it, meekness ‘is the spirit of one who is so absorbed in seeking some worthy goal for the common good that he refuses to be deflected from it by slights, injuries or insults directed at himself personally, or indeed by personal considerations of any kind’.

Patience - godly trait = steadfastness in the enduring of suffering = long suffering...

never pray for patience...

A rather pious individual once came to a preacher and asked him to pray for him that he might have patience.

“I do so lack patience,” he said, trying to be humble as he said it.

“I wish you would pray for me.”

“I’ll pray for you right now,” the preacher replied.

So he began to pray: “Lord, please send great tribulation into this brother’s life.”

The man who had asked for prayer put a hand out and touched the preacher on the arm, trying to stop his prayer.

“You must not have heard me rightly,” he said.

“I didn’t ask you to pray for tribulation.

I asked you to pray that I might have patience.”

“Oh, I heard what you said,” the preacher answered.

“But haven’t you read Romans 5:3, ‘And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also, knowing that tribulation worketh patience’?

It means we acquire patience through the things that we suffer.

I prayed that God would send tribulations so that you would have patience.”

Bearing with one another in love = forbearance

literally to “hold him up”… patience finds loving expression here!!

‘It involves bearing with one another’s weaknesses, not ceasing to love one’s neighbours or friends because of those faults in them which perhaps offend or displease us’ (Abbott).

It is ‘that mutual tolerance without which no group of human beings can live together in peace’ (Stott).

How and why are we do live this way?

Eager = zealous effort to see it done… this is not passive!

Matthew 5 = blessed are the peace-makers for they are called sons of God…

Maintain unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace

Indeed, since Christ is himself their peace (Eph.

2:14), it would be unnatural for them to live otherwise than at peace with one another.

We are MADE for unity.

Unity to the Body of Christ is what you are called to.

(1-3)

if you have been called (at all) this is what you are called to.

This is a heavy charge the we dare not neglect.

He is the…

Means Of Unity

Original Christian Creed

Repetition of ONE = unity is intrinsic to Christianity, GOD

Body

Comparing the church to a body is particularly appropriate in this passage, however, for a body is something that works together, even though it is composed of many diverse parts.

Moreover, its unity is organic.

That is, it is achieved not by joining a number of diverse parts or pieces in the way one would make a machine, but by growth.

The church is not a diesel engine or a watch or an airplane.

It is a body.

It grows by the multiplication of cells.

Spirit

We have many differences in the small particulars of our conversions.

But when we begin to talk about what the Holy Spirit did in our hearts to bring us to faith in Christ, our experiences are identical.

Hope

This is not a blind mindless Disney magic wishful desire…

Jesus is going to come back.

We are going to be with him.

There is a home for us in heaven.

Lord

There are not many Lords.

There is only one Lord, and that Lord is the Lord Jesus Christ.

If we are following him, if we are open to what he is doing, that must be a force for drawing us together.

Faith

“Faith” can be used objectively or subjectively.

Subjectively it means our experience of faith; there is no salvation apart from faith.

Objectively it means the content of faith or what we believe, the gospel.

Baptism

Have you been publicly identified with Christ?

God

of all

over all

through all

in all

Is there only one God?

Then he has only one church.

Is the unity of God inviolable?

Then so is the unity of the church.…

It is no more possible to split the church than it is possible to split the Godhead.

John T. MacNeil, a great Scottish preacher and evangelist, was a pastor of Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia for two years in the 1920s.

He used to imagine a conversation that might have taken place between the man who had been born blind, whose story is told in John 9, and the other blind man who was healed by Jesus, whose story is told in Mark 8.

MacNeil imagined these two getting together to discuss how Jesus healed them.

The man who had been healed without the spittle would tell his story, and the man who had been healed with the spittle would tell his.

He would say to the other, “But you left out the part about Jesus spitting in the dust and making clay and placing the clay upon your eyes.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” the first would reply.

The man from John would answer, “It has to be that way, because that’s the way Jesus gives sight to people.