Sermon Tone Analysis

! Introduction

            When I was a teenager, the style was to have long hair and I had hair that was down to about my neck.

We used to pick up an elderly gentleman and take him to church every Sunday.

One morning, as we were driving to church, he told me that it said in the Bible that men should not have long hair.

I didn’t change, but it did bother me that he should try to impose rules on me that I didn’t think were that important.

A few years later, I behaved in a similar way.

My brother, who was not living for the Lord at the time, wanted to go skiing on a Sunday afternoon and I told him that I could not do so because it was Sunday.

In doing so, I was judging my brother.

I knew one person who was so obsessed about attending church on Sunday that if he missed a Sunday because he had to be away on business or was on vacation, he felt guilty about missing church in his home church.

I have met Christians who get so disturbed with a fear that they are failing to measure up to all that God wants them to be that they enter into depression.

There was a time when the list of rules about what it meant to live as a Christian were long and we were quick to judge those who did not measure up.

It is much more prevalent today to be quite loose about our Christian life.

We hear about Christian guys living with their girlfriends.

We have changed from a people who did not own radios and certainly not televisions to people who watch just about anything that is on TV.

We have gone from the excessive discipline of shunning to no discipline at all.

Is there an alternative to the two poles of legalism and permissiveness?

We have been talking about being a healthy church and have emphasized lately that a healthy church is one in which people love God.

I would like to suggest to you today that love for God is expressed by an obedience that is lived by the direction and power of the Holy Spirit.

!

I. Love for God Is Expressed In Obedience

Canada and the United States are probably two of the most Christian nations in the world.

They were founded on principles which assumed belief in God.

They have strong Christian roots.

Most of the universities in these two countries began as church schools.

There are churches everywhere and religious broadcasts can be heard in most parts of the country.

Yet in spite of such a strong presence of Christianity, we find that evil is as much present here as anywhere else in the world.

Prostitution, drug abuse, alcoholism, violence and theft and every other of the ten commandments is broken in significant degrees throughout these two countries.

People say they believe in God but their lives don’t show it.

It seems evident that people have not understood that a relationship with God implies a lifestyle that matches.

Many think that love for God is something you feel when you are worshipping or when you get an overwhelming sense of God’s presence or when you experience his goodness.

According to the Bible, love for God is demonstrated in obedience.

In John 14:2, Jesus promised the disciples “I am going to prepare a place for you.”

Love for God is a response of joy at the wonderful hope which we have of being in heaven some day.

As we read on in this passage, verses 6ff talk about the possibility of a relationship with God.

Love for God is the privilege of such a relationship.

John 14:13 indicates that whatever we ask in the name of Jesus will be done.

Love for God is rejoicing in the privilege of access to the power of God.

Having hope, a relationship and faith are all part of what it means to love God, but then in John 14:15 Jesus says, “If you love me, you will obey what I command.”

The most direct statement about how love for God is expressed tells us that it is expressed in obedience.

In my personal pilgrimage of faith as I have sought to experience the love of God and to love him in return, I have been struck recently with how often the Bible teaches that love for God must be expressed in obedience.

John 14:21, “Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me…” and I John 5:3, “This is love for God: to obey his commands.

And his commands are not burdensome…”

“Love to Him is not a thing of words.

If it is real it is shown in deeds.”

!

II.

Obedience By the Spirit of God.

As people who come from the Anabaptist background, we have understood this very well.

Yet in emphasizing obedience to God, we have often misunderstood how we should live that obedience.

Instead of emphasizing obedience as a love response to God, we have fallen into the trap of legalism.

!! A. The Problems With Outward Obedience

!!! 1. Often Indicates an Effort to Earn Favour With God.

We have fallen prey to the temptation to think that obedience is part of our salvation.

As Mennonites, we have emphasized that you cannot be a disciple without following Jesus.

We agree with Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s emphasis on costly discipleship.

Obedience is a consequence of salvation, but by some twist of logic, we go beyond that and begin to look at failures to obey as signs that our salvation is in jeopardy.

We begin to think and live as if we will not be saved if we don’t do certain things.

We add our works to God’s work in order to help Him achieve our own salvation.

In “A Taste of Joy” Calvin Miller writes, “Any struggle to be a better person which aims at earning favour with God is a futile attempt to make payment to God for a completely free salvation.”

“There are thousands of believers whose good works are not so much a response to grace as an attempt to pay for it.”

Even the guilt we feel when we think we have failed becomes a part of this attempt to help God.

Miller writes, “Yet often guilt, the enemy of renewal, remains.

It is our attempt at homemade atonement.

By holding on to guilt feelings we are erroneously trying to help God do what God has already fully done in the death of Christ.”

“At such times we say the cross is inadequate.

Jesus could not possibly have ‘paid it all,’ so we must pay the remainder by feeling bad about ourselves.”

This is not what obedience as a love response to God is all about.

!!! 2. Outward Obedience Doesn’t Cover Inward Sins

Another problem with legalism is that we emphasize outward obedience, but seldom deal with the inner sins which no one can see.

A person may never pick up a prostitute or even read or watch pornographic material, but may permit all kinds of mental fantasies.

We commend his moral lifestyle without realizing that an inner disobedience is destroying his relationship with his wife.

A person would never consider murder and might not even viciously slander another person, but may allow hatred and bitterness to brew on the inside which also destroys relationships.

In “A Taste of Joy” Calvin  Miller says, “Since we cannot get caught at sinning in the mind, we do not stress those sins so heavily.”

When we do this, we fail to understand the meaning of obedience.

!!! 3. Too Many Man Made Rules

            The other problem is that in interpreting God’s requirements, we add all kinds of human requirements.

So many of the things we adhere to are not in Scripture or if they are, we multiply their meaning with man made rules.

Many are sincerely arrived at, as an attempt to live Biblical principles, but somewhere along the line, they become human rules.

We see this clearly in the way the Pharisees had added all kinds of rules to the requirements which God had made.

We have done the same thing when we have made rules about hair and clothing and radios and jewellery and the vehicles we are allowed to drive.

Jesus condemns the Pharisees in their legalism and I believe that His condemnation applies to us as well.

!! B. The Fence Within

            Legalism is comfortable.

We know where the fence is and we just have to stay inside it, but is this the way in which God has called us to live our Christian life?

When children are young, we put them into all kinds of things which provide them with external fences - cribs, play pens and even fences around the back yard.

While they are young, these fences are necessary so they are protected from hurting themselves, but we know that the external fences will not work forever.

There comes a time when we have to teach them to protect themselves by internal fences.

Eventually, we take down the fences and teach them to look both ways before crossing they street.

They are protected not by external fences, but by the internal fence of knowledge and life principles.

In the Old Testament, God gave Israel a large outward fence called the law by which they were supposed to live.

After hundreds of years during which people built the fence ever higher and yet kept breaking through the fence, God made a promise in Jeremiah 31:33, “This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after that time,” declares the LORD.

“I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts.

I will be their God, and they will be my people.”

Paul picks up on that promise when he says in Romans 7:6, “But now, by dying to what once bound us, we have been released from the law so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit, and not in the old way of the written code.”

The wonderful thing about what God has done for us is that through the death of Christ on the cross, he has removed from us the guilt of our sin and the punishment of our wrong doing.

He has also, by His Spirit, given us a new power to live in a completely new way.

The fence for following Christ in obedience and expressing our love for God by obeying Him is no longer an outward fence, but is now within us.

We as Christians obey through the direction and power of the indwelling Holy Spirit.

In writing to the Galatians, Paul addresses the temptation which we are subject to and that is the temptation to go back to law instead of living by the power of the Spirit.

He says to them in Galatians 5:18, “But if you are led by the Spirit, you are not under law.”

As Christians, we must live in an entirely new way.

Instead of living with legalism or permissiveness, we need to live a Spirit led life.