Sermon Tone Analysis
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Good morning!
I hope you all had a great week.
We had a wonderful trip and then two what felt like several Mondays back to back.
lol
Last week we had a wonderful service that was full of testimony and, it was so good!
I appreciate Bethany reminding us that we are studying New Testament wisdom literature.
It is a good reminder because if we lose that focus, it may appear that I’ve gone down a weird path of very pointed teaching.
I’ll be honest, the kinds of messages that we have had recently are hard.
Primarily because they touch parts of our lives that we don’t really want to talk about publicly.
That will certainly be the case today.
So, again, thanks for the reminder that we are walking through wisdom literature, not a vengeful sermon series cooked up by the pastor.
Amen!?
Okay, sit up and buckle up.
We are going to hit a lot of scripture today as God works this truth into us.
At the beginning of the message, we talked again about true faith, and I want to recap that portion again because it is so important for us to understand.
We have come to understand that true faith never stops growing.
Not only does True Faith continue to grow, but also, it always reveals itself.
Biblical faith is the certainty that it will happen, not based only on hope or hard work but on the revelation of God’s truth and character.
Our faith grows as we spend time with God, follow His directions, and get to see Him work in our lives.
Over time we learn to trust God’s voice and His ways.
It is by allowing God to work in our lives that our faith is grown and that faith will reveal itself to the world around us.
As we discussed two weeks ago, we have all, individually and corporately, been called to action.
We have been called to make disciples.
I want all of us to realize that as our faith grows, it will be revealed to the world by virtue of itself.
To take that idea further, if you grow in faith as God works in your life, you cannot hide it.
I hope you see the way God has designed this to work.
We aren’t discipling people or leading them to God by our own words, but by simply sharing with them what God has done in our lives.
The more active our relationship with God is, the more we will see him, and the more the world will see of him.
As I mentioned last week, the inverse is also true.
If our relationship with God is not active, we won’t experience God’s goodness, and neither will the world around us.
Over the last few years, God has revealed to us that if we are going to be His people, we aren’t going to look or act like the rest of the world.
Not because we have learned to look or act better, but because God is changing us into His likeness.
That is the goal.
However, the problem we all run into is that we don’t want to be that different from the world.
This world has some creature comforts that make us feel good.
I hope that by the end of this message today, we see God has something far greater than what this world can offer.
You see, we suffer from an identity crisis.
As believers, we are no longer from this broken world.
We belong to a different kingdom.
We are still in a broken world, but we are to be different.
Look at how Jesus described it.
We are united with the Father through the Son, and our purpose is to be in the world telling it about the Father and the Son.
This is not our home, but we are not to leave yet.
Jesus said that He is not praying that God would take us from this world, but that He would protect us from the evil one.
We are strangers in this world, but we have a purpose.
That purpose is to reveal God to the world as He works in our lives.
That work is not easy.
It does not always feel restful.
Do you know why?
Jesus tells us.
What does it mean to be sanctified?
to sanctify v. — to make as dedicated to God; either in becoming more distinct, devoted, or morally pure.
Sanctification is a difficult, God-sized, job.
You were born in the world and of the world, but at some point, you heard the gospel, and chose (for yourself) to GIVE your life to God.
You asked for and received sanctification, and that is an ongoing process.
So, when we say that our goal is to develop True Faith, we are saying that our goal is
to be sanctified,
set apart from the world,
made more like Jesus,
So that we are recognizably different from the world.
Why has and does God do all this?
So that His joy may be complete in you.
The world comes to know God by seeing his activity, his joy completing work, in your life.
While His sanctifying work may not be easy or restful, it always leads to joy.
The purpose for which we were created, we rebelled against, but God has done the work to bring us back to himself so that we can experience the incredible relationship he intended.
God intends for the world to see the beauty of that relationship through your life.
This is why James is speaking so brashly against partiality.
When we don’t treat others the way God does, we are doing the exact opposite of what God wants.
Last week James talked about not playing favorites, particularly between the rich and the poor.
He is going to further develop that thought in this next section.
We have talked about how James is pointing to a new teaching when he says, “my dear brothers and sisters, but in this case, he adds the word “listen.”
He does that to get their attention because this is such a big deal.
It isn’t a problem that no longer exists but is rampant in churches today.
We are keenly aware that we live in a culture that is obsessed with and run by money.
This is not a new phenomenon.
Those with the ability to purchase or trade the most have historically held the seats of power in society.
This was certainly the case at the time of James’ writing.
James therefore first asks, Is it not the rich who are exploiting you?
James, as we have seen, treats the majority of the Christians to whom he writes as poor.
Contributing to this poverty, he now suggests, are the immoral and perhaps illegal practices of rich people.
The strongly marked socioeconomic class distinction presupposed here corresponds closely to what we know of conditions in the first-century Middle East.
A small group of wealthy landowners and merchants accumulated more and more power, while large numbers of people were forced from their land and grew even poorer.
Most of James’s readers probably belonged to this class of poor agricultural laborers.
The scenario is one that would be very familiar to readers of the OT.
The prophets frequently denounce (even using the same verb James uses here, katadynasteuō) rich people who “oppress” the poor (Amos 4:1), including orphans and widows (Ezek.
22:7).
This is what James means by exploitation.
It is possible that you don’t personally feel the effects of this system in play, but there are certainly many who do.
I’ll share more about this after the message, but part of what Cenla Interfaith is working on is helping families that are in difficult places financially because of this very issue.
James wants the church to know that God does not favor the rich as the world does.
In fact, He and Jesus have had much to say about how they view the poor.
God sees the poor, those that feel the effects of the broken world more than any, and he has promised them a great inheritance.
We talk a lot about having God’s perspective, and this is one area of our lives in which we need God to change how we see people.
We look at those with big homes, fancy cars, etc, and think they are really blessed by God, but Jesus says that the poor are the blessed.
The poor are blessed because they will receive far greater things as heirs in God’s kingdom.
We talked several weeks ago about death being the great equalizer, and as a result, there will be a reversal that happens.
A person might have a lot of possessions while they are alive, but they lose all of it when they die.
On the flip side of that coin, a person may have nothing in this world but will gain everything when they die.
If we really believe this, why do we act like it isn’t true?
James goes on to say, those who are rich and whom we are tempted to give special favor to, they have dishonored the poor and God.
Here he is referring to their first-century Middle-eastern culture in which the wealthy got more wealth and took from the poor to get it.
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