Sermon Tone Analysis

Why has He come: this infant?

Romans 1 tells us that our downfall is that we worship the creature rather than the creator.

The created things then become what define us, rather than us giving definition to creation.

God’s willingness to become flesh and to continue in obedience makes our flesh holy.

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Dietrich Bonheoffer wrote the man who confesses his sin in the presence of a brother knows that he is no longer alone with himself.

He experiences the presence of God in the reality of the other person.

Many of us have not experienced grace “in the flesh”.

We can be around a lot of acceptance and grace, but until the hurt and guilty places in our hearts are exposed, we do not experience grace, and the gap between what we know in our head and what we experience in our hearts continues.

The humble heart names its offence and yields it up to Him as an offering of sin.

Jesus transforms His bride by having us expose our rags to one another, rather than allowing us to hide behind gleaming coats constructed out of shame.

What then does reconciliation mean in relation to other men and, in particular to white men? “When the other men are white people, this means that black people will bring their new restored image of themselves to every encounter.…

They will not let Whitey make an It of them, but will insist, with every ounce of strength, that they are people.

For white people, God’s reconciliation in Jesus Christ means that God has made black people a beautiful people; and if they are going to be in relationship with God, they must enter by way of their black brothers, who are a manifestation of God’s presence on earth.

The assumption that one can know God without knowing blackness is the basic heresy of the white churches.

They want God without blackness, Christ without obedience, love without death.

[1]

True Christian knowledge is the knowledge of a Person.

And because it is knowledge of a Person it leads to love, because He Himself is love.

‘God is love’.

Christ is love incarnate.

So to know God and to know Christ, of necessity leads to love.

If the knowledge we claim to have has not led to greater love in our lives we had better examine ourselves very seriously.

Knowledge without love becomes what the Scriptures call ‘heady’ and ‘high-minded’.

It turns us into authorities; it introduces a censoriousness and hardness which is positively harmful.[2]

Why should the eternal, absolute, holy God trouble at all about this world that rebelled against Him and reduced His paradise to a state of chaos?

Why did He not destroy it all, and consign it there and then to perdition?

It was because of His eternal, self-generating love!

This is the motivation in the heart of God.

And in the Christian life we are to be like Him; we are to follow in His steps, we are to be reproductions of Him.

See this motive as it is exemplified in the Apostle Paul himself.

Scripture portrays him as an indefatigable evangelist and preacher who travelled day and night teaching and preaching, who crossed oceans and was subjected to endless cruelties and indignities at the hands of men.

Ask him why he behaved thus.

In his Second Epistle to the Corinthians he gives his answer: ‘The love of Christ compels us’ (5:14).

The love of Christ is in Him.

He has seen the situation of mankind in sin as Christ saw it.

He knows what Christ has done for him, and this has created a like love in his heart.

He is ‘rooted in the love of Christ’, it is the base of His entire experience.

This is what drives him on, this is the motive, and nothing else.

This is to be the way in which we too are to represent Him, to bring glory to His Name and to be well-pleasing in His sight.

There is yet one further element in this idea of being rooted in love.

It is negative, yet very important, and has been implied in what we have said.

There is no ultimate value in all our work, and all our activity, unless it is rooted and grounded in love.

That may appear to be too strong or too extreme a statement; but it is not mine, it belongs to the Apostle himself.

He tells us: ‘Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal’.

You may be the greatest orator in the world, you may be able to speak in an affecting manner which can move people to admiration and perhaps even to action; but if love does not control what you are saying or doing you are but as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal.

Further, ‘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, and have not love, I am nothing.

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

That is a shattering and alarming statement, but it is obviously the simple truth.

It must be so because the Christian life is a Christ-like life, and everything in Him had its source in love.

So must it be with us.

The day of judgment will be a revelation, a day of surprises.

What appeared to us to be very great may then appear to be nothing at all; and what appeared to us to be trivial will then be seen to be of great value with the arc-light of God’s love shed upon it.

What a reversal of our judgments and our conceptions we shall find!

Her tears were more acceptable in His sight than the precious, expensive ointment which she used.

To be anointed by tears from the heart is of infinitely greater value to Him, even though it be only applied to His feet, than to have His head anointed with spikenard or the most costly spices and fragrant perfumes.

Nothing is of value in His sight unless it comes out of a heart of love.

The Christian is not a man who is carrying out a task, or labouring merely to perform a duty.

He is one who is ‘rooted in love’.

And, like his Lord, his every motive arises from it.

He is also energized by it, constrained by it.

He cannot refrain, he cannot but be thus.

Because Christ is dwelling in his heart by faith, his faith is rooted in the soil of love, and it is drawing its precious vital nutriment from that source.

Thus it becomes a reproduction of the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

May God open our eyes to this! May He give us this love, and ‘shed it abroad’ in our hearts!

May we seek after it above everything else, because all else without it is nothing, and will lead to nothing but loss.

May God root us in His love!

[3]

Was there any one secret above all others which explained success in winning such a coveted prize year after year?

And particularly, what was the secret of their remarkable height?

He told me that it was quite a simple principle; if you want great height you must dig deeply.

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Our Lord taught this more clearly than anywhere else in the Sermon on the Mount, as we find it recorded in Matthew’s Gospel, where He contrasts His way with every other way.[4]

That is the basis of the Christian life.

That is the thing that differentiates us from the best non-Christian.

The latter loves people who love him, but he does not love his enemies; he hates them as they hate him, and because they hate him.

But that is not Christian; anyone can love those who love him, and all are doing so.

At the very foundation of the Christian life is this love of our enemies; and until we are on this foundation we are wasting time in seeking any higher experiences.

You will never know the breadth and length and depth and height of the love of Christ which passeth knowledge until you are on this foundation.

That is the argument of this prayer which Paul offers for the Ephesian Christians.

is to be in us.

This attitude is clearly something that we have to cultivate, and to make sure that we possess.

Am I loving my enemies and blessing those that curse me and who say all manner of things falsely against me?

I must consider this carefully, and I must not be satisfied until I can honestly say that I love them, and pray that God may have mercy and pity upon them and open their eyes, and bring them to Himself.

Until I do so it is idle for me to seek some higher experience.

How important the foundation is!

One of the most subtle temptations of the devil is to get us to ignore foundations and to rush on to seek the higher experiences.

‘Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled’.

The people who are going to be filled with the Spirit, the people who are going to enjoy the full blessing are those who are hungering and thirsting after righteousness; not after the blessing, but after righteousness.

Our last principle is that the foundation always suggests stability.

God’s perfect love is self-generated; it does not depend on anything outside Himself; it is a love that starts within and goes out to others.

That is why God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.

It was in spite of what He saw in the world, and certainly not His response to a demand from man.

It was His own self-generated love pouring itself out.

It starts in Him, and it is based upon itself.

Your love and mine must be the same.

In that beautiful thirteenth chapter of his First Epistle to the Corinthians the Apostle Paul says, ‘Love suffereth long and is kind’.

It ‘suffers long’ because it is on a solid foundation.

It also stands up to the stresses.

‘It is not easily provoked’.

A love which is easily provoked is not deep.

‘Love beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things’.

Change in others, malice, spite, bitterness, hatred, anything that may happen they make no difference!

love stands firm!