Sermon Tone Analysis

A Realist, an Optimist and an Activist Once Met

~*Robert J. Morgan \\ ~*March 25, 2007

 

I read this week about some men I can identify with.

They came to the psychiatrist and the first one said, “Doctor, you gotta help me.

I think I’m a bridge.”

The doctor said, “Well, what’s come over you?”

The second man said, “Doctor, I think I need help, too.

I keep thinking I’m a curtain.”

The doctor replied, “Well, why don’t you pull yourself together?”

The third man said, “Well, doctor, I think I’m a bell,” to which the doctor said, “Take two aspirin, and if it doesn’t help give me a ring.”

Maybe we all feel like those men from time to time.

We have so many pressures in life that if we can’t pull ourselves together, we’re going to end up ding-a-lings.

Virtually every day of my life, someone talks with me, either in person or by e-mail, about deeply personal and troubling issues they are facing in life; and we all have those.

Well, that’s one of the reasons God gave us this book of 2 Corinthians, because here the great apostle Paul opened up and told us about the pressures that bore down on him and how he handled them.

That has been our study for the last several weeks, and today we are coming to 2 Corinthians 6:4-10:

*/“As servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger; in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left; through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown, dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.”

/*

Paul crams a lot of material into these verses, and I have counted nearly forty different characteristics or attributes that he listed here to describe himself.

What if I gave each of you a blank sheet of paper and we took about ten minutes to write out the forty terms that best describe us.

What words or series of words best describes you?

Well, in a sense that’s what Paul is doing here, and he divides his list into three categories.

These categories provide a great deal of understanding into the way the Lord wants us to look at life, and from them we can extrapolate three great rules for dealing with pressure.

*1.

Be a Realist: Accept the Difficult (vv.

4-5) *

First, verses 4 and 5 tell you and me to be a realist and to accept the difficult.

Paul doesn’t flinch from his problems.

He begins by saying: ~/As servants of God we commend ourselves in every way.

~/In other words, Paul is still answering his critics in the Corinthian church, not so much because he wants to defend his own reputation, but because he wants his message and his Gospel to be respected and received.

So he said here, “I want to demonstrate for you our integrity.

In every way, I want to be commendable in your sight.”

And now, he goes on to tell us what he has borne and is bearing:

*/In great endurance/*.

This is a very important New Testament trait of Christians.

The Greek word, ὑπομονή, occurs 31 times in the New Testament.

It means pressing on despite pressure and difficulty.

What are you having to endure right now? Don’t quit.

Don’t falter.

Keep one foot in front of the other, and keep going.

Persevere.

*/In troubles/*.

The word here is θλῖψις, which literally means pressure, especially pressure brought on by affliction and pain and suffering.

This is very often translated “tribulation” in the New Testament, and this is the word Jesus used in Matthew 24 to describe the Great Tribulation.

A day of Great Tribulation is soon coming on the world, but all of us face θλῖψις now.

*/...and distresses/*.

The Greek word here literally meant “narrow places.”

We once had a house with a crawl space under the floor and once in a while I had to crawl under there for one thing or another.

It’s not easy, to crawl on your elbows and shins through dirt and cobwebs in a narrow place.

That’s the idea behind this word ~/distresses.

~/We find ourselves in the crawl spaces of life.

*/In beatings, imprisonments and riots/*….

~/Here Paul was speaking literally of the beatings he endured at the hands of Jewish and Roman officials who pulled out their rods or their whips and applied pain to his body.

There were times when he was roughly shoved into prison cells, and times when he was caught in riots and nearly pulled limb from limb.

None of us knows when we’re going to experience a time of physical pain or suffering or a time of great limitation or of criticism and unpopularity.

But those times come in life, and we have to accept them.

*/In hard work/*….

~/Sometimes our pressure comes from our workload.

*/Sleepless nights…/* Nothing is harder than losing periods of necessary sleep.

The Apostle Paul wasn’t always able to get his eight hours every night.

Some nights he was traveling through the night.

Other nights he was preaching until the midnight hour or even all the way through the night.

Other nights he was counseling, or perhaps he was so burdened by the day that he couldn’t rest at night.

Sometimes he was caught in storms at sea or in cloudbursts on land.

When we don’t get our sleep, our bodies labor under the weariness of the flesh and our emotions become much more difficult to control.

The apostle Paul experienced all this, too.

*/And hunger/*.

Paul traveled on a shoestring, and there were some days when he didn’t have adequate food.

Most people go through times in life when we have trouble meeting the basic necessities of our lives.

We are needy people, and sometimes our greatest life-pressures come from unmet needs within us.

So life is very hard.

This was brought home to me recently when Katrina and I read a book on the lives of America’s first ladies, beginning with Martha Washington.

I didn’t know very much about the wives of the presidents, and as I read the accounts of their experiences, I was overwhelmed with the tragedy and difficulty and sadness and hardship that many of them faced.

I’ll just give you one example.

*Franklin Pierce* was the fifteenth President of the United States.

His wife, Jane, had grown up in a wealthy New England textile family, and her father was a college president and Congregationalist minister who, from all reports, was rather severe and morbid.

Jane was the third child in the family, and she grew up without much self-confidence, and she suffered from anxiety, bronchial problems, and tuberculosis.

She met Franklin Pierce when he was a member of the United States House of Representatives from New Hampshire, and he was a very heavy drinker who bordered on alcoholism.

The two of them dated for eight years, but Jane was so frustrated by the political attacks on Franklin that she came to utterly despise politics and wanted nothing to do with it.

She married him, but seldom traveled with him to Washington, preferring to stay in New Hampshire.

In 1836, they had a little boy, but he died within days.

Franklin was elected to the United States Senate, but Jane was so unhappy that he resigned and moved to Concord and opened a law practice.

Except for Franklin’s drinking, things calmed down.

Then they had another child, but he died with typhus at the age of four.

They had another child named Benjamin, and Jane tried her very best to protect him because she didn’t think she could endure another loss.

But meanwhile, unknown to her, Franklin was planning to run for President of the United States.

He told her nothing about it, deceived her about it, and when she finally learned of his presidential bid she fainted.

When he won the election, she had no choice but to move to Washington.

As the family traveled by train through New England, somehow the train jumped the tracks and right in front of her own eyes, eleven-year-old Benjamin’s head was torn off by flying debris.

The damage to Jane’s emotional equilibrium was enormous.

Her three sons were all dead, one right in front of her eyes.

Her husband had deceived her.

And now she was suddenly in the unwanted role of America’s First Lady as the nation was hurtling toward Civil War.

She turned the White House into a living tomb, covered with black bunting.

She dressed in black, turned all hosting duties over to an aunt, and sat upstairs alone in deep depression writing letters to her dead son asking his forgiveness and awaiting for her presidential husband to come in from his drinking forays.

She became known as the “Shadow of the White House.”

Franklin Pierce only served one term in office, and shortly after they left the presidency, she died of tuberculosis.

This story just illustrates that everyone in the world, no matter how powerful or well-known, faces incredible hardships in life.

I once heard of a father who told his daughter, “I tried to provide a great childhood for you, but in the process I didn’t let you know how hard life is.

It would have been easier for you know if you had known earlier that life is hard.”

Paul didn’t flinch from life’s hardships.

He was a realist.

We have to be realists and accept the fact that life is hard.

Jesus Himself said, “In this world you will have tribulation.”