Sermon Tone Analysis

ATTENTION:

Ever feel uncertain?

Ever feel like you’re facing some life-changing decisions with a hundred voices shouting a thousand questions, none of which have clear answers?

It’s easy to go for days, locked in step, paralyzed in doubt.

How wonderful, when in such a condition to hear the Word of God in Psalm 34:5:

They looked to Him and were radiant; and their faces were not ashamed.

This radiance we’ve been talking about is anything but indecisive.

In fact, that verse makes it sound as if the radiant, confident believer has something that many in our world desperately need: clarity!

In our world, you might say it like this: Clarity is a rarity.

Everyone wants nuanced actions that account for every opinion and lead in circles.

Radiant believers, however, do not participate in that struggle.

They are clear and they are decisive.

NEED

Sound like something you might need?

Do you lack decisiveness?

What about when it comes to your lifestyle?

Do you struggle with what the right thing is?

Do you find yourself willing to dump principle for the siren song of situation?

Listen!

Radiant Christians have clarity!

They are decisive.

The psalmist, in this passage, tells us what it means to be a decisive believer and just what you must be decisive about, and, if you want to be a truly radiant believer, you really need to hear him.

You can become decisive in your lifestyle.

And a radiant Christian is decisive in another area of his life.

He is also decisive in His relationships.

He doesn’t buy into the relational shortcuts the world tries to sell him.

She doesn’t fall for the sucker punch of living together before marriage in order to see if you’re “compatible.”

He doesn’t take his moral cues from the good ol’ boys and she doesn’t nuance her moral conduct in the First Church of Oprah.

No! A radiant believer is decisive about how they handle their relationships.

A confident life is a decisive life.

And those are the two areas about which the psalmist tells us we must be decisive if we are to develop radiance.

In verse 14 of chapter 34, he tells us to, “Depart from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.”

Two very clear commands are given here.

The first one is this: If I am to life a confident, decisive life, I must

DIV 1: PURSUE A GODLY LIFESTYLE.

EXPLANATION

The writer tells us that we are to turn from sin.

We are to depart from evil.

To David that would have meant to absolutely refrain from any unlawful activity.

Anything that violated the Law that God gave to Moses should be avoided.

To us it would mean to depart from anything that would violate God’s word.

That’s the negative.

Now the positive: The psalmist says to “depart from evil and do good.”

You see, it’s not enough to curse the darkness, you must spread the light.

We are not to be known for the bad destructive things we’re against but for the wonderful things we’re for.

We are to depart from evil and do good.

Now there’s nothing earth-shattering in all of that.

When it comes to how we live our lives, I am sure that the same thing has been said many times before.

What strikes me about what is said here is the way that it is said.

David tells us without equivocation or hedging.

Like a drill sergeant, barking out a command, he orders us to make a decision about our lifestyle.

He says, in essence, “Be decisive!

Stop sinning!

Start living right!”

Now we can lay the blame for the moral weakness of God’s people at the doorstep of many things.

We can say our society is increasingly decadent, and it is.

We can say that television and the internet is corrupting our young people and it is.

We can say that our political leaders have let us down and sold us down the river and, in many cases, they have.

But the greatest reason we’re in such sad moral shape in our country today is not the decadence of the world but the ambivalence of the church!

The greatest roadblock the church faces today is the roadblock of indecision.

ILLUSTRATION

Barry Lorch in his San Diego Union column recently told of a debate on the floor of the United States Senate about 130 years ago.

The issue was whether alcohol should be sold in the territories seeking statehood.

One notoriously anti-alcohol senator, who, according to one description, was so dry he was a known fire hazard, challenged one of his colleagues to state his position on alcohol.

Supposedly his colleague stood up and said this: "You asked me how I feel about whiskey.

Well, here's how I stand on the question.

If when you say whiskey you mean that Devil's brew, the poison spirit, the bloody monster that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yes, literally takes bread from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that topples the Christian man from the pinnacle of righteousness and gracious living and causes him to descend to the pit of degradation, despair, shame, and helplessness, then I am certainly against it with all my heart.

"But if, when you say whiskey, you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in an old man's footsteps on a frosty morning; if you mean the drink whose sale puts, I'm told, millions of dollars into our treasury which are used to provide tender care for our little crippled children, or blind or deaf or dumb, our pitifully aged, and our infirm, to build highways and hospitals and schools, then I am certainly in favor of it.

This is my stand, and I will not compromise.”

Sounds like that guy could have been a baptist deacon in a local church!

APPLICATION

I don’t have to tell you that this indecision about right and wrong is prevalent in the church.

In a recent survey, George Barna found that faith made little difference in one’s morality.

The director of the research, David Kinnaman, pointed out, "The research shows that people’s moral profile is more likely to resemble that of their peer group than it is to take shape around the tenets of a person’s faith.

This research paints a compelling picture that moral values are shifting very quickly and significantly within the Christian community as well as outside of it."

Shifting, I might add, in a decidedly immoral direction.

Why is it that we have such a problem with “departing from evil and doing good?”

Why is it that believers are so indecisive.

Let me suggest 3 reasons: First believers are so indecisive because they misapply scripture.

For one thing, few believers personally study the Bible on a regular basis.

If I were to take a survey in this room this morning and ask you, “Out of the 168 hours that have passed since we were together last Sunday, how many of them have you spent studying God’s word,” would you be able to talk in terms of hours or in terms of minutes?

Would you be able to say anything at all? \

We misapply God’s word because we don’t study it and we also misapply it because we don’t connect it.

What I mean is, we fail to see its application in our personal lives.

WE leave its principles on the page and don’t let it permeate our living.

We read that we are not to commit adultery, for instance, and that if we look on a member of the opposite sex in order to lust after them, we’ve committed adultery with them in our hearts, yet somehow we fail to connect that with the risque commercial we see on television, or the “brief nudity” we encounter in our r-rated video.

We read that we are to provide things honest in the sight of all men, but we fail to connect that with the facts we withhold from our potential buyer when we are closing the sales deal.

We misapply God’s word because we don’t connect it with our lives and we are indecisive.

There’s another reason we are indecisive, though.

It’s not only because we misapply Scripture but also because we misunderstand legalism.

Some believers seem to think that self-imposed discipline is legalism.

They reason something like this: If the Bible doesn’t absolutely forbid something it must be ok.

Then they turn and look at their Christian brother or sister and shake their heads in superiority saying, “I used to not do that too before God set me free from legalism.”

Will you hear me this morning?

Legalism is not the limits I place upon myself in order to stay holy.

Legalism is when I try to take the extra-biblical limits the Holy Spirit places on me personally and apply them to you and judge you for not doing what the Holy Spirit has led me to do.

It’s not legalism to have godly limits in your life.

Listen to me, Christian: It’s not legalism to refuse to watch an r-rated movie just because the Bible doesn’t mention it.

As far as I know, Jesus never walked by a Carmike Cinema in His life, so He never addressed it.

But that doesn’t mean it’s ok.