Sermon Tone Analysis

ATTENTION

Ever heard of NPD? Probably not.

It’s “Narcissistic Personality Disorder.”

That’s right!

There’s actually a psychological condition describing many American’s fascination with themselves.

By the way, it’s a problem which isn’t just growing, it’s exploding!

According to Jean Twenge, the psychologist who wrote The Narcissism Epidemic, one out of every ten Americans in their twenties have suffered some symptoms of NPD.

Want some examples?

Well,

• On a reality TV show, a girl planning her sixteenth birthday party wants a major road blocked off so a marching band can precede her grand entrance on a red carpet.

• A book called “My Beautiful Mommy” explains plastic surgery to young children whose mothers are going under the knife for the trendy “Mommy Makeover.”

• It is now possible to hire fake paparazzi to follow you around snapping your photograph when you go out at night — you can even take home a faux celebrity magazine cover featuring the pictures.

• A popular song declares, with no apparent sarcasm, "I believe that the world should revolve around me!"

• People buy expensive homes with loans far beyond their ability to pay — or at least they did until the mortgage market collapsed as a result.

• Babies wear bibs embroidered with "Supermodel" or "Chick Magnet" and suck on "Bling" pacifiers while theirparents read modernized nursery rhymes from This Little Piggy Went to Prada.

People strive to create a "personal brand" (also called "self-branding"), packaging themselves like a product to be sold.

Although these seem like a random collection of current trends, all are rooted in a single underlying shift in the American psychology: the relentless rise of narcissism in our culture.

Not only are there more narcissists than ever, but non-narcissistic people are seduced by the increasing emphasis on material wealth, physical appearance, celebrity worship, and attention seeking.

Standards have shifted, sucking otherwise humble people into the vortex of granite countertops, tricked-out MySpace pages, and plastic surgery.

A popular dance track repeats the words "money, success, fame, glamour" over and over, declaring that all other values have "either been discredited or destroyed."

The tragedy is that this trend has worked its way into the church.

When Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, the Italian author Riccardo Zucconi opted to skip the movie with its gory crucifixion and show his children The Gospel According to Matthew instead.

His choice, however, was not as interesting as his reason.

He reportedly said, “The Gospel of Matthew is very deep and (listen) you don’t see a drop of blood.”

That reaction says a lot about the contemporary response to the crucifixion.

People want the spirit of Jesus, without the Incarnation; the death without the pain; the sacrifice without the blood.

But without the body, the pain, and the blood, the Crucifixion is meaningless.

Sacrifice cannot be sanitized.

Sacrifice has always been bloody.

That's the point!

I sometimes think that we have many “Riccardos” in our American Churches.

We want Christianity, but we don’t want sacrifice.

We want Jesus if He’s all cleaned up and smiling at the little children, but we run from the blood-sweating Savior in the garden or the blood-shedding Savior on the cross.

It carries over into our lives.

We love to embrace the Jesus who said “Come unto me and I will give you rest,” but we aren’t so excited about the Jesus who said, “Take up your cross and follow me.”

Sacrifice is unpopular; suffering is to be avoided at all costs.

That’s why Paul’s writing in Chapter 3 of Philippians is so poignant, and I might add, counter-cultural.

He says in v 10: That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, 11 if, by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.

Now I want to focus in on these two verses today and explain what I believe Paul meant by this, and I really want you to listen.

I know some of you are here today and you’re going through what you would call the worst time of your life.

You’re looking for relief and, more than that, you’re looking for answers.

You want to know why this person died, or that family member is sick, or why you lost your job.

I believe the God may just want to speak to you this morning.

Others of us are here in church, but our hearts are angry with the very God we’re worshiping.

We are frustrated because we think God has forgotten us or laid something on us that’s unfair.

There’s only one problem: Our anger has stolen our joy and God seems a million miles away.

I want you to listen.

You may discover some truth that will change your perspective on your trouble and restore that relationship with God that you’ve been missing.

You see, when I read those verses Paul wrote, I am struck by what he says about suffering, especially the suffering that comes as a result of following Christ.

He says, that knowing Christ and experiencing the power of His resurrection comes with, what seems to us narcissists at least, to be a very peculiar companion.

He says I want to know Him and the power of His resurrection, and the fellowship of His sufferings.

In other words, He is saying that you and I need to do a double-take on our trouble.

We need to look again at our suffering and realize that it is not something to be avoided, but something to be embraced.

Now that’s really hard for narcissists to swallow.

Embrace suffering?

Why should I? Why should you?

Why should we respect our suffering?

Well, let me give you three answers to that question this morning.

First we can respect our trouble because of:

DIVISION 1: THE FELLOWSHIP IT PROMISES

EXPLANATION

You see, fellowship and suffering cannot be separated.

In fact, the study I have done indicates that these two items are inseparable in the text.

Paul worte it that way on purpose.

He was saying that the power of Christ’s resurrection is inextricably linked to the participation in His sufferings, and the two, taken together, lead to a relationship that is unbelievably deep.

One commentator wrote:

In Paul’s sentence the two (suffering and resurrection) go together hand-in-glove.

Paul knows nothing of the rather gloomy stoicism that is so often exhibited in historic Christianity, where the lot of the believer is basically that of “slugging it out in the trenches,” with little or no sense of Christ’s presence and power.

On the contrary, the power of Christ’s resurrection was the greater reality for him.

So certain was Paul (of the resurrection)that he could throw himself into the present with a kind of holy abandon, full of rejoicing and thanksgiving; and that not because he enjoyed suffering, but because Christ’s resurrection had given him a unique perspective on present suffering as well as an empowering presence whereby the suffering was transformed into intimate fellowship with Christ himself.

Hence, “knowing Christ” for Paul involves “participation in his sufferings”—and is a cause for constant joy, not because suffering is enjoyable, but because it is certain evidence of his intimate relationship with his Lord.

You see, if you are genuinely saved, there is inside of you a strong desire to really develop a close relationship with Christ.

Every truly born-again believer wants that.

Paul is saying that the only way for you to really have that is to suffer.

But that suffering is not something you grit your teeth and endure in your own strength.

O no!

You have an amazing resource: You have the power of His resurrection working in you that enables you to go through anything and come out on the other side.

No wonder Paul says over in chapter 4 of this book, “I can do all things through Christ Who strengthens me.”

The relationship you want with Jesus lies on the other side of the very suffering you may be trying to avoid.

ILL

Frederick Douglass grew up as a slave in Maryland in the early nineteenth century.

He escaped and became one of the century's leading abolitionists, who fought to end slavery forever.

He writes in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave about being torn away from his mother's love

My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother.

It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age.

She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about 12 miles from my home.

Nonetheless, young Frederick's mother several times found ways to see her son:

She made her journeys to see me in the night, traveling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her day's work.

She was a field hand, and a whipping was the penalty of not being in the field at sunrise….

She was with me in the night.

She would lie down with me and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone.

That’s pretty amazing!

Douglass’s mother worked all day long in the scorching heat of the tobacco fields, and then, when her body was crying for rest, she walked 12 miles in the dark to see her son.

After comforting him and holding him as he fell asleep, she had to walk another 12 miles back.

She gave up a night's sleep.

She risked getting a severe whipping if she were discovered, or if she got home late.

But nothing could keep this mother from her son.

Why not?

Because she loved him, and she knew if she was going to have a relationship with him, it would cost her something.

APPLICATION