Sermon Tone Analysis

March 26, 2012

By: John Barnett

Read, print, or listen to this resource on our website www.DiscoverTheBook.org

Please open to I Timothy 1:19-20.

The God of the Universe has revealed Himself by way of a Book that He wrote.

That Book called the Bible; and it contains propositional truth from the One who calls Himself the Author of Truth.

This God explains that as the countdown to the end of days approaches, so does the level of religious deception.

False teachers, proclaiming a false gospel, with false prophets, heralding false messiahs would become the norm as Jesus explained in Matthew 24:24.

And, most ominous would be that Christ's church would heap together teachers who would bring teaching that people want to hear (itching ears), rather than what they need to hear (God's Word).

In the midst of all that warning come these verses that we begin with this evening.

The simple lesson for us, and warning to us is that:

*Detached from Truth—Lives are Shipwrecked*

Guarding the truth is our chief responsibility as we see the falling away from truth that characterizes the end of days.

To not guard the truth leads to “ship wreck”; we can get into a state of not being moored and anchored by the truth as we see when Paul uses this word to describe those who thrust away sound doctrine and try to sail on their own and not carefully guarding Christ's way, truth and life.

1 Timothy 1:19-20/" having faith and a good conscience, which some having rejected, concerning the faith have suffered shipwreck, 20 of whom are Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I delivered to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme./"

What can cause a soul to be shipwrecked?

False teaching and belief in a false doctrines about Christ.

That was one of Christ's constant warnings.

When the world darkens, culture crumbles, and truth dies—you know the end of the world is near.

It is then that Jesus warned that the church would fill up with fruitless counterfeits.

When that happens it is time for believers to brace for the storm that we know is coming.

The waves will only increase.

Spiritual darkness will only deepen as deceptions grow.

These are days when we who know and love the Lord Jesus should reach into our hearts and grab onto the anchor line of truth as contained for us in God's Word, and feel it strongly holding us securely—tugging us homeward.

*Jesus is the Ultimate Expression of Truth*

Then the Truth Incarnate, the Living Word of God is wrapped in humanity and sent to earth.

Jesus is the exact and true representation of God (Heb.

1:3).

If you see Jesus you have truly seen His Father.

The only link we have to God comes by faith in His Word (Romans 10:17).

God’s truth saves us, sanctifies us, and defends us from all attacks.

Truth is of the essence.

It is what we build our lives upon and place our hope in.

God is Truth, Christ is the Truth, and His Spirit is the Spirit of Truth.

Lost people never receive the love of the truth.

And sadly, in the last days (in which we live) many will turn away their ears from listening to truth.

Paul’s world was hostile to the truth of God; and Paul warned that days to come would increasingly be filled with false teachings about God, and bad behavior by believers.

II Timothy 4:3-4 /"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; 4And they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables."/

A generation ago this slide away from truth so troubled the great Chicago area pastor A.W. Tozer (1897-1963) that he wrote:

"Wrong ideas about God are not only the fountain from which the polluted waters of idolatry flow; they are themselves idolatrous.

The idolater simply imagines things about God and acts as if they were true.

"Perverted notions about God soon rot the religion in which they appear.

The long career of Israel demonstrates this clearly enough, and the history of the Church confirms it.

So necessary to the Church is a lofty concept of God that when that concept in any measure declines, the Church with her worship and her moral standards decline along with it.

The first step down for any church is taken when it surrenders its high opinion of God.

"Before the Church goes into eclipse anywhere there must first be a corrupting of her simple basic theology.

She simply gets a wrong answer to the question, ‘What is God like?’ and goes on from there.

Though she may continue to cling to a sound nominal creed, her practical working creed has become false.

The masses of her adherents come to believe that God is different from what He actually is, and that is heresy of the most insidious and deadly kind."

A.W. Tozer, The Knowledge of the Holy, 9.

For times just like those in which we live Paul writes, Christ's church is to be filled with men who are sound in faith.

Titus 2:2 /"that the older men be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love, in patience;"/ NKJV

But instead there are an entire generation of believers who are as Paul warned, driven about with every wind of doctrine.

Look for a moment at Ephesians 4:14:

that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting,

*Why does Christ's Church still Stray from “Sound Faith”?

*

There are four dangerous trends I see in modern evangelical culture.

Each of these can be observed in nearly any Bible teaching fellowship.

All are dangerous and were clearly warned of by Jesus Christ in His ministry.

The first danger is a drifting from the authority of the Word.

Danger #1: Unsound-Faith starts with an Improper Understanding of the Authority of the Scriptures (John 17:17)

You can’t separate growth in truth from God's Word.

Growth is a part of sanctification.

We are sanctified by God's Word, and God's Word is Truth (John 17:17).

To illustrate this danger let me just read a press release in the news this morning:

THE SHACK CONTINUES IN NO. 1 SPOT (Friday Church News Notes, January 30, 2009, “The Shack” has held first place on the New York Times bestseller list for Paperback Trade Fiction for 33 weeks.

Though its author, William Young, is not a member of a church and is even reticent to call himself a Christian and though its doctrine of God is grossly heretical, the novel is being touted as a helpful Christian book.

“The Shack” has been endorsed by CCM artist Michael W. Smith, Eugene Peterson (Regent College professor and author of The Message), Mark Batterson (senior pastor of National Community Church in Washington, D.C.), and Gayle Erwin of Calvary Chapel, among many others.

An excellent writer, Young plays to emotion and touches on legitimate hurts and concerns.

The author excels at imbuing his deity with attributes of love, forgiveness, and mercy, and this is what many people have responded to.

Increasingly in novels and movies the Lord is blithely used as one of the characters and given words from the mouth of man.”

Lynn Garrett, senior religion editor for Publishers Weekly, calls the book's success "most unusual.

It's every self-published author's dream to start out this way and sell at this level."

Why are so many heading for The Shack? "People are not necessarily concerned with how orthodox the theology is.

People are into the story and how the book strikes them emotionally," Garrett says.

*Stay Away from The Shack*

If I could summarize the intense debate over this very popular and appealing book it would be by using the commentary from Chuck Colson’s radio show.

Listen to this analysis:

There are a number of truths in The Shack, valuable ones, like the importance of trusting God and not allowing fear of the future to dictate the present service to Him.

But these small nuggets of truth are in no way worth taking in the abundance of theological distortion.

The book asks many of the right questions—why must the innocent suffer?

Can God really be loving when there is evil in the world?

But its answers are so devoid of any scriptural foundation, or any reason to be confident in God’s power, that you are better off staying far away from The Shack .

A popular song from the ’90s asks, “If God had a face what would it look like? . . .

What if God was one of us?”

Those are hardly original questions.

Man has spent millennia confounded by the mysteries of the divine, wondering what the Father of Creation really looks like, sounds like, acts like.

And that is surely the effect the story is meant to have.

Readers are subtly challenged, along with the main character, Mack, to set aside their preconceived ideas about who God is, particularly if those ideas were formed through some institutional means like a seminary class or biblical exegesis.

As the plot unfolds, Mack is more than ready to shed his own perceptions of God, whom he blames for allowing his young daughter to be kidnapped and murdered during a family camping trip.

Mack spends the ensuing years defining his life by his “Great Sadness,” until he one day receives a note addressed by “Papa”—the name Mack’s wife calls God—inviting him to come to the shack where his daughter was killed.

In a desperate search for some kind of answer, Mack obliges, and makes the pilgrimage back to the symbol of his greatest anguish.

God is indeed there, ready to restore Mack’s joy, regain his trust, and rebuild his theology.

Those are first jolted when Mack opens the door to find a warm welcome from a “large beaming African-American woman”—Papa.

If that’s not weird enough, the shack has two other residents as well: an Asian woman named “Sarayu,” who is a physical manifestation of the Holy Spirit; and the Incarnate Jesus, who has once again stepped down from His seat of glory to take on the characteristics of a vulnerable, even weak, man.

Mack spends time with all three Persons of the Trinity throughout the course of his weekend, and they each attempt to instruct him on the true nature of love, forgiveness, submission, and Trinitarian relationship.

But “Papa” is not God.

At least not the God of Scripture.

He (or she, in this case) doesn’t speak like God, doesn’t judge like God, and—despite the entire premise of the book—doesn’t love like God.

Nearly every aspect of God’s glory and power are distorted and diminished in the “Trinity” of The Shack.

The Shack would not dispute these limits of understanding—it dedicates many pages to chastising believers who cling too tightly to traditional views of God’s nature.