Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
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Disgust
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Joy
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Analytical
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Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Agreeableness
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Tone of specific sentences
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Anger
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Jeremiah struggled with God’s Word today.
You wouldn’t know it by the words before you.
As the verse of the day, you heard half of Jeremiah 15:16, “Your words became a joy to me, and the delight of my heart.”
Hear the whole verse and you still might miss it it: “When your words came, I ate them; they were my joy and my heart’s delight, for I bear your name, o LORD God almighty.”
What’s the problem?
Look at the surrounding verses.
The LORD tells Jeremiah to tell his countrymen that death, destruction, plague, and famine are coming.
And Jeremiah says, “Oh, goodie.
I get to be the bearer of more good news.”
Actually, what Jeremiah says is, “Alas, my mother, that you gave me birth, a man with whom the whole land strives and contends!
I have neither lent nor borrowed, yet everyone curses me.”
Jeremiah curses his mother, then grumbles at God: “Why is my pain unending and my wound grievous and incurable?”
Who likes being a Jeremiah?
Who likes being the bad cop, the bearer of bad news, the hard case?
On occasion, there’s a certain, savage satisfaction to being a Jeremiah; that’s mostly because it satisfies our hunger for a pound of flesh.
It’s the satisfaction Bill Cosby put on Noah’s lips.
The crowds watch Noah building his ark and ask, “Whatcha’ doin’ up there, Noah?”
And he says, “I can’t tell you!
Ha, ha, ha, ha!”
“Well, can’t you give us a hint?”
“You want a hint?”
“Yeah!”
“How long can you tread water?
Ha, ha, ha, ha!”
Likewise, at times and moments, Jeremiah no doubt felt good swinging the hammer of God’s law.
He saw a kingdom falling apart.
He saw idols and incense, sexual immorality, oppression, injustice – all those sins that the LORD’s prophets denounced for over 200 years.
It feels good to point the finger and say: “How long can you tread water?
Ha, ha, ha, ha!”
But even putting aside the question of how much of that good feeling is a desire for vengeance as opposed to wanting to win a brother over, there still comes that moment when being Jeremiah just stinks.
All your friends have left.
The nation thinks you’re nuts.
Or worst, racist and bigoted and intolerant.
God called Jeremiah to go against the grain.
He called Jeremiah to call his countrymen away from what felt good, away from what everyone else does, away from sin.
And they didn’t want to.
And they cursed Jeremiah.
Spit on him.
Beat him.
Destroyed his books.
Threw him into dark cisterns.
Forced him into exile.
Don’t you see the potential for such in our lives?
Most potently it’s in looming challenges that the Church faces as gay marriage becomes more and more acceptable.
A court in New Mexico says a business has to take pictures of a newly married gay couple whether they want to or not.
As more and more states define marriage more and more broadly, a direct challenge to a church that refuses to marry a gay couple will most certainly come.
And how will the courts decide?
Who knows?
Even if that never happens, we still have to deal with being counter-cultural on the issue.
The Bible says homosexual behavior is a sin.
More than that, it says all sexual activity outside of marriage is a sin.
You heard that in Hebrews today, “Marriage should be honored by all and the marriage bed kept pure.”
This word, like Jesus Christ, remains the same yesterday, today, and forever.
Yet as statistics suggest, most couples have sex before getting married.
An increasingly growing number of couples live together without the benefit of marriage.
And we have to speak out.
And not just about sex.
It’s about abortion.
Or cheating on taxes.
Or insurance fraud.
Or any number of other sins that have become “accepted.”
First we must be Jeremiah’s to ourselves.
We must condemn our own sinful hearts that lower the bars however and wherever they lower them.
And it’s not pleasant.
It’s no fun to be Jeremiah.
But you know what happens if there’s no Jeremiah.
If there’s no Jeremiah, there’s no remnant.
For sure, most of Israel and Judah fell away from the LORD, just as today, most of the world rejects Jesus, and even many who profess to be Christians have wandered from the faith.
But because God keeps sending Jeremiahs, God keeps on preserving a remnant.
There remain always at least that 7,000 whose knees have not bowed down to Baal in whatever form he manifests himself today.
That doesn’t change the long, hard, slogging nature of being Jeremiah.
Perhaps you’ve seen the movies based on The Lord of the Rings novels, or read the books.
Two creatures, called hobbits, small men, named Frodo and Sam, must destroy a ring of power before the enemy, Sauron, can retrieve it and conquer their world.
To destroy the ring, they must go into the heart of Sauron’s kingdom, Mordor, and throw the ring into a seething volcano called, aptly, Mt.
Doom.
To get there requires a long, perilous journey to unknown lands, facing countless enemies.
Along the way Frodo and Sam meet creatures called elves, who provide them with a food called lembas.
Lembas is a bread like substance that provides more than normal amounts of energy.
Eventually, Frodo and Sam run out of almost all other food except lembas.
They must survive on it, and it alone, for a long period of time.
And despite its almost miraculous qualities, they complain about this food.
“Lembas again!
Yeesh!”
Sounds like another group of people from a decidedly non-fictional world.
The people of Israel marched through the desert for forty years after God freed them from Egypt.
They spent forty years in the desert because they disobeyed God and failed to trust in Him.
They wandered not because their maps didn’t work, but because they were lost spiritually.
Yet even then, God provided them with food.
A very lembas-like food, with an equally Elvish name: manna.
Unlike lembas, this manna didn’t do anything miraculous.
You couldn’t leap tall buildings or stop a speeding bullet after eating manna.
What was miraculous was that it kept on coming.
Day after day for forty years God covered the ground with it.
Each day the Israelites gathered what they needed – “Give us this day our daily bread” – and the next day they woke up, without any food left, and found the ground covered in manna-dew.
And they got sick of it.
They grumbled and complained, just like Sam and Frodo.
Just like Jeremiah.
Just like we do.
We complain because it’s the same old thing.
Another lesson about sexual purity.
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