Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Sometimes a man can be so different that nobody can agree with him all the time.

Such was the case with Roger Williams, who was the founder of the first Baptist Church in America.

He came to America for religious freedom, and he expected to have more of it than anybody was willing to give him.

The Puritans regulated people's lives.

They told them when they could be on the street and when not; when they could kiss their wives and when not.

They forced everybody to go to church and pay a tax to keep the church going, and this even included the Jews.

Williams had a different idea of what it meant to be free, and he began to resist the church-state combination that regulated all of life.

Keep in mind that he was the pastor of the most powerful church in Boston.

His cry for liberty was too radical, and so they asked him to leave.

He went to Salem where they also found him too defiant for their blood, and so he moved on to Plymouth where he pastured the Pilgrims.

Here he found people who also loved liberty, but they could not go along with his radical ideas about treating the Indians fairly, even to the point of paying them for their land.

He resigned his pulpit there and became a preacher without a pulpit.

Mary, his wife, kept going to the church each Sunday, and Roger did not stop her, for he believed in religious liberty in the home as well.

He stayed home and preached to anyone who would come.

The problem was that too many came, and Williams was becoming a threat to the whole Puritan system of church and state.

He had to be dealt with, and so the leaders of the church and state summoned him to court.

The governor sat at the head, and his 25 deputies.

All of the preachers were there to see that this plague was ended once and for all.

Some of the preachers judging Williams were among the greatest in American history.

There was John Cotton and Thomas Hooker, for example, whose writings are available in any theological library.

It was Christians against a Christian.

When they read the list of charges against him Williams pleaded guilty to all of them.

When he was asked to recant he said, like Martin Luther, "Here I stand."

He would not budge.

He refused to stop his promotion of religious liberty, and so the court ordered him to be banished from the colony.

Roger Williams was too different to be tolerated, even by fellow Christians.

None of these Christian leaders doubted that Williams was a Christian, but they just could not endure his demand for religious liberty.

He was too different to fit into their idea of the ideal relationship of church and state.

The end result was that Williams escaped and founded his own colony in Rhode Island.

He founded his own church in Providence, which was the capital, and he began the experiment that changed the history of America.

In his colony there was complete separation of the church and state, and total religious liberty.

His ideal became a part of the Constitution of our country.

His way of thinking was so different, but it eventually became the American way of thinking.

The point is, history reveals that history is changed most often by people who are different.

They are people who do not conform.

They are odd balls and mavericks, and people who seem to be always swimming upstream and going against the grain.

Someone said that there are only two kinds of people in the world, those who think there are only two kinds of people in the world, and those who know better.

It is easy to say everyone is either a Christian or a non-Christian, but this really does not cover the complexity of who people are.

There are many differences among Christians, and many of the great conflicts of history have been because Christians are so radically different.

The Jews could have said the same thing saying there are only Jews and non-Jews.

But here they are in great conflict with a Jew named Paul, who is turning their world upside down.

Paul was a Jew, but he was different from the majority of Jews.

Paul was a Christian, but he was also different from the majority of Christians.

He was no commonplace sparrow, but he was a rare bird.

He was different in his conversion and in most every other way.

Paul was different in his calling.

He was uniquely called to be the Apostle to the Gentiles.

None of the others had this unique call.

Peter was used to bring Gentiles like Cornelius into the kingdom, but Paul was different from Peter.

Paul made an easier transition to universal Christianity than Peter did.

Paul had to rebuke Peter for his relapse into a narrow Jewish centered Christianity.

All of the Apostles were different from each other.

Jesus did not choose men who were all alike.

Variety is not only the spice of life, it is the very essence of what makes life possible and interesting.

I have often thought that if everyone was just like me, the whole economy of the world would grind to a halt in a matter of days, and civilization as we know it would perish.

If everyone bought only what you buy, millions of people would be thrown out of work in a week.

Plato in the Republic said, "I am reminded that we are not all alike; there are diversities of nature among us which are adapted to different occupations."

Paul makes a great deal of this in dealing with Christians.

He points out that God has made every member of the body different, and He has given them different gifts, and so it is important that we recognize the need for differences in the body.

We do not have to like everything about the differences of Christians, but we must learn to recognize that God can and does love the differences.

We do not have to like everything about Paul, for he didn't like everything about himself, but we do have to recognize that differences are not defects.

They are the key to the churches having the diversity necessary to reach a very diverse world.

You do not have to worry if there are things you do not like about other Christians, or that there are things you cannot do that they do.

Spurgeon, the great Baptist preacher, said that the saints have different relationships to God just as children do to their father.

He wrote, "When I read some of the prayers of Martin Luther they shock me, but I argue with myself thus: It is true I cannot talk with God in the same way as Martin, but then perhaps Martin Luther felt and realized his adoption more than I do, and therefore was not less humble because he was more bold.

It may be that he used expressions which would be out of place in the mouth of any man who had not known the Lord as he had done."

There was no one quite like Luther, and there was no one quite like Spurgeon, but like all whom God has used, they were different.

We need to learn to celebrate our differences and recognize that just as our civilization would collapse without differences, so would the church.

It grows and thrives on differences.

Unity in diversity is what makes our nation great, and this is also what makes the church great.

This is not to say that because differences can be delightful that all differences are good.

Some people get so different that they become eccentric, which means off balance, and they no longer contribute to the healthy variety of the body.

Differences are also the foundation for conflict.

The Jewish Talmud tells of the Jew who had a young wife and an old wife.

The young one kept pulling out her husbands gray hair to make him look young.

The old one kept pulling out his dark hair to make him look older.

The end result was that he ended up bald.

Differences of perspective can be destructive to the body.

Paul spent a good portion of his ministry trying to resolve the conflicts of Christians who were different, but still one in Christ.

They were Jews and Gentiles, bond and free, male and female, and all of their differences made a lot of waves.

They still do, and that is why there has always been a good many books on how to get along with people you love.

It can be hard because people are so different.

Diakrino Is one of the key New Testament words for describing people's differences, and Paul is the main user of this word.

He uses it most often in writing to the Corinthians.

They were in constant turmoil over their individual differences.

They were saying, "I am of Paul, I am of Apollos, I am of Cephus, I am of Christ."

The church was divided because the people liked different things in their leaders.

Paul tells them that this is nonsense.

It is God who makes each one different for the benefit of the whole body.

Do not pick and choose, but accept all of the differences as beneficial.

Do not boast that you are different Paul says, for you did not create this variety.

It is God's doing, and so if someone has a difference you are to praise God for it and not the person.

Differences divide the people of God when they begin to compare and compete.

But when they celebrate the differences as God's gifts then the differences become an asset that unites the church.

The battle of the Apostles in the New Testament is to help Christians see that the differences that use to make such a difference should no longer make a difference for those in Christ.

So what if people are Jews and Gentiles, or slaves and free, or male and female?

These differences no longer make a difference in Christ.

Peter stood up at the first Christian council in Acts 15 and told of what God did for the Gentiles.

He said in verse 9, "He made no distinction between us and them, for He purified their hearts by faith."