Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

In 1901 Andrew Carnegie sold his Pennsylvania steel mill to J. P. Morgan for 420 million dollars, and thereby became the richest man in the world.

That fortune was made by the sacrifice of thousands of common laborers.

He under paid them ruthlessly, and he forced them to work 12 hours a day 7 days a week.

His labor practices stirred up a lot of hostility, and in Homestead, PA., where our son Mark was born one of the bloodiest strikes in labor history took place at his mill.

Fourteen people were killed, and 163 were seriously injured.

The good that came out of this is that Carnegie felt obligated to benefit the masses with his fortune, and so he began to give it away.

He endowed 3000 libraries, and I have personally blessed with generous gift, for I have used some of those libraries.

Eighty per cent of his money went to educational purposes so that millions have benefited for the thousands who had to suffer.

So many of the blessings of life come to us because of men who felt obligated to do their best to make up for the damage their past has caused.

Paul was just such a man, and because of his strong sense of obligation he preached the Gospel and started churches all over the known world.

Paul felt like he was in debt to the whole world, and he poured out his life to the fullest of his ability to pay what he felt he owed.

Everyone is in debt to someone, but Paul was in debt to everyone.

In verse 14 he says, "I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish."

What he says just about sums up the entire human race.

There might be room to squeeze somebody in between wise and foolish, but there is no room at all between Greeks and non-Greeks.

If you are not a Greek, you are a non-Greek, and so everyone is covered.

Our national debt is outrageous, but even we do not owe everybody on the planet.

Paul was more in debt than anyone has ever claimed to be, but he was not ashamed of it.

He glories in his debt to all men, for what he owes them is, not dollars, shekels, or any other type of money, but the Gospel.

That is why he longed to get to Rome and to far off Spain, and to everywhere else in the world.

Paul owed the whole world the Gospel, and so he had business everywhere.

Something tells me this is a message we have missed as American Christians.

How often have we ever felt in debt to our non-Christian friends, associates, and neighbors?

We do not feel like we owe them anything.

But Paul says that he felt an obligation to all men to share the Gospel.

He was debtor to all because he owed them the Gospel.

Why did Paul feel such an obligation?

It was because he knew that all men were capable of being made rich in Christ.

The Gospel is not-look at how good I am-if you were as good you too could be a child of God.

Or, look at how good someone else is.

That is not good news.

Good news is that you can be saved and be a child of God no matter who you are, or what you have been.

No matter how sinful, foolish, or proud you have been, you can be saved and be a child of God.

It doesn't make any difference if you are a PhD or a high school dropout.

The reason Paul was obligated to all men is because all have an equal right to receive the Gospel and be saved.

The implications of this are staggering.

It means that everyone of us is in debt to every non-Christian we know.

We owe them the opportunity to be saved.

This is an enormous obligation, but I fear we have been so influenced by our culture that we do not take obligations all that seriously.

Clerks are obligated to wait on customers, but they often make the customer wait while they do personal business.

Manufacturers are obligated to produce a product that is safe, but tons of stuff floods the market that can hurt, or even kill you.

The government is obligated to protect its citizens, but often neglects this and lets dangerous drugs and products into the market place.

Professionals of all kinds let us down for they set their obligations to us on the back burner, and give selfish goals priority.

We all do our share of griping and complaining, for we are all victims to some degree, but listen to how Paul starts chapter 2 of Romans: "You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things."

You say that people owe you money and they won't repay.

You say you have rights, but they are not being honored.

All of this might be true, but what about the fact that every man, woman and child on this planet has a right to hear the Gospel and become a child of God! What about the fact, that we as Christians are debtors to all people, and we have an obligation to share the Gospel with them.

We saw in a previous message that we have an obligation to be an encourager of all in the body of Christ, and now we see that we have an obligation to be an enlightener of all who are outside of the body of Christ.

We are debtors to all people, and we owe everybody something.

We need to face the reality that we are all in as bad a shape as the government.

We let our debts build up and do not pay them off.

We neglect a major obligation of the Christian life because we do not have a plan by which we share the Gospel with unsaved people.

I suppose we feel that just because Paul felt such an obligation to all people, it does not mean we have to take on that same sense of debt he felt.

But this rationalizing will not hold water, for in chapter 8 Paul uses this same word to refer to all believers having the same obligation as he had to die to self and what the sinful nature desires.

We are to live in accordance with the Spirit, and set our minds on what the Spirit desires.

The Spirit does not give us all the same gifts, and so we are not like Paul in many ways, but it is God's will for all of us to have that sense of obligation that Paul had, and to feel like we owe this lost world a chance to get in on a saved world that will last forever.

We all owe the lost a chance to be saved, and so we are all under the same obligation as Paul to not be ashamed of the Gospel, but to be bold in sharing it with those who will be lost without it.

Notice that Paul does not say I am obligated to God the Father, the Son, or the Holy Spirit.

Jesus saved him even though he was a proud and arrogant man of violence who persecuted and killed Christians.

He was a religious bigot of the worst kind, and yet Jesus saved him.

He owed everything to Christ, but Paul also knew he owed nothing to Christ, for Jesus paid it all, and he was debt free to God.

All he owed to God had been paid by his Savior, and so he was a free man.

But it was to man that he was in debt.

They did nothing for him, and yet he was in debt to them.

He owed them the Gospel because he had received it freely, and when you have a gift that is so valuable that you can share it with everyone, and in so doing have even more of it, then you have an obligation to do so.

If I won the lottery and started sharing my fortune with others I would eventually run out and deplete my resources.

But if I share the Gospel I never have less, and I enrich others with that which makes them rich forever.

The Gospel is a gift that never stops giving, and that is why we are so obligated to share it.

If I discovered a cure for all cancer and just kept it for myself in case I ever got cancer, you would consider me a monster of immorality worthy of a place along side Hitler in the pages of infamy.

Yet we have a cure for sin and all of its eternal effects, and still we feel no obligation to share this good news with those who are dying for time and eternity for lack of it.

There is only one way to reduce this deficit, and that is by doing what Paul did.

He shared the Gospel with everyone he could in the world.

If we do not share the Gospel with anyone, then we are guilty of not paying our greatest debt in life, and we fail in our greatest obligation.

We do not like this message of Paul.

We like his message when he says there is no condemnation for those who are in Christ, and we like his freedom message, and his message about escape from the bondage of the law.

We love all of his positive stuff, but we do not like the balancing side where he makes us feel the need to bear one another's burdens, and to feel responsible for suffering for the cause of Christ, and being obligated to pay off our debt to all people.

We like the benefits of being servants of Christ, but not the burdens.

We want Christianity without the cross, for the cross is costly and puts us into debt.

To take up the cross and follow Jesus like Paul did is to feel an obligation to tell the world about the Gospel.

We owe everyone the chance to be saved, but we seldom make a payment on this debt by telling anyone about what Jesus did for them.

Should we feel guilty?

Of course we should!

If we have a legitimate debt and do not try to make payments we should feel guilty.

A non-witnessing Christian should feel guilty because that is probably the only way they will get motivated to make a list and begin to pray for people, and think of strategies by which to share the good news.

We feel the obligation to pay off our financial debts, and we need to match that zeal in paying off our spiritual debts to the lost world.

I was impressed in reading about the life of Sir Walter Scott.

In 1826 at the age of 55 he sank everything he had into a book publishing company that went bankrupt.

It not only left him penniless, but heavily in debt to the tone of 700 thousand dollars.

He was no Pollyanna who said that this was wonderful.

He was miserable, as any of us would be in that circumstance.

He wrote in his diary that he would like to lie down to sleep and never wake up.

He wanted to escape the burden of it, but he did wake up and vow that he would pay back every cent.

He rented a home in Edinburgh and began to write like a madman.

In two years he had paid his creditors 200 thousand.

He toiled so hard that he became ill, but he never ceased writing.

Great books flowed from his mind.

His hair turned white and he became weak with exhaustion, but he had a debt to pay, and pay it he would whatever the cost.

He suffered terribly, but when he died he had paid off the greatest share of his debt, and all of his creditors honored him as one of the greatest writers and honorable men of all time.

He became great by his labor to pay a debt.