Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Vanna White, the glamorous star who turns the letter on Wheel Of Fortune, was a leader in her church youth group at North Myrtle Beach, North Carolina.

Her pastor wrote about how he asked her, when she was a senior, what she was going to do after graduation.

She responded that her dream was to become a model, and so she was going to modeling school in Atlanta.

This is how the pastor reacted.

"Vanna, no!" I said.

"Don't do that!

Those schools will do nothing but take your money.

Nobody ever gets a job at one of those places.You have brains!

Ability!

You could be more than a model!"

She thanked me politely and said, "But I have this dream of going to Hollywood and becoming an actress."

"From North Myrtle Beach?"

I asked.

"Vanna, that only happens

in movies.

This is crazy!"

He goes on to say, he is not surprised that her autobiography does not mention his ministerial influence.

When David Lettermen asked Vanna about the most interesting men she has met, she mentioned only Merv Griffin and Tom Selleck.

This former pastor ends his article by pointing out that Vanna makes more in one week on Wheel Of Fortune than he makes in a whole year of giving good advice to aspiring teenagers.

The whole point of this article in the Christian Ministry magazine is to call our attention to the fact that it is not wise to try and interfere with other people's dreams.

They may not be what we want for them, but if it is their dream, and they have made it their priority, and their aim in life, we should support and encourage that dream if it is consistent with the will of God.

The key to happiness and success in the new year is to have a dream, and a goal to pursue.

Without a dream or goal to motivate us we will just drift through the new year, and whatever we achieve will be a matter of chance and not design.

God wants us to plan ahead, and to set some goals for life, and to work toward a designed growth.

By His grace and providence we can grow and achiever positive things, even by just drifting along without a plan, but Scripture and history make it clear, the most successful people in the kingdom of God are those who aim for specific goals, and focus on them as a priority in their life.

Listen to the Apostle Paul who was a great achiever for the glory of God.

He writes to his favorite Christians in Phil.

3:13-14, "Brothers, I do not consider myself yet to have taken hold of it.

But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and striving toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."

Then Paul says in the next verse, "All of us who are mature should take such a view of things."

In other words, this is not a personal Pauline perspective of no relevance to anyone else.

It is the way all mature Christians are to look at life.

You start with an honest recognition that you are not yet all you ought to be.

You do not have all God wants you to have.

Then you forget the failures of the past, and do not get bogged down in grief and despair over what you can't change.

You set your sights on the goal of Christian growth, and you press on to move in the direction of that goal.

That is the plan for mature Christian living.

A big factor in the plan is concentration.

That is the source of power for progress.

You cannot do everything in life.

You have to make some choices.

This is an agonizing process in a world with more good choices than men have ever had.

But it has always been the case.

Successful people are people who concentrate on doing something well.

It might seem superficial to use Vanna White as an example, but the fact is she is the best letter turner in the world.

When she was off the program to have her baby, they got another model to take her place.

It was so conspicuous that it takes unique poise to do that job.

Vanna is so smooth and graceful, but the substitute was awkward, and she made it clear that even the most mundane tasks can be done poorly or efficiently.

But let's look at a more sophisticated level of achievement.

Fritz Creisler, who became a famous director of the Philharmonic Orchestra, began playing the violin as a boy.

He was not good at all.

At 14 he toured the U. S. with moderate success, but when he returned to Vienna he could not get a job as second violinist.

He dropped the violin feeling he was a failure, and he took up medicine.

He did not like that, and so he tried painting, but he was not content with that either.

After a few more things he came back to his first love, the violin.

He made up his mind he was going to succeed.

He spent 8 weeks just practicing finger exercises.

He went on to become one of history's greatest violin players.

He could have spent his life going from thing to another, but he stopped and concentrated on an area of his life, and he became the best.

The problem with new year resolutions is that we bite off more than we can chew.

We choke on it, and spit it all out, and decide change is to painful.

We don't like to gag, so we give up.

The solution to the resolution problem is concentration, or specialization.

You do not aim to hit a multitude of targets, but just one.

In other words, it is a new year's resolution, and not resolutions that will change your life for the best.

There are always many areas of life that need improvement, but the best way to deal with them is by a focus on one.

The best way to clean a house is not all at once, but one room at a time.

To clean the soap dish in the bathroom, and then run to the basement to clean the lint out of the dryer, and then up to the kitchen to throw out the over ripe fruit, and then into the bedroom to put on clean pillow cases, and then back to the bathroom to remove the dirty towels, is not the way to do it.

Efficiency calls for focus.

Get something done, and then move on to something else.

To try to do all things at once is to never be done.

Paul says, "This one thing I do," and not, "These 40 things I dabble at."

To get something done you need to focus on something, and not everything.

Focus on a specific goal you can achieve, or at least make significant progress toward.

This is a way to happy new year.

Light that is focused becomes a powerful laser.

A falls that is channeled can produce great power.

Energy has to be concentrated to be of value.

Non-focused energy is like a flood, or a storm.

It can be destructive, for it is not funneled toward a goal.

Look at the life of Jesus.

He could have become a great political leader.

He could have become a great poet, artist, or musician.

He could have become great in many areas of life, and been the best of whatever He chose to be.

But He did not use His many gifts to be a multitude of things.

He focused on being a servant of the people.

There was no big money in it, but Jesus was happy in His human life as the Son of God, for He was doing what He loved, and was pleasing God.

That is the goal of life-to do what you love, and to please God.

That was the essence of Paul's life as well.

He suffered plenty, but he was a very happy man, for he loved what he was doing, and in this letter he is always rejoicing in the Lord as he presses on to those goals that please God.

You want a happy new year?

Then make it a year of focus and concentration on doing what you love to do in such a way that it is pleasing to God.

There is no higher happiness, for this is to taste of heaven in time.

The life of Paul is summed up by himself in this one sentence in Phil.

1:21, "For to me, to live as Christ and to die is gain."

You can't get any more focused than that- to live as Christ.

Though it is true that Paul was a man of great variety, and his strategy was to be all things to all men that he might win them to Christ, we need to see that all his diversity was channeled to one goal, and that was Christ.

Focus does not mean a lack of variety and diversity in life.

It just means that all of life however diverse has a target.