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
0.14UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.11UNLIKELY
Fear
0.14UNLIKELY
Joy
0.53LIKELY
Sadness
0.25UNLIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.68LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.13UNLIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.91LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.92LIKELY
Extraversion
0.1UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.53LIKELY
Emotional Range
0.78LIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
By Pastor Glenn Pease
The famous medical missionary Dr. Grenfell of Labrador once came to John Hopkins Hospital in America looking for a head nurse to go back to Labrador with him.
He made this appeal: "If you want to have the time of your life, come with me and run a hospital next summer for the orphans of the Northland.
There will not be a cent of money in it for you, and you will have to pay your own expenses.
But I guarantee that you will feel a love for life you have never before experienced.
It's having the time of anyone's life to be in the service of Christ."
The nurse who responded wrote this after she came back to America: "I never knew before that life was good for anything but what one could get out of it.
Now I know that the real fun lies in seeing how much one can put into life for others."
She learned that the blessed life is the life of the servant.
This is one of the major truths of the Bible, and one that John stresses in this book of Revelation.
The first chapter and the last chapter have the same emphasis: This is a revelation to servants, and blessedness is found in the keeping of what is revealed.
Listen to Rev. 22:6-7 which shows you how the last chapter sounds so much like the beginning of the first chapter.
"And the Lord, the God of the spirits of the prophets, has sent his angel to sow His servants what must soon take place.
And behold I am coming soon.
Blessed is he who keeps the words of the prophecy of this book."
From beginning to end this book is for servants, and the blessing is found in doing.
In this third verse of the first chapter John spells out most fully the actions that lead to the blessed life.
The three things you can do with this book that leads to blessings are: You can read it; you can hear it, and you can keep it.
Readers, hearers, and keepers, are the three kinds of servants who will reap the benefits of this revelation.
Before we look closer at these three actions, we need to look at the implication of this verse as a whole.
This verse makes this the most unique book in all the Bible.
All Scripture is profitable, therefore, there is a blessing connected with reading, hearing, and obeying any part of it, but this is the only part of Scripture where it is plainly stated.
This is the first of seven beatitudes in the book, and is the most comprehensive.
Every Christian in history has this blessing as a potential for his life.
There are exceptions, like the thief on the cross, who never had a chance to even see the book, and likely there are many others in history who also did not have a chance to see it.
But the fact remains, Christians of every generation have had the chance to enter into this blessing.
This makes the interpretation of this book, by necessity, a book that has to be a meaningful one to every generation of Christians.
If it is not, this promised blessing is a farce and a mockery.
If only the first Christians could understand it, then the blessing is meaningless to all the Christians since.
And if only the last generation of Christians can grasp it, then this blessing has been meaningless to all the Christians through history.
There is just no alternative to this conclusion: If we are to take this blessing as a legitimate promise to all readers, hearers, and keepers, then it must be a revelation that is relevant to all Christians of all time.
How can you keep what has no meaning to you?
How can you be blessed by reading what makes no sense because it is not meant for you, but for Christians of some other age?
There is only one way you can do justice to this third verse, and that is to recognize that it makes this book a now book for all time.
The very first Christians who received it entered into the blessed life, and the very last who receive it will enter into the blessed life.
The blessed life is not all out there in the future when the world is coming to an end.
The whole point of a revelation of the future is to bring the blessings of the future back into the present so we can begin to enjoy them now.
The best is always yet to be, but the better is always near for those who know what that best to be is.
Realized Eschatology is what the scholars call it.
It simply means that the future can greatly influence the present in the lives of those who live now with eternity's values in view.
They begin now to experience in some measure the blessings that God has prepared for those who love and serve Him.
If a man gets a letter telling him that the girl he loves is going to say yes when he proposes next week, that knowledge of the future affects how he lives that week.
He is already enjoying the future.
This verse says that the blessed life is now.
The overall theme of the book is the conflict of Christ and Satan, good and evil, light and darkness.
We don't have to wait until the battle is over in enjoy the fruits of victory.
Christ wants to live in us and gain victories now over the forces of evil.
We might even become martyrs in the conflict, but this book makes clear that if we do, it only leads us more quickly to be crowned, and to join the battle in the spiritual realm even nearer to Christ.
No matter how fierce the conflict, and no matter how rough the persecution, Christians must recognize that the blessed life is now.
Any interpretation of this book that robs any Christian of any age of this opening blessing is missing the mark.
We are dealing with a perpetual now book, and the important thing about this revelation about the future is, how does it affect our now?
How does our knowledge of God's plan and purpose for the future alter our present character and conduct?
The first thing we have to do to allow the future to change the present is to enter into the three-fold blessing of this verse.
The first blessing is on-
I. THE READER.
The first thing we need to observe is that this blessing is designed to fit the specific situation of the first century Christians.
The reader is singular.
"Blessed is he who reads."
The hearers, however, are plural, for it is they that hear.
We have a clear picture of the public service where one reads the Word and the congregation listens.
The reading here is not the private reading in your home, but the public reading in the church.
In the early church where there was only one copy of the book, no one had a copy to read at home in private.
It would have been meaningless to offer a blessing to those who read the book to themselves at home, for no one could do that.
The Living Bible; the RSV, and other modern translations stress the public reading by translating: "Blessed is he who reads aloud."
It is not a silent private reading that being referred to here.
The implication of this is clear.
This book is meant for a group experience.
It is guide for the body in its decisions and strategies for doing the will of Christ in history.
It is not designed as a devotional guide for personal devotions like the book of Psalms or Proverbs.
It is to be a public standard for the guidance of the church as a whole.
In verse 4 John addresses the seven churches of Asia, and the second and third chapters deal with Christ's view of the church.
What this means then, on the practical level, is that the principles of this book are to guide us as a body.
This book is to be more important to us as a local congregation of believers than our constitution.
Here we have a revelation of how our Lord, the Head of the church, feels about what goes on in His church.
He is to determine what theology we teach; what actions we take, and what attitudes we express toward our world.
In order to guarantee that the Lord's view of the church might never be lost, He made it a blessing for churches of all ages to have this book read and heard publicly in the worship service.
This does not mean there is no value in reading the book in private.
It is just that the blessing is designed to keep this book as an open and public guide to the local church all through history.
The leader or reader may be a pastor or a layman who keeps this guide before the body by reading it in public, and he is blessed for doing so.
The other two categories of blessing are really one, for to be a hearer and not a keeper of the Word is a curse rather than a blessing, and so we can link them together and call them-
II.
HEARER-KEEPERS.
The obvious reason why it is a blessing to hear this book read is because you thereby become informed on the mind of Christ.
You are then able to live in obedience to His will.
The reverse truth is also obvious.
It is a curse to be in the dark and not know what your Lord's will is.
To be in a battle and not know what your commander's goals and objectives are is to be and aid to the enemy, and a stumbling block to your fellow soldiers in the faith.
If we are ignorant as a local church as to what Christ expects of us, we can burn up all of our energy doing things that do not accomplish His purpose.
As we shall see, it is possible for a local church to be in just that kind of situation.
To avoid it we must be hearers of this portion of the Word and doers.
The ear gate was the primary means of receiving the Word of God in the early church, and the preached Word is still the main means for most Christians to be exposed to the truths which Christ wants the church to hear.
This means that good listening habits are important for Christians to develop.
Boredom is not always the fault of the speaker.
Quite often the listeners are lethargic.
They do not take the message seriously enough to overcome the distractions and the tiredness that makes the mind drift and sink into a stupor where the message does not penetrate.
This verse is saying, it will be a blessing for those Christians who take this revelation serious enough to fight all obstacles to good listening so that they can hear what Christ has to say to the church.
Over and over we will see the phrase in chapter two and three: "He who has an ear, let him hear what the spirit says to the churches."
In other words, you can have an ear and still not hear.
It is the hearing that leads to understanding and obedience.
The good listener is one who is always asking questions about what he hears.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9