Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

Christians have always had mixed feelings about pleasure.

They know God made us to enjoy many pleasures of life, and yet there are also the forbidden pleasures.

These are often just extremes of what is acceptable.

Sex is good, but immorality is bad.

Food is good, but gluttony is bad.

Abundance is good, but excessive luxury is bad.

Power is good, but tyranny is bad.

Every pleasure seems to have a danger zone where it goes to far and become a negative.

It is like the heat gage on your dash.

It is necessary for your car to develop heat, but when it keeps rising it goes into a danger zone, and is then a threat to your car.

A good thing gone to far is a bad thing.

So it is with pleasure.

Adam and Eve had all the pleasures of paradise, but when they took the forbidden fruit they went into the danger zone, and that pleasure was very costly, for it led to great pain.

Christians tend to focus on one aspect or the other of pleasure-the fair or the forbidden.

The Puritans spent much of their energy focused on avoiding the forbidden.

They even passed laws forbidding laughter on Sunday.

Their idea of entertainment was sitting on a hard wooden bench listening to a three hour sermon.

They feared pleasure lest it be taken to extremes.

They felt the best way to avoid extremes is to avoid even the legitimate pleasures of life.

They found pleasure in avoiding pleasure.

Modern Christians have rejected this approach, and feel the Christians should take advantage of the pleasures God has made available.

It is obvious we are made to enjoy a great many pleasures.

God has given us taste buds to enjoy many tastes, and then provided us through nature a multitude of foods to stimulate these taste buds.

A major part of our joy in life is the pleasure of eating.

God built us with a nervous system designed to enjoy the pleasures of sight, smell, touch, and sound, and not a day goes by in which we do not experience pleasure by our senses.

These are all legitimate and motivate us to seek ways to add to our pleasures.

This may be more healthy than the Puritan approach, but it faces the same danger of lack of balance.

Christians can get so caught up in the pursuit of pleasure that they neglect their spiritual life.

The Psalms are God's gift to His people to prevent this, and promote the pleasures of the soul, so that we maintain a balance between the pleasures of the flesh and those of the inner man.

The pleasure we want to focus on is the pleasure of beauty, and more specifically, the pleasure of God's beauty, or the pleasure of perfection.

Psalm 84 begins with an expression of pleasure in God's dwelling place.

"How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord Almighty."

There is a deep longing in this song to experience again the pleasure of being in this lovely environment where the presence of God could be felt.

We are made in the image of God, and so there is a magnetic attraction to what is lovely, beautiful, and perfect.

When we see perfect beauty we are compelled to praise.

Why do you think millions are spent to make cars look beautiful, and why beautiful women are used to advertise them?

It is because what motivates people to buy things is the beauty and pleasure of perfection.

We all want to own beautiful things with perfect shape, perfect colors, perfect efficiency.

The perfect price is unachievable, of course, but we will pay the price if

the beauty is near enough to perfection.

Anybody selling anything uses beauty to promote the product.

Better Home and Gardens gives you pictures of what is a perfect home and garden.

This produces in people a desire to possess such perfection.

The love of perfection is built into us, for it is part of God's image, and that is why the classics never die.

They are classics because they never lose their appeal, for they are aesthetically pleasing to our ears or our eyes.

Truly beautiful music and art are permanent for they appeal to human nature in every age, and will continue to do so for all eternity.

God expects man to have pleasure in worship, for it is to be experienced in an environment of beauty.

The Temple was designed by God to be filled with the beauty of colors, artwork, sculpture, and gold to appeal to the eye.

The vast choir was to produce music appealing to the ear.

The incense was to appeal to the nose.

The sacrifice was to appeal to the taste.

Worship was to be sense oriented so that the whole body, mind, and soul of man would experience the pleasure of perfection, and out of that pleasure praise the God of perfection.

The reason most churches are built with an attractive sanctuary is because beauty is a stimulus to worship.

Beauty makes us feel nearer to the Creator of beauty.

Ugliness makes us feel nearer to the Lucifer, who by his rebellion brought ugliness into the perfect world of God.

Disorder, dirtiness, and anything that repulses us is a hindrance to worship.

That is why we must work at keeping the environment of worship one that appeals to our aesthetic nature.

God is everywhere at all times, but we do not always sense His presence.

It is beauty and perfection that produce in us the sense of His presence.

We may never achieve perfection in this world, and all we do may always have defects and flaws, but it is still our duty to strive for perfection and seek to provide an atmosphere that gives pleasure to the senses.

It is possible to worship and praise God in a muddy foxhole or in a dusty bamboo hut.

From every place below the skies

The grateful song, the fervent prayer

The incense of the heart, may rise

To heaven, and find acceptance there.

There is no atmosphere where God cannot be praised, but the Bible stresses the beauty of the house of God as an ideal environment in which to worship.

Beauty is an aid to worship for God is the most beautiful of all beings.

David in Psa.

27:4 writes, "One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek: That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord, and to seek Him in His Temple."

You may not be aware of it, but for centuries the highest goal of life for Christians was the beatific vision.

This is the vision of God's beauty, which we will see when we behold God in all His glory on the throne.

John in the book of Revelation got a preview of this beauty, but all Christians will get this vision and experience forever the pleasure of perfection which will lead to perpetual praise.

Worship is to be a foretaste of heaven.

It is a sip of that cup of pleasure we will drink for eternity.

If we come to church and do not get any pleasure we have not worshiped.

If the truth of God's Word does not reveal to us any beauty to appreciate; if the music does not give us pleasure by the message or the tune, then we have missed the essence of worship, which is to praise God for the pleasure of His beauty.

If there is no pleasure in some aspect of beauty you will not be worshiping, for worship is expressing pleasure in who God is and what He has done.

The purpose of coming to church is to experience more of the beauty of God.

Augustine called God "the beauty of all things beautiful": "The most beautiful": "The fairest of all."

He said of God's Word:" Thy truth, bright and beautiful above all."

He wrote, "I was borne up to thee by thy beauty."

He came to Christ after a life of sin and he lamented, "Too late have I loved thee, O thou Beauty of Ancient Days."

Beauty is an aid to worship because it is a reflection of the beauty of the One we worship.

Fortunately we can rise above our environment and worship God even in very non-beautiful surroundings.

Corrie Ten Boom had to worship God in a concentration camp where there was ugliness of the physical and spiritual.

The sin of man's nature was never more ugly there, yet she worshiped the God of beauty there.

But when she was asked to help develop housing for the homeless after the war she directed the rehabilitation of old factories and buildings.

One was a former concentration camp.

She ordered that the barbed wire be removed and that everything be painted with bright colors, and every window have a flower box.

She knew the awfulness of a bleak environment, and she was determined that sorrowing families have some beauty in their lives.

Beauty is basic to pleasure, and pleasure is basic to happiness.

Every realm of life is affected by the beauty, or lack of it that we experience.

That is why the goal of coming to church is to experience the pleasure of beauty.

But since beauty is in the eye of the beholder, that is why there is a need for variety.

Some people see beauty in old songs, and some see the beauty in new songs.

Some see beauty in the King James Version, and others see it in the Living Bible.

Some see beauty in the solo, and others in the choir.

Some like hand clapping, and others prefer silence.

Variety is a part of beauty, for there are many different tastes.