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
0.1UNLIKELY
Disgust
0.07UNLIKELY
Fear
0.58LIKELY
Joy
0.59LIKELY
Sadness
0.58LIKELY
Language Tone
Analytical
0.69LIKELY
Confident
0UNLIKELY
Tentative
0.64LIKELY
Social Tone
Openness
0.67LIKELY
Conscientiousness
0.92LIKELY
Extraversion
0.14UNLIKELY
Agreeableness
0.84LIKELY
Emotional Range
0.7LIKELY
Tone of specific sentences
Tones
Emotion
Language
Social Tendencies
Anger
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9
Do you ever feel like you have to be happy when you come to church?
Our society puts such a priority on avoiding any kind of pain or discomfort.
We try to numb pain, avoid hard things, and ignore emotions we don’t like.
Sometimes, the pressure for us to do that is even greater when we come to church.
I mean, after all, aren’t we supposed to be marked by peace and joy?
Isn’t life supposed to seem perfect if we are following Jesus?
It is true: our lives are supposed to be full of joy and peace.
At the same time, though, we also deal with fear, disappointment, and heartache, and we will for as long as we live.
So, here’s the question: Is worship big enough to handle our negative emotions?
In other words, is worship just for the happy and upbeat, or can we worship when we are afraid or disappointed?
As we look at Ezra 3 this morning and seek to rebuild the foundation of worship, I want to hopefully show that when we worship, we can bring our strongest, heaviest emotions with us.
This morning, we are going to see that the exiles who returned to rebuild the temple did just that.
Specifically, they worshiped in the middle of fear and disappointment.
From their example, then, I want us to see how our fears and even our tears can lead us to true, genuine worship.
Start by reading Ezra 3:1-5 with me.
Can we bring our negative emotions to worship with us?
Absolutely.
In this section, we see that worship is big enough to handle our fear.
1) Fear: Run to him for safety
Think about what is going on here.
70 years before this, Jerusalem had been destroyed.
The temple was demolished, and God’s people had been carried off into captivity.
Now, a relatively small group has come back from exile and is trying to get worship reestablished again.
To do that, they needed to do two things: get the sacrifices and temple running again, and start observing the feasts God had commanded them to observe.
They have been back in the land for a few months, so they have started to get settled in their towns.
If you know the Old Testament, though, you will remember something: where was the one place they could go to offer sacrifices?
And where were the men supposed to come 3 times a year to observe the feasts?
Jerusalem.
So, then, if you are coming back to Jerusalem to reestablish the temple and observe the feasts, who would be at home to watch your stuff?
Not only that, we are going to find out in the very next chapter that the people who had moved into the land during the 70 years prior are really unhappy with the Jews being back, so they are in great danger.
With that in mind, look back to verse 3 for me...
The version we are using says “even though they feared the surrounding peoples.”
That makes it sound like these people were a group of courageous individuals, willing to do the right thing even when it was opposed.
Certainly, they were courageous for taking this on.
However, that phrase can also be rendered a different way.
In fact, it seems like it is almost a 50/50 split between whether translators take it this way or render it differently.
The other way to look at this is to say that they built the altar, “…for they were terrified because of the peoples of the land” (ESV)
In other words, they didn’t build the altar in spite of their fear, they did it because they were afraid!
At first glance, that may not make a lot of sense.
You are afraid that your neighbors are out to hurt you, so you are going to leave your house, go kill some animals, and camp out in some homemade booths for a while?
How does that make sense?
Humanly speaking, it doesn’t.
However, for the exiles, who looked back at their parents and grandparents and great grandparents, it finally clicked.
Throughout the Bible, you find that God is the one we are to run to when we get scared and need protection!
However, their ancestors had gone after bigger and better armies, alliances, and treaties to try to make their problems go away.
None of that was able to protect them.
When they would surrender and let God lead, he always came through for them.
You see that in Joshua, where God told Joshua to put priests and the ark of the covenant at the front of the line when they marched around the city of Jericho.
When the time was right, God caused the walls to fall down, proving that it was him who was able to deliver the city into their hands.
That’s what these exiles were doing.
They knew that if they had any hope of being safe, then they had to worship the God who had proven himself to be their protector.
Isn’t that what we said about God a couple weeks ago?
He is the protector of Israel, so Jeshua and Zerubbabel and the others know that when they are afraid, they are to run to him for safety.
Is that what worship is for you?
When things get scary, which direction do you turn?
When you are afraid of what is going to happen to you or those you love, do you respond with worship, turning to the God who protects, or do you try to fix it yourself?
You are low on money, so you say, “There’s no way I could give.
I need to work harder to earn more so I can finally have enough to retire on.”
You should know by now that money will never rid you of fear.
When you don’t have enough, you worry that you won’t make it.
Once you have it, you worry that you’ll lose it.
The same is true of everything else we chase after.
We are afraid of dying, so we try to eat right and exercise.
We are afraid of our kids resenting us, so we give them everything they want and make them the center of our world.
Stop it!
Stop trying to fix your fear on your own.
Instead, because you are afraid, come to God in worship and sacrifice and praise.
Remember what he has done, just like they did when they celebrated the Festival of Booths or Tabernacles.
That was another reminder to them that God brought their ancestors to that land from Egypt, and it took on new meaning for these exiles as they returned from Babylon.
Think back to the songs we have already sung this morning.
They pointed us to the fact that Jesus is the only solid assurance we have and hope of salvation.
He is the only foundation for our hope, and he always will be.
When we come to worship and bring our fears with us, we declare that he is bigger than the things we fear.
We honor him as we declare that we want to run to him first, seek him first, and not try to fix it ourselves.
When we worship, we come to God and can rightly say, “I am afraid, and I don’t know how this is going to work out.
I don’t even know what to do, but I am throwing everything I have and everything I am on you, trusting you to keep me safe.”
If you aren’t comfortable enough with God to do that, I would point you back to the message from a few weeks ago.
Look over Psalm 121, and keep digging into it until you see God as he really is.
Worship is big enough to handle fear, because fear lead us to acknowledge our need, just like Zerubbabel and the other exiles did.
This passage deals with more than just fear, though.
As we read the second half of the chapter, we see that worship is big enough to handle...
2) Disappointment: Run to him for fulfillment
Read verses 8, 10-13.
A few months after what we read first, they began to lay the foundation for the temple.
On one hand, it was a beautiful moment of celebration, because God had kept his promise to bring his people back to the land.
He had, as Ezra said in Ezra 1:1, kept his word that Jeremiah had spoken.
They had a great worship celebration.
Did you notice, though, that there was a group there who wasn’t as excited?
Look back at verse 12 again.
These were the old folks.
They would have been over 70 years old, and they had seen what it all looked like before.
Now, as they saw the foundation of the temple being laid, they wept.
Why?
The temple they were building would never be as grand as the previous temple.
Not only that, but it was their fault that it had been destroyed.
They had been around, they had sinned, and God had punished them, just like he promised.
Many of those priests, Levites, and leaders would have remembered the horrific events of the conquest of Jerusalem.
They lost parents, siblings, and friends and would have carried that for the last 70 years.
Seeing the foundation go up was more bitter and sweet because it reminded them of all they lost.
We need to stop and acknowledge something here: sin has major, life-altering consequences.
< .5
.5 - .6
.6 - .7
.7 - .8
.8 - .9
> .9