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
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Disgust
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Fear
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Joy
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Sadness
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Language Tone
Analytical
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Confident
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Tentative
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Social Tone
Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Agreeableness
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Emotional Range
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Tone of specific sentences
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Emotion
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Anger
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Where Am I Going?
I have shared w/ you that I am directionally challenged.
GPS has saved me so many times.
Of course, if it’s wrong I’m up a creek!
In my defense, I grew up in Wichita.
It’s flat.
Every street runs either N and S, or E and W.
There’s a stop light every mile.
Check your odometer.
There are side streets.
If you miss your turn, take the next on and double back.
Left, right?
turn around easy.
I learned early on that men don’t stop and ask for directions.
It’s innate.
We don’t.
We will drive lost for hours trying to convince everyone in the car we know a short cut.
We know where we’re going.
Even if I’m the only one in the car.
Men are wired to compete.
Everything is a competition.
We will win.
Like w/ the remote control and the TV.
We will not ever get caught watching the 2nd best thing on TV.
Which is a real challenge w/ satellite and cable b/c of all those obscure channels that come w/ the service we’ve overpaid for.
Stopping to ask for directions is admitting defeat!
We won’t do that.
Complicating my life is my wife was born w/ and internal GPS.
She just knows how to get where we’re going.
Left, right, north, south mean nothing to her.
Just go this way, she says.
I can be absolutely certain I’m supposed to turn left.
She’ll say, “Where are you going?” “It’s this way.”
I don’t know.
I once had a college english professor tell me very creative people don’t know how to spell.
Well, maybe we aren’t confined to one way home.
And then, once I learn how to get to your house, I have to get home.
How does that work?
I remember turning right onto your street.
Right again?
No, left this time.
What?
Eventually, we always get where we’re going.
I’ve never had to stop at a hotel on my way home.
I get home eventually, I just tend to make it harder on myself than it needs to be.
We’re in a series called Do-Over.
Ezra and Nehemiah.
Isreal got a great, big do-over.
We need do-overs, b/c we take wrong turns in life.
Then, when God gives you a do-over, what are you going to do w/ it?
God promised Israel they’d live in the land.
That is, unless they were horribly unfaithful and disobedient.
Then, He’d remove them for a time to discipline them.
But, He promised, they’d get to go back.
This promise is still in effect today for Israel.
Understand why they are having so much trouble w/ their homeland.
They did, and they will again, in the end times.
The first time it should have been a short trip, straight in the land.
But, on the way they messed up bad.
So, they wandered for 40 years and that entire generation died out, except for 2 men; Joshua and Caleb.
They didn’t mess up God’s plan.
He planned all along that Israel would live in the land.
He didn’t promise those individuals.
But, he did promise the nation.
They didn’t mess up God’s plan.
They only messed up their own lives.
They didn’t make things harder for God.
They made things much harder for themselves.
God finished what He started.
Well, He’s finishing it, and He will.
That is true for Israel and it’s true for us.
We can’t mess up God’s plan for us.
He will finish what He starts in our lives.
The question is, what will happen between now and when He’s finished?
We can, however, make things harder.
We don’t have to, but too often we take wrong turns b/c we think we know the best way to go in our lives when God is leading us to go a better way.
We can’t mess up God’s plan.
We can only mess up our own lives.
God is going to finish what He has started in your life.
How much easier, or how much harder, are you going to make your life until He does?
Today in , we are going to look at 3 ways he was tempted to make a wrong turn which would have complicated his life unnecessarily.
We face those same intersections regularly in our lives.
The enemies of Israel and Nehemiah had tried to stop the work on the wall by threatening the nation.
That got them nowhere.
Now, they are getting personal and going after Nehemiah.
It’s a hail Mary, last gasp effort to prevent Israel from finishing the wall.
They set up an ambush and then tried 3 ways to get him to make a wrong turn and fall into their trap.
They baited their trap w/ things that spoke to him on a deep level that made him choose to either follow God for them or try to find them on his own.
Of course, had he gone his own way it would have made his life much harder and he would not have found what he was looking for until he returned to God’s way.
The first of the 3 ways they baited their trap was for peace.
Peace
Nehemiah 6:1-
The wall was almost entirely finished.
The only thing left was to hang the doors in the gates.
These are the same enemies he’d dealt w/ all along.
Now, they are getting personal.
Before the threats were to the nation.
Now their bullseye is on Israel’s leaders.
Thinking that if they can cut off the head the body will die.
This first attempt to bait their trap is the most subtle of the 3.
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