Sermon Tone Analysis

Over the last few months we have been thinking through the need for every one of us to personally engage in Great Commission work.

That means we have to make the main thing the main thing.

We have to put the first things first in our life.

We have many different kinds of commissions as disciples of Jesus, but we only have one Great Commission.

And if we are going to be serious in our desire to be a Christ follower, then we must be serious in our desire to actually do what Jesus told us to do.

Part of that means going into our Jerusalem and seeking to build redemptive relationships with people that do not yet believe in Jesus.

We must get outside of the walls of our church and outside of the walls of our houses and go into the world- we must be in the world, but not of the world.

Maybe the Lord has convicted you in this area.

Maybe you have made an effort to get into your community and build friendships with unsaved people with the purpose of doing the Great Commission.

So, hopefully all of you have made at least one friend.

Now, what is the next question that comes into you mind?

Now what?

What do I do with them now?

Or, how can I start a conversation about God or the Bible, without offending them or scaring them off?

The answer is we need to be Christlike Evangelists!

What I am suggesting is that we, all of us, need to mimic the principles of relational evangelism that Christ used while he was here on earth.

“That’s impossible!” you might be thinking, “I can’t heal the sick, or multiple bread, or raise the dead to life—how can I mimic Jesus’ principles of evangelism?” True, we cannot perform the miracles that Jesus did, but are there methods or principles of evangelism that the Lord used that we can imitate?

My answer is yes there are many principles of evangelism that we can learn form the Master Evangelist.

And we should seek to be Christlike in our evangelism as much as possible.

We should strive to be Christlike not just in the character of his life, but also in the content of his daily living.

So how do we become Christlike Evangelists?

This morning we can give the answer to this question in one sentence:

Use the Lord’s method to make your friend curious

How do you do that?

Well, let’s look at how the Lord did it in John 2-

How did Jesus make people curious in order to lead them to an understanding of the gospel?

I. Jesus did something that the Jews did not understand (vv.

13-17)

V. 13 is key to understanding the setting of this story.

Where is Jesus?

He is in Jerusalem at the temple.

What significant religious event is taking place?

Passover.

What do we know about Passover?

What is the main purpose of Passover?

It was to remind the people of the deliverance, and grace, and mercy, and love, and faithfulness of God when he delivered them out of the land of Egypt.

Why did God want the people to be reminded of this event every year?

Worship.

This event is all about genuine, heartfelt, sincere, honest, pure worship of God.

It was about the Jews unworthiness, their need for a perfect blood sacrifice!

This was all about sinful man coming to a merciful God- acknowledging dependence, thinking deeply about their own relationship with God, and honoring and worshiping God in spirit and in truth.

That is what Passover was supposed to be about.

What did Jesus find when he got to the temple?

Apparently this was an outrage and an affront to God.

Why?

Schneider offers this explanation:

“Jesus entered the temple in Jerusalem and found the leaders selling oxen, sheep and doves.

The quiet serenity of the temple had been replaced by a din of animal noises; the fragrant smell of incense oils had been smothered by animal smells; the excitement of coming to the living God in an attitude of repose and worship was a ghost of the past.

The moneychangers sat plying their trade.

They changed the people’s money and greedily took a cut from the exchange.

The priests paraded their importance as a sign of spirituality.

​

According to the Law of Moses, to receive forgiveness for their sins, the people who came to worship needed to offer sacrifices to God.

However, in Jesus’ time, when a devout Jew brought the required animal to the temple to be sacrificed, he immediately ran into a problem.

The priest at the door examined the animal and, more often than not, claimed that the animal was not good enough.

He should know.

He had studied “Lamb Theology.”

The lamb would have a blemish or defect, unseen by its owner, that did not meet the priest’s standards of perfection.

The priest would then offer to buy the animal at a price well below its true value and then sell one of his own “perfect” animals to the man.

​Where did the priest get his “perfect” animals?

From a previous worshiper!

​What sort of God were his priestly representatives portraying to the common Jew by such a practice?

Over the centuries, since the time of their return from captivity, the Jews had fostered a picture of a God who took and took.

Religion was pure business.

The religious leaders had given the people a wrong picture of God because the leaders themselves did not know the living God.”

How were the priests corrupting Passover for the Jews?

What sort of God were the priests portraying to the common Jew by such a practice?

Year after year, the Jews would come to the temple for Passover and be confronted by the greedy practices of leaders in the temple, and this had so damaged the image of God in the people’s minds that God had become one who takes and takes.

Religion had become nothing less than pure business.

The religious leaders had given people the wrong picture of God, and they had destroyed an event that should have been the spiritual highlight of the year- at time of reflection, reverence, and worship- instead it was a time of greed, selfishness, and corruption.

Is this what God is really like?

Is God a god who only takes and takes?

How do religious leaders today portray God?

Do people in our time have a right or wrong picture of God?

What must be corrected in the thinking of many people?

How can we correct this wrong thinking?

How did the Lord correct it?

Jesus reacted to this temple scene.

He took time to make a scourge of cords.

We can almost imagine the Lord thinking through what he was going to do as he made the scourge.

His anger was not like ours – selfish, hasty, and misguided.

His was a well-thought-out, righteous anger.

​Can we imagine the Lord entering the temple and saying, “May I have your permission to turn this table over and send all the money flying?”

Or “Now people, please don’t do this.

Look at the mess that the animals are making all over the floor!

God is going to be very upset about this!” His actions were not “polite” as most would define the term politeness today.

He did not reason with the leaders to get them to stop portraying God as the great businessman in the sky.

He just cleaned house.

​

Can you hear the cows bellowing as the Lord laid that scourge across their backsides, the doves screeching as he opened their cages and turned them upside down, the sheep bleating, and the tables crashing down?

Can you see the money flying all around the room and the priests scrambling for cover toward the back of the temple to get out of the way of a very strong, angry man – wanting to retrieve their money, but not wanting to come under that scourge?

Why did Jesus do all of this?

Did Jesus want to lead these priests to the Father?

Did Jesus want to lead them to genuine belief in Himself?

Then why was Jesus so impolite to them?

What kind of evangelism was that?

He certainly did not seem to worry about whether his impoliteness would turn them off.

Would they have listened if He had used any other approach?

Apparently, Jesus did not think so.

What was Jesus’ goal?

His goal was to make these people curious about spiritual things.

These kinds of practices had been going on for years and years and it had become the “norm” in religious life.

Jesus needed to do something that the people would not understand to make them curious enough about spiritual things to begin to question their own thinking about God.