Sermon Tone Analysis
Overall tone of the sermon
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We have finally arrived.
We have come to the end of the beginning.
As my kids would say, Wait, What?
The end of the beginning?
Today is Christ the King Sunday.
It is the last Sunday of the Christian calendar.
Next Sunday we enter into the season of Advent leading us to the celebration of Christmas.
It’s hard to believe that Thursday is Thanksgiving.
In about 30 minutes or so depending how long-winded I get we’ll gather for our annual Thanksgiving Dinner here at the church.
Everyone is invited to stay.
I’m pretty sure there is enough for everyone!
There are a lot of traditions that we have with Thanksgiving.
I remember as a kid looking forward to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.
Watching it on the old black and white TV didn’t do justice to all the floats and balloons compared to watching it today in high definition.
I still enjoy watching the parade because it for a while takes us back to our childhood.
I do get frustrated with the parade now because they spend more time talking than just letting us watch the parade and listen to the bands.
I wish they’d change that.
Growing up, Thanksgiving dinner was always a big deal at my parents’ house.
I can’t remember ever going anyplace for Thanksgiving dinner as a kid.
It would be a huge dinner with tons of food and we’d eat until we were stuffed and then come back later for some leftovers and stuff ourselves again.
My dad wasn’t a cook, but Thanksgiving was one time that he’d help my mom in the kitchen.
It was almost always his job to mash the potatoes.
He was really old school, he didn’t like to use the electric mixer to mash the potatoes; he had to use the old potato masher.
Do you remember them?
Kids today don’t know what real mashed potatoes are; all they get it seems instant potatoes.
Dad really got into mashing potatoes with that old handheld masher.
My youngest older sister (don’t think about that too hard) was about as big around as my little finger.
She was a chain smoker so I guess that attributed to her size.
When she was home for Thanksgiving we learned that she had to be the last one to get food passed to, particularly the stuffing.
Mom’s homemade stuffing is one of those food items that I truly miss.
When it came to the stuff my sister ate her weight in it so we’d make her wait until everyone else got some first.
Lots of great memories about Thanksgiving and lots of reasons to be thankful.
I am indeed blessed.
I’m thankful for a great family, an awesome wife, five great kids and four grandkids.
I’m thankful for an awesome church who provides well for us.
You all have blessed us tremendously this past year – thank you.
Above all that I’m thankful for a great Savior who came and lived and died for my sins so that I could restored into a relationship with God.
Today in the Christian Calendar is Christ the King Sunday.
I think it is highly appropriate that it comes around Thanksgiving Day to remind us all of the ultimate reason that we have to be thankful.
That reason is Jesus and all that God has and is doing for us.
Paul will write about that in our Scripture this morning.
As I read through this passage and tried to organize it in my mind I see the what and the why of Christianity.
Into this church had crept false teaching and Paul is writing to counter the false teaching by bring to them a challenge of what it means to live as a child of God.
Paul writes there in verse nine that they have not stopped praying for the church.
Paul wasn’t the founder of this church, it was most likely founded by Epaphras.
It was Epaphras who came to Paul in Rome to tell him about the problems that the church was having with false teaching.
Isn’t it something to know that people are praying for you?
I know that there are many of you that pray for me on a daily basis.
Thank you, I can sense the power of your prayers at work in my life.
Many of you are in church this morning because someone prayed for you for a very long time before you even darkened the doors of this building.
I think back over my life knowing that people prayed for me.
My mom prayed for me as an infant.
She prayed for me and gave me to God like the Prophet Samuel’s mother Hannah.
I didn’t know about that until after I was already in full-time ministry.
I had two of my grandmother’s sisters who prayed for me.
They would remind me from time to time that they were praying for me.
Prayer is important.
It isn’t though some magic way of gaining God’s favor.
It’s communication, and it involves us talking to God and then allowing God to speak to us.
If all we do is talk but never listen we don’t grow in our relationship with God.
God is not some cosmic Santa Claus that we constantly bring our wish list too.
Paul says that he never stops praying for them.
If you tell someone that you’ll pray for them, don’t stop until the prayer is answered.
Remind the person that you’re still praying for them.
And here’s an idea, if in the course of a conversation you tell someone that you’ll pray for them, why not stop there and pray for them!
You’ll show them that you are sincere in your intent to pray for them.
One of the big questions that Christians have is what is God’s will for their lives.
Often times when bad things happen to people that you will hear someone say that it must have been God’s will.
The curse of sin that we live under has caused the brokenness that we see in the world.
It’s the cause of the genetic mutations that cause cancer and other diseases and birth defects.
God didn’t create the word that way.
When He created man God created man is His image which was perfect.
Certainly God doesn’t have a physical body like us.
Jesus the Bible tells us took on the likeness of man, He became one of us.
Paul says that in his prayer that he hadn’t
stopped praying for you and asking for you to be filled with the knowledge of God’s will, with all wisdom and spiritual understanding.
How do we come to know God’s will in our lives?
It’s by the Holy Spirit who fills us with wisdom and understanding.
To have understanding is to be able to comprehend something.
It’s the Holy Spirit that enables us.
We often miss what God is wanting to do because all we do is spend time talking to Him, we don’t spend any time asking God to speak to us.
We don’t make any room in our busy schedules to allow the Holy Spirit to work within our lives.
A false idea that many have is that they can do whatever they want and then when bad times come that they can go running to God in prayer and say a few words and God is going to make it all better.
Are we ever guilty of that?
We go running to God and want him to solve the problem immediately by putting a band aide on it so that we can say it’s all better.
I can tell you that is not the way God operates, He wants to have a daily relationship with you.
Why?
Why is that important to pray and seek God’s will?
Paul answers that question in verses 10 and 11 these five outcomes of walking daily with God when he writes:
Underline them in your Bible, they are import aspects of our daily walk with Jesus.
We pray, we seek God’s will so that we can do these things.
· Live a life worthy of the Lord
· Please him in every way
· Producing fruit in every good work
· Growing in the knowledge of God
· Being strengthened by his glorious might
Those all begin with a verb, a word used to describe an action, they are actions that we take and which the Holy Spirit works through us.
That first one is a call to live holy lives.
It is practical holiness, it is a personal holiness as well as a social holiness.
We as Christians are called to be witnesses to Jesus.
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