Sermon Tone Analysis
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What restaurant has the best fries?
What does it mean for God to be Sovereign?
This is a tough question, I know that it is.
A big reason that we have done this series is so that we can establish who God is, completely different from us, and from the point of creation until now, where we live, He has never changed.
The unfortunate part about the Church as a whole is that they deem certain doctrines and truths as too difficult for people to worry about.
You guys can handle it.
I know you can.
Not because you’re smart, or wise, but because it is truth; and as Jesus prayed in John 17 last week, Gods Word is truth and we are to be sanctified, set apart, in truth.
So I, as your pastor who wants to feed the sheep God has provided me with food fit for a sheep, will speak the truth in love.
I do want to make my tone clear.
I have been really hard on you guys, probably harder on you guys than any youth pastor before me.
Am I wrong in assuming that?
But I do it because I love you guys, I want you to grow.
I want you to know God and love Him for who He is.
Where we live
And at what point in history do we live right now?
We live at the point in History between Christ’s death and His return.
I mean of course in this time a lot of things have happened and a lot of time has passed, but to simply put it, we are at a place between Christ’s perfect life and death and resurrection, and His victorious return.
And God, of course is the same then as He is now.
Last week, we read through the very lengthy and eye opening High Priestly prayer of Jesus.
Hopefully you found it as impactful and assuring as I did.
If you weren’t here it was recorded on our app so be sure to give it a watch.
Today, we are going to examine the prayer of the Disciples in Acts 4. God willing we will all be challenged and encouraged to look deeper into it.
The Context
This is a very quick context as to what is happening.
Basically, the persecution of the early church is beginning, this is something that we need to understand when going into this prayer.
The messiah has died, rose again, and ascended into heaven, and the church is in the midst of persecution.
John and Peter, 2 of Jesus’ disciples get put in custody under the priests and elders for sharing the Gospel and healing people, we step into where they are being released.
So we are now back with the other disciples and John and Peter are informing them as to what the Priests had said about their sharing the Gospel and healing a man, and this is what had happened
So John and Peter have informed the disciples of this, and now we enter into the prayer.
Here is where we see Adoration, the apostles lifting a praise to the God who is.
The Sovereign Lord, creator of everything seen and unseen.
Here what we see is affirmation of the Holy Spirit’s work in the old testament.
People think that the Holy Spirit just did not do anything in the old testament and that’s not true.
We see the Holy Spirit poured out at Pentecost to establish the early church, but He was certainly active in the Old Testament doing things such as inspiring those who wrote the scriptures.
Here we see one, this is a quote from Psalm 2 written by David.
David is posing the question, Why?
In this series we have been answering the question How?
But here David poses the question, Why?
Why did the gentiles rage?
Why did the peoples plot in vain?
Why did the kings of the earth set themselves and the rulers who were gathered together against the Lord and the Lord’s Anointed?
Why did this happen?
First of all it’d be great if we had context as to what this is talking about.
Oh wait we do!
Next verse:
So The Disciples have just shown how the scriptures have been fulfilled in this instance with all the players described here.
But we still have the question.. Why?
Why did they do this?
I want us to try to predict what the potential answer they are going to say here is.
Don’t look it up.
Why was everyone gathered in opposition to Jesus?
Why did the gentiles, the Jews, Pontious Pilate, Harod, gather here?
Why did all of the major players players come?
In prayer they say.
Before we continue on with this prayer, I want to ask some questions.
Who knew this verse was in scripture?
Who knew this word was in scripture?
People like to set up this debate
Predestination vs. Free Will
That should never be a debate that you get into.
Why? It’s clear from the testament of Scripture that Predestination is a thing.
We see it right here.
The real question is this,
In what sense does God Predestine?
There are a lot of views on this.
Many of them not Biblical in the slightest.
So lets try to quickly establish a Biblical view on predestination before we finish out this prayer.
Firstly, we see revealed here that God has so predestined the event of the crucifixion and everyone who was there to be there and to act accordingly.
Is this the only thing that God has ever predestined?
Lets look elsewhere.
We see here the same thing we saw in our lesson last week.
That the Father, in love, has predestined believers, or in the language of Jesus in John 17, given the believers to Jesus to die for their sins and thus be adopted into the family of God.
So we see this language used in the crucifixion and salvation.
What else? Glad you asked!
Just move a couple verses down in Ephesians,
Woah so we are predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will.
Don’t you ever let anyone tell you God doesn’t work all things according the the counsel of His will.
It literally says right here God works all things according to the counsel of His will.
It does not mean a few things, or some things, It says all things so it means all things.
Don’t read into Scripture what is not there just because you don’t like what it says.
Now, I want to interject that it is important to note that while God is sovereign and brings all things to pass, man still makes choices and will be held accountable for those choices.
Often times God’s sovereignty and human responsibility meet in a singular verse or in a verse right after the other.
Let’s look at an example from Genesis.
Joseph
Does everybody know the story of Joseph?
It is found in the latter half of Genesis but i’ll give you a quick summary.
He was one of the sons of Jacob.
He was clearly Jacobs favorite, so much so that Jacob gave Him a coat called the coat of many colors.
Beautiful coat.
One day Joseph had a dream that all of His brothers would bow down before Him.
At hearing this, His brothers were furious.
They hated Joseph and wanted Him dead.
So they had traveled far from home and plotted to kill him, but one of the brothers spoke up and said they should just sell him into slavery.
So they did just that, Joseph was sold into slavery.
The slave traders brought him to Egypt and sold him to Potiphar.
A high up Egyptian.
Joseph served Potiphar well but Potiphar’s wife took a liking to Joseph.
She tried to make advances on Joseph but he fled from the temptation and in doing so Potiphars wife ripped a part of his garment and used it as evidence against Joseph.
So Joseph gets thrown into prison.
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