Finding Our Native Tongue Series

FINDING OUR NATIVE TONGUE

John 8:42-44

Friends, did you know that there are 6000 languages in the world

One is said to disappear every fortnight—2 weeks.

200 years ago the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt stumbled upon a village in what is now Venezuela. While there he heard a parrot speaking and asked the villagers what it was saying. No one knew since the parrot spoke the last words in the Atures language.

Two elderly brothers who live in a coastal village in Scotland are the only two people left who can speak a particular dialect of the Scots language. Their people made their living fishing on the water and now that the fishing industry has disappeared nobody has learned the dialect in two generations.

What they discovered is that

When a way of life begins to disappear

So do the words and the language that describe that life.

Has the Christian way of life so disappeared in American that

We have lost the language to describe and share it????

Has the media and modern secular society, and the churches move toward inclusive language, threatened our Christian tongue in the Wesleyan tradition with extinction?

Jesus said to them, "If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. I have not come on my own; but he sent me. 43Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. John 8:42-43

I. THE LOST LANGUAGE OF GOD

Why is my language not clear to you?

First of all Jesus said:

Because you are unable to hear what I say.

When the cup is full you can’t fill it with something new.

Not until you empty what is in the cup, only than can you than fill it.

Our ears are full of the words of our world.

We have allowed our society to fill our ears

To the point that we are ashamed of our God

And of our Biblical faith

So that we no longer share it or live it in public.

When is the last time you heard in your office or on the street of Aberdeen,

Any talk about Jesus or your Biblical faith,

Or any talk about sin in our society?

When is the last time you heard sin called sin even in some of our churches?

If there is one good thing that can come out of the rise of Islam popularity,

It is demand to be permitted to pray 5 times a day.

Muslims are demanding time and space in the office, work place, and schools.

So they can kneel, face the east, and pray to ALLA.

SLIDE They don’t care who see them or knows.

Like Daniel who prayed at an open widow facing the heavens.

Boldly in the face of the king’s decree to worship only His God.

Have we lost the language and the courage to face the lions of our day?

Jesus asks: Why is my language unclear to you?

Why was it that when President Reagan talked about his faith in God the nation respected him but when President Bush said that the most important man in history that changed his life was Jesus Christ, it brought criticism on him.

Is it because the world wants to lose the tongue of the Christian vocabulary.

We want to delete the Name of Jesus in our conversation except

In the verbiage of swearing and cursing.

The world is changing friends, you know it and I know it.

Christian are at war with the world.

The pressure is similar to what my grandparents felt in WWI and WWII.

That they quite speaking the German language.

Lest they thought to be in sympathy or allied to the German enemy.

Has Christianity become so unpopular that we are afraid to speak the language of God

Lest we be ridiculed and ostracized?

Jesus ask: Why do you not understand my language?

Not ONLY have we lost the language.

We have replaced it with a new language.

II. THE REPLACED LANGUAGE OF TODAY SOCIETY.

43Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. 44You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. John 8:44

We no longer speak the truth.

Because we have sold out to another family.

Whose father is political correctness,

The father of secularization

Who has removed God from Education,

the media, the Arts, science, and Government.

And now is trying to remove God from the church.

Nicholas Van Hoffman

We have clouded our God language so much.

That we don’t know what God is saying today.

We have developed a religious mush language.

This religious mush appears to millionaires and movie stars.