I begin this morning by inviting you to transfer your mind back two thousand years. We are in the hot, dusty desert of Palestine and the way is being prepared for a great preacher, one whom many believe is the Messiah, the King.
How should the people get ready for the Messiah? There isn’t even a road. But here comes a forerunner, shouting to the people in the desert: the king is coming! Make a road for him! Make it good and straight!
This is the message that had echoed among the Jewish people for hundreds of years, from the time that Isaiah 40 was written, until the coming of John the Baptist. This was part of the great message of hope, of forgiveness, of healing for the nation after the horror of exile. The Messiah would come bringing comfort and rescue. That’s what John says is happening now. It’s time to get ready. The king, who is God in person, is coming. Get ready for God’s kingdom! The problem is the people are not ready, just as many of us are not ready today.
How would you feel if you knew that Jesus was coming back today? How would you prepare? How can we prepare the way for King Jesus to come afresh into our lives and into the world? I believe the ministry of John the Baptist gives us some clues. Listen for God’s word to you from Matthew 3:1-12…
In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord,
make his paths straight.’”
Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.
But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance. Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.
“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
How can we prepare the way for the king? Think about what you would do if you knew an earthly monarch was going to visit your house today. I bet you would be off to clean house before this service was even over. And that suggests in a small way the urgency we need to have in preparing for the coming of King Jesus.
John the Baptist tells us about three things we need to do to prepare. First, we need to repent for the kingdom of heaven is near.
What is repentance? It is a change of mind that results in a change in direction.
Wabush, a town in a remote portion of Labrador, Canada, was completely isolated for some time. But then a road was cut through the wilderness to reach it. Wabush now has one road leading into it, and thus, only one road leading out. If someone would travel the unpaved road for six to eight hours to get into Wabush, there would only be one way he or she could leave—by turning around.
The Bible teaches us that by birth and by choice, each of us arrive in a town called Sin. As in Wabush, there is only one way out—a road built by God himself. God sent his Son into this world to build a road out of sin city for us.
Now, John the Baptist not only preached repentance he also modeled in a small way what Jesus would accomplish more completely. John lived a life that was counter cultural; he was going against the flow. Rather than living a life of luxury as some religious leaders did in his day, John the Baptist chose to live out in the desert of Judea. He wore simple clothing, ate simple food, and led a simple lifestyle. He lived a visual protest against self-indulgence.
John preached and lived out his life of repentance in the presence of all different types of people: Pharisees, Sadducees, and even irreligious people. The Pharisees and Sadducees to whom John preached belonged to two different sects within Judaism. John attacked both the Pharisees and the Sadducees for pride in their ancestry. He warned them that being children of Abraham would not be enough to rescue them in the day of the Messiah’s appearance. John told them they would need to produce fruit in their lives in keeping with repentance.
If we are honest with ourselves, we will recognize that we have some of the same problems that the Pharisees and Sadducees had. We are often guilty of pride. We are often tempted to think that being born into a Christian home or attending church all our lives is enough. But if that were true then being born at McDonald’s could make a person into a Big Mac. It just doesn’t work that way. Salvation requires a total change from the inside out. Religious or not, we all need change.
Helmut Thielicke once wrote:
A salty pagan, full of the juices of life, is a hundred times dearer to God, and also far more attractive to men, than a scribe who knows his Bible… in whom none of this results in repentance, action, and above all, death of the self. A terrible curse hangs over the know-it-all who does nothing.
That’s why John preached so radically against the Pharisees and Sadducees.
But why should we repent? Why should we turn away from our sinful, selfish ways when those ways can seemingly be “fun” at times? John says we should do it because the kingdom of heaven is near.
The kingdom of heaven was near in John’s day because Jesus was physically near. It is near today because Jesus can reign as king in our hearts and lives by his Spirit. As the Apostle Peter instructs us in 1 Peter 3:15, “But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord.” Jesus’ kingdom is near whenever we allow him to rule in our hearts, whenever we allow him to have control of our lives.
Furthermore, the kingdom of heaven is near today because, as the New Testament says throughout, Jesus is coming back soon. Many people today wonder about the claims of Christ’s second coming. He hasn’t come back for 2000 years. Is he ever going to come back? How can we say that the return of Jesus is near? Peter gives an answer to this in 2 Peter 3:8-9,
But do not ignore this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like one day. The Lord is not slow about his promise, as some think of slowness, but is patient with you, not wanting any to perish, but all to come to repentance.
God doesn’t count time like we count time. Jesus is coming back soon according to God’s schedule. He could come back today.
Meanwhile, he is giving us time to turn our lives over to him and get ready, because when he comes back, he is going to judge the living and the dead.
Now, repentance is not the only thing that John tells us we need to do. We also need to confess our sins. We read that the people who came out to hear John’s preaching confessed their sins and were baptized in the Jordan river as a sign of their repentance and confession.
To “confess” means “to say the same word”, to agree with God that we have fallen short of his plan for our lives.
When King Frederick II, an eighteenth-century king of Prussia, was visiting a prison in Berlin, the inmates tried to prove to him how they had been unjustly imprisoned. All except one.
That one sat quietly in the corner, while all the rest protested their innocence. Seeing him sitting there oblivious to the commotion, the king asked him what he was there for.
“Armed robbery, your Honor.”
The king asked, “Were you guilty?”
“Yes sir,” he answered. “I entirely deserve my punishment.”
The king then gave an order to the guard: “Release this guilty man. I don’t want him corrupting all these innocent people.”
Confession of sin means that we agree with God that we are guilty of breaking his law just as the robber admitted his guilt. Furthermore, confession and repentance are essential to finding God’s mercy and forgiveness, just as that robber found forgiveness from the king.
Proverbs 28:13 says, “No one who conceals transgressions will prosper, but one who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.”
The amazing thing is that our holy God, out of love for us sinners, took our sin upon himself and vanquished its power and penalty through the cross. That is the only reason why we can receive forgiveness from him when we repent and confess.
Now there is one more thing John says we can do to prepare the way for King Jesus in our lives. That is to receive the Holy Spirit. John says that Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire.
Without the Holy Spirit, repentance and confession are not possible. They are gifts of the Spirit. (2 Timothy 2:25; Titus 3:4-5) Only God can get rid of sin. He does not expect us to clean up our act before we come to him. Cleaning up our act by the power of the Holy Spirit is a description of what coming to him looks like.
J. B. Phillips once wrote, “Every time we say, ‘I believe in the Holy Spirit,’ we mean that we believe that there is a living God able and willing to enter human personality and change it.”
The Holy Spirit wants to come into our hearts and act like a hand in a glove. Our lives are like an empty glove. A glove cannot do anything by itself, but when my hand is in it, it can do many things. It is not the glove, but my hand in the glove that acts. It is the Holy Spirit in us who is the hand who makes us what God the Father created us to be, and Jesus the Son redeemed us to be. As Corrie ten Boom used to say, “We have to make room for the hand so that every finger is filled.”
The Spirit of God is not Someone who we, as mere gloves, can manipulate.
Nathaniel Hawthorne once described happiness as a butterfly, which, when pursued, is always just beyond our grasp, but which, if we sit down quietly, may alight upon us. And it’s like that with the Spirit of God. He cannot be seized. Rather, he must be received.
There is a beloved Christmas carol that embodies the message of repentance, confession, and reception of the Holy Spirit that John the Baptist talks about in Matthew 3:1-12. Do these words sound familiar?
Hark! the herald angels sing,
“Glory to the newborn King;
Peace on earth, and mercy mild—
God and sinners reconciled!”
God and sinners are reconciled precisely through repentance, confession, and reception of the Holy Spirit.
And then later in the same carol, there is a quatrain seldom sung…
Come, Desire of nations, come!
Fix in us Thy humble home:
O to all Thyself impart,
Formed in each believing heart!
It is precisely through our receiving of the Holy Spirit that God imparts himself to us and forms himself in our believing hearts.
There is a fascinating story behind the composition of “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” …
The words were composed by Charles Wesley. Wesley lived in the 1700s. He was the youngest of 18 children. God used Charles and his brother John to launch the Methodist movement. During his lifetime, Wesley wrote over 3000 hymns.
In 1737, during his daily quiet time, Charles was working on a new Christmas composition. When he jotted down the line, “Hark! how all the welkin rings, glory to the King of Kings,” the new song quickly fell together. Welkin, a word foreign to most today, literally means the “vault of heaven makes a long noise.” Thus, when heaven sends forth a loud pronouncement, the entire power of the King is revealed. Set to one of the writer’s own unique melodies, “Hark! How All the Welkin Rings” premiered in Wesley’s own church and quickly gained favor with other congregations following the new Methodist movement. Naturally, the writer was pleased with the acceptance of his work. However, when his old college friend, George Whitefield, finally published the song, Wesley was not entirely pleased.
Whitefield, a former bartender turned Calvinist preacher, was often at theological odds with Wesley. True to form, when Whitefield published Wesley’s Christmas song, he changed the words without consulting the writer. When Wesley read the new first line, “Hark! the herald angels sing,” he was a tad bothered. Nowhere in the Bible did angels sing about the birth of Christ. Yet because of Whitefield’s change in one line, today most people believe that Luke 2:13 refers to singing angels rather than speaking ones. As long as he lived, Wesley never sang Whitefield’s rework of his song.
Fast forward over 100 years to 1855. In that year, a man by the name of William Cummings combined Felix Mendelssohn’s melodic tribute to Johannes Gutenberg with the Whitefield rewrite, “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.” The end result was a dramatic change unimagined by either composer. Cummings’ arrangement of “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” was first printed in a Methodist hymnal in 1857. Over the next few years, it was adopted by other denominations and publishers. Within a decade, the new “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” was one of the most recognized carols in the world.
But think of it! The road to acceptance and fame for this Christmas carol began when a misquoted verse of Scripture (by Whitefield) was combined (by Cummings) with a melody (written by Mendelssohn) to honor the man who first produced the Bible on a printing press (Gutenberg). Although neither Wesley nor Mendelssohn would probably have approved of this combination of lyric and melody, it now seems appropriate that the words of a man like Wesley, who lived to win the world to Christ, should be tied to a musical tribute written for a man who invented a method of mass-producing the Bible for all to read.[1]
I think it goes to show that when we surrender our lives and our work to God through repentance, confession, and reception of the Holy Spirit, things begin to happen that extend beyond our wildest dreams. Our job is simply to remain open to the creative things that God will do through us that may not be what we planned at all.
[1] Collins, Ace. Stories Behind the Best-Loved Songs of Christmas (p. 75). Zondervan. Kindle Edition.
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