Because of my father’s friendship with Billy Graham, I got to meet and spend time with Mr. Graham on several occasions. One of those times was at Anaheim Stadium where Mr. Graham spoke in to over 80,000 people one night in 1985.
I was astonished to see the elaborate preparations that were made for his arrival. Mr. Graham had a police escort. There was an ambulance at the ready just in case an attempt was made on his life. The route that Mr. Graham took through the stadium was planned out, his every move accompanied by an entourage.
Now, I invite you to transfer your mind back 2000 years. We are in the hot and dusty desert of Israel and the way is being prepared for another preacher, but not just any preacher, for this is the preacher who will be the Messiah, the King.
How should the people get ready? There is not even a road. So, 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 Jews for hundreds of years, from the time that Isaiah 40 was first written, until the coming of John the Baptist. This was part of the great message of hope, forgiveness, and healing for a 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 is coming! Get ready for God’s kingdom!
The problem is that the people are not ready. Just as many of us are not ready today.
I wonder: how would you feel if you knew that Jesus was coming back today? How would you prepare? How can we prepare the way for Jesus the King to come afresh into our lives and how can we prepare the way for Jesus to come again to the earth?
I believe that 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 came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea and saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is he who was spoken of through the prophet Isaiah:
“A voice of one calling in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.’”
John’s clothes were made of camel’s hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey. People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan. 6 Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.
But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
“I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”
I invite you to think about what you would do if you knew an earthly monarch was going to visit your house today. I bet you would head home to clean up before this service was even over! And that suggests, in a small way, what we need to do to prepare for the coming of King Jesus.
First, John the Baptist tells us we need to repent for the kingdom of heaven is near. Repentance is a change of mind that results in a change in direction.
Allow me to illustrate repentance this way… Wabush is a town in a remote portion of Labrador, Canada, a town that was completely isolated for some time. But a road was eventually cut through the wilderness to reach the town. 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 be only one way they could leave… by turning around!
The Bible teaches that each of us, by birth and by choice, arrives in a town called Sin. As in Wabush, there is only one way out, and it is a road built by God. God sent his Son into this world to build a road out of sin city for us.
And how did God’s Son do that? C. S. Lewis once described it this way…
This process of surrender—this movement full speed astern—is what Christians call repentance. Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent, but only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person—and he would not need it…
… unfortunately, we now need God’s help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all—to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God’s nature corresponds to this process at all. So that the one road for which we now need God’s leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not. But supposing God became a man—suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person—then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God’s dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God’s dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.[1]
This is what Jesus accomplished for us, and it is the work he can still do in us: repentance, a complete about-face, without which there is no way out of sin city.
John the Baptist not only preached repentance he 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 many religious leaders have done, John chose to live out in the desert. He wore simple clothing, ate simple food, and led a simple lifestyle. He lived out a visual protest—against self-indulgence.
John preached and lived out his life of repentance in the presence of many different types of people: Pharisees, Sadducees, and even irreligious people. The Pharisees and the Sadducees to whom John preached belonged to two different sects within Judaism. The Pharisees were the religious progressives of the day. They had come to believe in the resurrection of the body, whereas the Sadducees were more conservative; they held to the old view of Sheol, a place of darkness and shadows after death. The Pharisees accepted all of what we call the Old Testament, and they took seriously the obligation to apply the Scriptures to everyday life. However, in their attempts to apply the Scriptures to everyday life they tended to codify and force their rules upon others. John the Baptist and Jesus criticized the Pharisees for being legalistic and hypocritical. The Pharisees added to God’s law, and they expected perfect obedience from other people in areas where they could not even keep up themselves.
What did the Pharisees need to repent of? Pride was one of their main problems, pride in their own, supposed, religious purity. They needed to get pride out of the way to make way for the coming of the king.
The Sadducees, on the other hand, were in control of the Temple; they had a great deal of political clout. John criticized them for using religion to advance their own political position.
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 too are often guilty of religious pride. We are often tempted to think that being born into a Christian home and growing up in the church is enough to save us. But salvation does not come that easily.
Salvation requires a total change from the inside out. Religious or not, we all need change. As 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.
You might wonder: but why should we repent? Why should we turn away from our sinful and selfish ways when those ways can seemingly be so “fun” sometimes? John says we should do it because the kingdom of heaven is near.
The kingdom of heaven was near in John’s time because Jesus was physically near. It is near to us today because Jesus can reign in our hearts and lives by his Spirit, here and now. As it says in 1 Peter 3:15, “in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord.” Whenever we do that, whenever we allow Jesus to rule in our hearts, his kingdom is near to us.
Furthermore, the kingdom of heaven is near because Jesus is coming back, just as he promised. As Eric Henderson likes to say: “Jesus is on the way!” In 2 Peter 3, beginning with verse 3, we read…
Above all, you must understand that in the last days scoffers will come, scoffing and following their own evil desires. They will say, “Where is this ‘coming’ he promised? Ever since our ancestors died, everything goes on as it has since the beginning of creation.” …
But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day. The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.
Jesus is indeed on the way. And we can prepare for his coming by our repentance.
But there is a second thing that John tells us we also need to do to prepare the way for King Jesus. It is something that goes along with repentance. We 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.
The Greek word for confession means “to say the same thing”. In other words, to confess means to agree with God when he says that we have fallen short of his glory. (Romans 3:23)
When King Frederick II, the 18th century king of Prussia, was visiting a prison in Berlin, the inmates protested their innocence. All except one. That one sat quietly in the corner while all the rest clamored to be heard by the king. Seeing the one inmate sitting alone, the king asked him what he was in prison for.
“Armed robbery, Your Majesty.”
The king asked, “Were you guilty?”
“Yes sir,” the man replied. “I 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.”
Proverbs 28:13 says, “He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy.”
Psalm 32:5 says, “Then I acknowledged my sin to you and did not cover up my iniquity. I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord’—and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”
1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.”
The miracle of God’s love is that he knows what a mess we are, and he loves us anyway. That means we can confess any sin to God knowing that his love for us will not diminish because he has already given us his Son.
Finally, there is one more thing John says we can do to prepare the way for King Jesus. We can receive the Holy Spirit. John the Baptist promised that Jesus would baptize us, he would wash us, with the Holy Spirit.
Without the Holy Spirit, repentance and confession are not possible. In fact, they are gifts of the Spirit. 2 Timothy 2:25 says that it is God who grants repentance and the acknowledgment of the truth. And Paul says in Titus 3:4-5,
But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.
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 the glove. A glove cannot do anything by itself, but when my hand is in it, the glove can do many things. It is not the glove really, but my hand in the glove that acts. Just so, it is the Holy Spirit in us who is the hand making us (the glove) to be all that the Father created and 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.”
It is important to note that the glove cannot manipulate the hand. Just so, we cannot manipulate the Holy Spirit.
Nathaniel Hawthorne once described happiness as being like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always just beyond our grasp, but which, if we sit down quietly, may alight upon us. It is like that with the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit cannot be seized but only received.
Will you receive him today?
Let’s pray…
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