This is Luke. This is Luke. Third chapter, verses one through six. It was now the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius, the Roman emperor.
Pontius Pilate was governor over Judea. Herod Antipas was ruler over Galilee. His brother Philip was ruler over Eteria and Trachinitis. Lysanius was ruler over Abilene.
Anis and Caiaphas were the high priests. At this time, a message from God came to John, son of Zechariah, who was living in the wilderness. Then John went from place to place on both sides of the Jordan River, preaching that people should be baptized to show that they had repented of their sins and turned to God to be forgiven. Isaiah had spoken of John when he said, he has a voice shouting in the wilderness.
Prepare the way for the Lord's coming. Clear the road for him. The valleys will be filled and the mountains and hills may level. The curves will be straightened and the rough places made smooth.
And then all people will see the salvation sent from God. This word is true and can't be trusted. So Advent seems to be like the official, weird, mysterious characters in the Bible season. And we talked about Simeon last week, super holy.
I mean, very righteous, but also this random stranger who runs up and grabs babies in the temple. Kind of weird. We have the whole idea of the wise men. We're not really talking about the wise men that much, but the wise men, they're kind of strange.
They're these weird Middle Eastern magicians that show up, it's a lot more like the Syrians and 300 than kids in the church Christmas play. And they're also well known for showing up in overthrowing governments. Like you have them, they're kind of weird too. And then we have John the Baptist.
And he's another weird one. You've got this camel, we think about John the Baptist. You have like a camel skin loin cloth. He eats bugs and he's never cut his hair in his entire life.
That's normal, right? But John the Baptist is this in-between character. He's this bridge between the New Testament and the Old Testament. He's the last of the Old Testament prophets and he's ushering in the newness of Jesus.
And sometimes during these seasons of disruption and change, we really need the wild and the weird. And I hope that we don't ever get into a situation that requires us listening to a wild man who even the desert wearing loin cloths. But that was sure got our attention. It got people's attention back then as well.
And today we're looking at John the Baptist and we're fast forwarding a couple of decades into when he's announcing to Jesus this year, he's telling people to prepare. And we're supposed to be a people prepared. In fact, that's what, you know, advent means come. What does it mean for us to look and to see and expect Jesus to come?
So when we read our past this morning, Marj and I were talking to Marj, she said, Chad, there's a lot of weird, funny names here. We also, they also sound like medications. Like I'm gonna go to, what was it? I'm gonna go to my tyrannicus, I just suggested.
You know, there's, you know, there's, there's something's going on here. And what Luke is doing is he's jumping off this adult story of Jesus and he's naming these religious in these civic leaders. There are people of power and they're all people who are jockeying for this power. Mount like one of my nerdy fascinations the last few months has been trying to understand the relationship between like the Roman rulers and the Jewish high priests and all that.
It's like a straight game of thrones for like 100 years. Like heads being chopped off, like all sorts of weird stuff. It's not appropriate to talk about in church on Sunday morning with little ears around us. But these are people that are trying to get power and are willing to do whatever it takes to get power.
And Nia, so we talked about him earlier, he'd been the high priest like years before. He'd only be high priest for two years. And he'd been at his five sons had been it. And then Kiafas, his son-in-law was it.
What people talked about was the fact that he, the religious leader, and it's kind of like, I mean, Rome trusted him in many ways to be a ruler there that all of his sons and now his son-in-law were just his puppets. And we see this big, huge interchange of power. And John the Baptist shows up. And what he thinks he is saying in the way that he is dressing just echoes at the prophet Elijah who lived hundreds of years before this.
And Elijah was well known for just taunting those people who are in power. And so when John shows up, this wild man in the desert, he's coming at a time where people are looking for true power. And he's calling out those folks who really weren't in charge. And he's calling out these people who really didn't speak for God.
But what I've been thinking about the last week is because John the Baptist, when he's talking about during Advent, is I've been thinking about his internal life. And we never really think about what was John the Baptist. Like, I want to know more about him. And there's not that much that they tell about him.
But that Hebrew word for prophet, it means to bubble over. And it suggests a person that has spent so much time with the presence of God and in the presence of God that they exude the goodness and the truth of all that God is. We're familiar with the story of how John was born. That's kind of part of our classic Christmas Bible passages that we read, two older parents, both from the tribe of Levi, from Priestly lines.
They were well beyond the age of childbearing. And they were barren. His father, Zechariah, went to serve at the temple during his twice a year rotation there. And while he's offering incense on the altar, this is the kind of thing that a priest will only do once in their entire life.
While he's offering this incense on the altar, he has an angelic visitation and says, your wife will become pregnant and you will have a son. His name is to be John. He used to be a Nazarite, so he won't cut his hair. He doesn't touch grapes or wine, and he doesn't touch dead things.
And he will be for his entire life dedicated to God. Zechariah then becomes mute until his son is born, his wife Elizabeth is just as surprised as he is. You got to think about his childhood, raised by an elderly priest who took this vision from God really seriously. You got to think about what's going on in the adolescent mind of God.
He's visibly different. You know, never cutting his hair, not doing things, all this kind of stuff. Like taking a vow that many people would do for a season of time and instead making this about his entire life. I mean, he stuck out from those other kids he was around.
If you think about the death of his parents, since they're decades older than those of his friends, what does it mean for him? Probably as a young boy to see his parents dying. When we think about the internal life that John had with God about how every decision it was made for him until he could make decisions and the decisions he made in adolescence and early adulthood, they all led him to this place in this ministry. We don't think about John like that.
Then we read these words. He's quoting heavily from Isaiah chapter 40. Prepare the way of the Lord. You know, when we think about his internal life, it helps us begin to think about the mechanics of this message.
What I want us to think about this morning is really just to look at one word that's crucial, not just to what John is talking about here, but it was also part of Jesus' earliest message, the early preaching of Jesus. John came to talk about a baptism of repentance. And friends, we don't talk about repentance that much at all, do we? It was just me saying that word might seem a little alienating, okay, where are we going with this now?
Like is this about to make us like not feel good about ourselves? Like what do we do with repentance from what I told you all? We need to sometimes get into the mechanics of what we believe. Repentance is the same word where we get our word metamorphosis from, it's about transition, it's about change.
It indicates a reversal. Quite literally repentance means to turn. It implies recognition. You know, one of the best examples to talk about the process of repentance is in Psalm 38.
And it shows a pattern of repentance that goes through our own emotional understandings of it and our intellectual understanding. It talks about repentance in the physical side of it about how our body reacts, but how, what are the things we go through when we are in processes of repentance? What does it mean for us to call out for God, to rescue us and to save us? And the home sheet this week really is just walking through Psalm 38 and us beginning to understand repentance.
So Frederick Meyer, he wrote a fantastic biography of John the Baptist over 150 years ago. I read it last week and it's just beautiful, but he talks about this way. He says, there must be a renunciation of sin, the definite turning to God, the bringing forth of fruit for an amended life. And no other way could the people be prepared for the coming of the Lord.
We see that there must be a renunciation of sin. That's the thing we normally think about when we think about repentance. But he goes beyond that, there's the turning to God. And the peace that really just stuck out to me so much is the bringing forth of fruit for an amended life.
That our life has changed and that we now have different things as the outcome of that change in our life. And John makes that same call to us for repentance is a personal thing. A lot of times you hear me talk about how we need to begin stepping away from an individual understanding of our faith, but when we come to a conversation about repentance, we really do have to personify that. We have to make that thing ours.
We have to think about that individually. We have to push heavier and heavier into our own soul and our own attitude. Where the places in our life, where we might not have personified this call of John, this call of Jesus. First a repent for the kingdom of heaven is coming.
And I thought like this, going to space camp when you're a kid doesn't mean you're an astronaut. And just knowing about Jesus doesn't necessarily mean that we know him. And the edge of this, edge of any experience we have with Jesus happens when we take on that personal action of repentance. So John, he's quoting Isaiah 40 a lot in the wilderness, prepare the way for the Lord.
When we are in our own spaces of in between, when we're in the spaces of our own questioning, of our own doubts, of our own fears, the best direction for us to take is to prepare for a greater move of God. And he's going to cleanse us how he's going to provide for us, how he's going to offer us a better and a different outlook. He imbalances prayer takes hold of the promise and conducts it to its marvelous ends. It removes the obstacles and makes a highway for the promise to its glorious fulfillment.
We have to begin this work in prayer. You've heard me talk before about why it's important to understand the why and the how of what we believe. Many times we hear this call for repentance. We think that us to ask for forgiveness, we carry this idea of a confession booth that we might have seen in a movie somewhere.
We think that's what repentance looks like. We think that's the end of it. But what we find in this story, this quick call of John is that, biblically, repentance is just a beginning path towards a greater alignment with God, towards the clarity, towards the power of his presence. And John is simply saying, hey, I need you to prepare to meet with God.
And all throughout Isaiah there, these passages we're talking about clearing the road in the highways, an older register call at the highway of holiness. We think about that. What are the things that are standing in front of us? How many times have you been walking in darkness or you're trying to get from one part to the house or another part at night that turning lights on?
You trip over things. What a time when we realize something is there, we know we either need to move it or adjust it ourselves. We begin pursuing what repentance looks like. What this means is us coming to a point and saying, hey, I've got this major roadblock in my life.
And I know that I have the ability to run into it for this thing to continue on stopping me. Repentance means us taking care of the big rocks first. What does it mean for us to ask God to say, hey, I don't have the leverage to move this thing out of my way. And I know it's stopping me from seeing you.
For us to come in and to ask God to help to remove that obstacle from in front of us. Only problem with that is then you have a big hole where you used to have a rock. And we find that path of prayer, that path of repentance to yielding through personal acknowledgement, all those things, what God then does is he begins to break up that thing that used to stop us. And we find that what our sanctification, what our holiness means is all of the rubble that God has slowly broken up now begins to cover that hole.
We always know there's a patch right there. We carry the story of that patch. We carry the healing that patch brings. We carry the transformation.
But that is patched in front of us and we're able to move forward and move through that. And that's all repentance is. It's us preparing to meet with God. And if we just see repentance as just one time thing, it might seem a little frightful.
But instead, what John challenges us to do is to see repentance as this willful belief that exists inside of our head where we've yielded to God. We understand our true place. That's smoothing over and over and over and over that he does. We do this in prayer.
We do it in quietness and honesty before God. Hans von Balthasar says this, prayers a conversation in which God's word has the indicative and we for the moment are nothing but listeners. What does it mean for us to come in to say what I want to prepare the way to see you here right now? What does it mean for us to have the spiritual honesty to say I may see these things standing in front of me, they're stopping me, but for also us to come to God and say, hey, I don't know what's standing between me and you.
But I'm going to enter into a place where I'm asking you to reveal those things and as you reveal them for you to give me the strength to pull them up and for you to break them up. I think John was able to say all of these things that he said, just that simple message because he knows that this life is about those silent moments with God. Inside of those silent moments inside of the solitude of life that we meet with God and by meeting with God in this way, we become strong. Friends, as we wait for Jesus this season, let us consider the power of waiting with repentance.
Let's pray. God, as we sang earlier, oh, it is Savior. And we've all got roads. As John said, prepare the road.
All of us have different curves, different hills, different mountains, different valleys, God. But in the fullness of who you are, you came to our world and you have the ability to get honest and real with us. God, and it's about us being willing to be honest and real with you as well, God, to enter into that transformative journey with you. God, let us see the reality of repentance.
God, I've entered into that journey with you. God, this is not about right and wrong. It's not about bad. It's not about good.
Instead, this is about honesty. Lord, in the hopeful belief that you are making us into someone who is stronger, who is healthier, than what we can do on our own, Lord. Lord, this is just the same path your son, Jesus, took its submission and its exaltation. God, all we are asked to do is enter into the journey of Jesus.
So Lord, meet with us. God, we stand and we take the power to do that first thing that we need to do to invite this process for wherever we are right now. Come, Lord Jesus, come, Lord, let us prepare the way for that moment. This shouldn't break.
Stand and continue singing together.