We are often told of the need to be relevant and accessible in our preaching and teaching. Well, John the Baptist was neither. He lived as a bit of a weirdo, at least in our terms, though less so in his own times. He called the crowds a "brood of vipers", there are not many book on preaching that commend this as an opening gambit for a sermon. Now, this is not to say we should all aim to become the nuttiest preachers we can, nor should we ignore all the advice on making messages understandable and attractive. But we do need to always remember that it is the Holy Spirit who makes us effective, if indeed we are effective.
Next we should note the centrality of repentance to the message. The root of the gospel is the need for us to repent. We talk a lot about it being the love of God, but how is that love shown? It is shown in His forgiving us for our sins, and sending the Holy Spirit to renew our lives, to start the work of making us evermore Christlike. For this to happen we need first to acknowledge our sin, then we need to turn from our sin and turn to Christ, ie we need to repent. And the "deal" on offer is that we will be forgiven and God will work in our lives to make us more and more like Christ, ie according to His agenda, not ours.
In our own lives if we make progress over the next year then we can be sure that there will have be some repentance involved at some point (probably several). The attitude of much of the church to the world and its ways is all too often to say "there, there now, God loves you". This is not a Biblical message, it is not declaring God's love.
Note now that the people responded! The world will not respond to a "nice" wish-washy message. If we preach the truth some will persecute us and some will turn to Christ and be saved.
John then gives direct practical advice on what repentance means. For each one of us there are actions that can take that demonstrate the reality of our repentance. Then in verse 15 we see that the people were expecting a messiah, the events surrounding the birth of John and Jesus were contributory factors in building that expectation. They wondered if John was the messiah. He knew that he was not, and he also knew that repentance was not the end of the matter, but only the beginning. Jesus would baptise with the Holy Spirit and fire.
See that it says that John proclaimed the good news. Repentance is good news! John was also not afraid to declare the truth to the powerful, and this would later cost him his life.
No comments:
Post a Comment