A People Prepared - Luke 1:5-25 (12.07.2025)

In the days of Herod, king of Judea, there was a priest named Zechariah of the

division of Abijah, and he had a wife from the daughters of Aaron,

and her name was Elizabeth.

They were both righteous in the sight of God, walking blamelessly in all the

commandments and requirements of the Lord.

But they had no child because Elizabeth was barren, and they were both advanced in years.

Now it happened that while he was performing his priestly service before God

in the appointed order of his division, according to the custom of the priestly

office, he was chosen by lot to enter the temple of the Lord and burn incense.

And the whole multitude of the people were in prayer outside at the hour of the incense offering.

And an angel of the Lord appeared to him, standing to the right of the altar of incense.

Zechariah was troubled when he saw the angel, and fear gripped him.

But the angel said to him, Do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your petition has

been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will give him the name John.

You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth.

For he will be great in the sight of the Lord, and he will drink no wine or

liquor, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit while yet in his mother's womb.

And he will turn many of the sons of Israel back to the Lord their God.

It is he who will go as a forerunner before him in the spirit and power of Elijah

to turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children and the disobedient to

the attitude of the righteous, so as to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

Zechariah said to the angel, How will I know this for certain?

For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.

The angel answered and said to him, I am Gabriel, who stands in the presence

of God, and I have been sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news.

And behold, you shall be silent and unable to speak until the day when these

things take place, because you

did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their proper time.

The people were waiting for Zechariah and were wondering at his delay in the temple.

But when he came out, he was unable to speak to them, and they realized that

he had seen a vision in the temple, and he kept making signs to them and remained mute.

When the days of his priestly service were ended, he went back home.

After these days, Elizabeth, his wife, became pregnant, and she kept herself

in seclusion for five months, saying, This is the way the Lord has dealt with

me in the days when he looked with favor upon me to take away my disgrace among men.

This is the word of the Lord. All right. Good morning.

So if you haven't already, turn in your Bibles to Luke chapter one,

and we'll have the scripture on the screens. If you didn't bring a Bible today, that's okay.

So, over the next three Sundays, we're going to be covering the three angelic

visitations that are in the Christmas story in the Gospel of Luke.

And so, this is the first one.

Gabriel appears to Zechariah in the temple while he's doing his priestly service

and gives him the good news that he and his wife, Elizabeth,

are going to have a son in their old age.

And he's going to be great before the Lord. He's going to be full of the Holy Spirit.

He's going to turn the hearts of people to the Lord their God.

He is going to be the forerunner for Jesus.

And Luke cannot tell the story of Christmas without telling the story of John the Baptist.

He's a very important character. If you want to understand the way that Luke

understands the story of Christmas, it all begins with this guy,

Zachariah, sorry, this guy, John the Baptist.

So we need to understand who this guy is and what he's about.

Jesus says this about John the Baptist in Matthew 11, 11.

He says, truly, I say to you, among those born of women, there has arisen no

one greater than John the Baptist.

No one greater than John the Baptist. That means that people that we read about

in the Old Testament, like Abraham, Moses, Elijah, the great prophet,

or King David, that no one that's been born has been greater than this man, John the Baptist.

And no one else's birth is recorded with such detail other than Jesus's, of course.

And so John the Baptist is quite an important character.

And I don't know if you've ever asked yourself this question as you've read

the story of Christmas in Luke, but like, why did we need John the Baptist?

Why did people, why did Israel need John the Baptist?

I mean, Jesus was coming after all, right? So what was his purpose?

I mean, why couldn't God have just done it without him?

And I guess one way of saying it would be that he could have,

but he chose not to. Why did he choose not to?

Why was John the Baptist such an important part of this whole story?

So that's what we're going to consider today. John the Baptist did accomplish

the mission that he was sent to accomplish.

And so here's going to be the outline of our sermon this morning.

The first part of my sermon, I just want you to get to know some key things

about John the Baptist. He is a very inspiring man.

And so I think that learning about him will spur us on in some specific ways

to pursue the Lord more passionately.

The second part of my sermon, I want to give you an understanding of what John's

mission was and how he accomplished it, what he preached.

So we'll look at that in detail.

And then finally, we'll consider how all of this comes to bear on our lives.

We'll see that just as in the days of John the Baptist, we have a vital role

to play in preparing our hearts for the Lord to do a great work in our lives.

Back in 2009, I was a firefighter in Gwinnett County.

And I had gone through the academy and the EMS training and all of that took about 10 months.

And then I started working in the department. And anyways, a few months into

it, I had this realization that even though before I had been a very zealous for the Lord,

that something had happened in my spiritual life and that I'd grown cold and

stale and it wasn't like I had left Christianity.

It wasn't like I had denied the faith or anything like that.

I continued to go to church. I continued reading my Bible even.

But I just had this awakening to the fact that my affections,

my heart had actually grown cold to the Lord.

And part of the process was I read a book called Desiring God by a guy named John Piper.

And the Lord did a work in my heart of repentance,

just recognizing that I had traded a real interactive and vibrant relationship

with God for kind of a cold and stale and mechanical religious thing.

And God did a work of repentance in my life that brought about times and seasons

of refreshing that actually led to God calling me to vocational ministry and

us planting our first church in Vermont.

The point is that when we take the time to comb through our lives and to turn

every part of our lives back to God,

it sets the stage for seasons of a great move of God in our lives.

And this Christmas could be that for you.

This Christmas could just be another Christmas that comes and goes and we buy

the presents and we sing the songs and we go through the motions and 2026 gets

here and nothing is really different in our lives for it.

Or this could be an opportunity.

This Christmas could be a Christmas that changes the rest of your life the way

that my life was changed back in 2009.

That's really the goal of this sermon. My aim is to help us get beyond a cold

and mechanical religion that has no actual impact on the way that we live our lives.

And to see that in order for us to enjoy a real friendship with God,

the way that we were created to, we must do the hard work of repentance.

We must prepare ourselves for a great work of God by doing the very practical,

very ground-level, nitty-gritty work of turning from sin to God.

Yes, so let's pray together. Father in heaven, we do want that.

As we dig into your word this morning, I do pray for each one of us.

Surely there's not one of us in this room that has no need of repentance.

We all do, Lord.

Would you help us to see it? Would you help us to see the specific things in

our lives that stand in the way of you doing a great work?

And would you help us by your Holy Spirit? Would you help me as I preach?

And would you attend your word with power? In Jesus' name, amen.

So first part of the sermon, who was John the Baptist? First of all,

John the Baptist was a prophecy fulfilled.

So this is the way that God works. He declares that he's gonna do things in

advance and then he does them.

That's the way that he's worked all through scripture leading up to this point

in the gospels is that he has declared what he's going to do and then he fulfills his promise.

Well, John the Baptist is no different.

The very last book of the Old Testament before we get to the Gospels,

before we get to the New Testament is book of Malachi.

And twice, God promises that this guy is coming.

Malachi 3.1, he says, Behold, I send my messenger and he will prepare the way before me.

The Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple and the messenger of

the covenant in whom you delight.

Behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts. And then chapter four of Malachi, verse five and six.

Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the Lord comes.

And he will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children

to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land with a decree of utter destruction.

So this is what was promised. And 400 years have gone by.

And now this angel shows up while Zechariah is doing his priestly stuff.

And did you catch what he says? He's gonna go before him in the spirit and power

of Elijah. This is verse 17 in Luke 1.

In the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children,

and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just and to make ready for the Lord of people prepared.

This is what the Lord promised he would do 400 years before.

He's also already promised that he would do it in Isaiah.

We read for our call to worship this morning, Isaiah 40, 600 or 700 years before this.

So first, we need to know John the Baptist is a prophecy fulfilled,

an important prophecy that had to be fulfilled before the Messiah would come.

Secondly, John the Baptist was an answer to prayer. Look at Luke 1.13.

But the angel said to him, do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has

been heard and your wife Elizabeth will bear you son. Okay, your prayer has been heard.

I want to be really clear about this.

I think that this was, I mean, those of you who have prayed for kids,

you know this. This is a prayer that they probably prayed passionately for a long time.

She has still had no children and they're advanced in age, it says.

So they probably prayed for this for a long time.

But I believe this text indicates that they had stopped praying for it. Why?

Because he doesn't believe the angel. When the angel tells him, he doesn't believe him.

And we don't tend to continue praying for things that we don't believe the Lord would do.

And so here's the encouraging thing about that.

I believe God may still answer prayers that you've stopped praying.

I don't think our prayers have an expiration date on them.

God who lives and exists outside of time was ready and willing to answer the

prayers that Zechariah and Elizabeth had prayed years and years before.

At this point, it's most likely that medically she shouldn't be able to have a child.

So of course they're not continuing to pray this prayer.

And that's why Zechariah is unbelieving when he hears the news.

So he's an answer to prayer. So it's interesting because I just said that he's

a fulfillment of prophecy.

John the Baptist came because God said he would come. But now I'm saying John

the Baptist came because they'd prayed for him. So which is it? And the answer is both.

The answer is both. God uses the prayers of his people to accomplish the very

things that he wants to accomplish, that he's promised to accomplish.

So what do we do with that?

We pray for things we know God wants to do, the things that we believe he will do.

We pray for those things because he uses our prayers to accomplish his will on the earth.

So he's a prophecy fulfilled. He's an answer to prayer. And thirdly,

he's a man who is set apart.

Look at verse 15. It says, for he will be great before the Lord and he must

not drink wine or strong drink.

He'll be filled with the Holy Spirit even from his mother's womb. Now, what's that about?

We didn't read it, but in the last verse of this chapter, verse 80,

it says that the child grew, became strong in spirit and he was in the wilderness,

until the day of his public appearance to Israel.

First thing that I just want to point out here is that John was different.

He was different. There were things about him that were strange.

The way that he dressed was strange, where he lived was strange.

He was a teetotaler his entire life. He didn't drink any alcohol his entire life.

He was probably what the Bible calls a Nazarite. This likely refers to the Nazarite vow.

The Nazarite vow was a vow of consecration to the Lord.

Samson was a Nazarite. You might know that story. He never cut his hair and

he wasn't ever supposed to drink wine or strong drink. He was consecrated in

that way, set apart for the work that God wanted to do with him.

Well, this is the same with John the Baptist.

And it was intentional. God wanted John to be different. And here's the thing

that's important for us.

We often think that in order to impact our world, we need to be like our world.

That's just not true. In fact, what we see time and time again in scriptures

is that those that are the least like the culture around them,

those that are least like the world are the ones that have the greatest impact on it.

God wants boys and girls, men and women who look nothing like the world,

who don't love what the world loves, who don't laugh at the crude jokes that the world laughs at,

who don't let this culture squeeze them into its mold.

So here's the takeaway.

We need to embrace as the people of God being strange to the world.

There's nothing wrong with being different. It is honorable.

So make it your aim to be set apart for God.

The last thing I wanna see about John the Baptist is that he was a reformer

of families. I think this is fascinating.

Remember the prophecy in Malachi 4, 6, he will turn the hearts of fathers to

their children and the hearts of children to their fathers.

And then Gabriel says a part of that as well.

He will, in verse 17, turn the hearts of the fathers to the children.

What does God send John to do in order to prepare people for the coming of Christ.

He sends him to reform families.

This is hugely important. He serves

as a wake-up call to fathers and as a result, families were changed.

When men drift from their God-given roles in leadership, beginning in the home,

society begins to crumble.

We see that played out in our own day. As go the men, so goes the culture.

So one of the main things that John the Baptist came to do was to awaken fathers

to their God-given responsibility in the home, to start taking the responsibility

of training up their children in the fear and instruction of the Lord.

And those men who listened to John's message turned to their children and they

instructed their children in the fear of the Lord.

And they prepared, not just themselves, but their homes for Jesus when he came.

So this is just a quick overview of who John is. He's a prophecy fulfilled.

He's an answer to prayer.

He's a man who was set apart. He was very, very unique. And he was a reformer of families.

Now I want us to dig into his primary mission. His primary mission,

what was his mission? What did he preach?

John the Baptist was God's man for the most crucial mission that any messenger,

any sent one had ever received in all of the story of scripture.

He was to prepare people for the coming of Jesus.

So it says in verse 17, at the end of verse 17, that he's coming to make ready

for the Lord a people prepared.

Ready for the Lord a people prepared. How did he do that? He did that through a preaching ministry.

So I want to just quickly look over in your Bible's two chapters to Luke 3,

just briefly looking at what he preached.

Verse in chapter three, verse four says, the voice of one crying in the wilderness,

prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.

Remember that is a quote from Isaiah 40, we read at the beginning of the service.

So this is who John the Baptist is.

He is the one who lays the groundwork, who prepares Israel to receive their long awaited Messiah.

And at some point, we don't know how many years John the Baptist has been preaching,

but Jesus begins to come around. He begins to show up.

And John the Baptist starts pointing people to Jesus. Behold,

he says, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.

Jesus came for this reason, to take away the sins of the world.

Our greatest problem, humanity's greatest problem is not political.

It's not economical.

It is sin. Our greatest problem is sin.

And Jesus came to take away our sin. Why? Because our sin separates us from God.

God is holy. He is perfectly holy. He's perfectly just.

He cannot, because of his perfect holiness, overlook sin.

He can't sweep it under the rug and still be a just and holy God.

He must deal with it. And that's why he deals with it himself.

He comes in the form of a man, Jesus Christ, the son of God,

to take away the sins of the world, the lamb of God to take away the sins of

the world, the sacrifice,

the once and for all sacrifice on the cross,

to pay the price for our wickedness, for our rebellion.

So John's message was, get ready. Get ready.

Jesus is coming to deal with sin, to take it away. But you need to be ready

because it's not automatic. You must receive him.

How do you prepare yourself?

What's John tell them? How do

people prepare themselves so that they can receive Jesus and his teaching?

Because certainly God was willing to transform countless lives,

but not every life was transformed. So what must happen?

That's a very important question.

What did they need to do? They needed to prepare themselves through repentance,

or else their hearts would be too hardened to be impacted by Jesus.

What about you? Is your heart hard or soft before God?

I hope it's soft. I hope that you want God to do a great work in your life.

That's a sign of a soft heart.

If not, there's good news. There's something you can do about it.

You can respond to the call this morning.

It's so important that we do what John the Baptist called Israel to do,

that we prepare our hearts for the coming of the Lord.

What happened to those that did not think about it?

Who do we know as we read the gospels that did not heed John's message to prepare

the way of the Lord and to repent, it was the religious leaders.

It was the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the religious leaders. They thought they were good, right?

They thought they were good. And so they didn't repent. And when Jesus came,

guess what? They didn't receive him.

They didn't receive his message. They rejected him and crucified him.

He says in Luke 3, 3, it says that he went into all the region around the Jordan,

proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

Repentance. This is an important concept for us to understand. What is repentance?

Here's my definition for repentance,

turning away from sin and returning with all of our heart to God.

That's what repentance is. It is turning away from sin and returning with all of our heart to God.

Jesus' preaching was summarized in the gospels as this, repent for the kingdom

of heaven is a hand. That's the summary of what Jesus preached.

Everywhere he went, he said, in other words, turn from your sin and return to

God with all of your heart for the kingdom of God is close to you.

It's near to you. It's within grasp if you'll just turn and take it.

Charles Spurgeon, the great preacher, said that repentance was the twin sister

of faith, the twin sister to faith.

There is no salvation where there is no repentance because repentance is a description

of what faith, genuine faith is.

It is the description of genuine faith. I love this definition by David Guzik.

He says this, repentance must never be thought of as something we must do before

we can come back to God, repentance describes the very act of coming to God.

You can't turn towards God without turning from the things he is against.

It's all one in the same. Repentance and faith are inseparable.

Two sides of the same coin. To put your trust in Jesus is not just to pray a magic prayer.

It is actually to turn with your life to God in trust.

Look at the kind of things that John told the crowds in Luke 3,

8. He says, bear fruits in keeping with repentance.

And do not begin to say to yourselves, we have Abraham as our father.

For I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham.

So he's saying, he's teaching Israel, instead of it being a one-time thing,

repentance is a lifelong thing. It's something you keep doing.

You keep repenting.

And he tells them, don't say we have Abraham as our father.

In other words, the religious leaders were counting on their religion to save them.

And John the Baptist is calling people not only to repent of sin,

but to repent of self-righteous religion.

Will keep you from God. Both self-righteous religion that says,

I'm good because I go to church, I give money, I'm a good person,

I'm this, I'm that, that will keep you from God just as much as the most heinous sins you can imagine.

So John the Baptist says, no, that won't do.

We need to repent both of those sins that we know are wrong and dead religion

because it can't save us.

John's preaching cut to the heart. And many who heard his message had their

consciences reawakened as a gift of God.

Look at verse 10 in Luke 3, and the crowds asked him, what then shall we do?

And John gets really specific. I love this.

He doesn't just say very generally, will stop sinning because repentance is

very specific in our lives.

It means dealing with very specific things.

Look at what he says to him in verse 11 through 14. He answered them,

whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none.

Whoever has food is to do likewise.

Tax collectors also came to be baptized and said to him, teacher,

what shall we do? And he said to them, collect no more than you are authorized to do.

And then soldiers also asked him, And we, what shall we do?

And he said to them, do not extort money from anyone by threats or by false

accusation and be content with your wages.

How John accomplished his mission to prepare people for the coming of Jesus.

He helped them to repent of specific sin in their lives.

He exhorted them to generosity, to maintain integrity in their work,

to be content with the salary that they had.

All of these things, interestingly, had to do with money because money has a

tendency to be God in our lives if we're not careful.

What are the results of John's fiery preaching?

Lives were changed in very practical ways. Families were set in order.

Fathers began paying attention to their children and exhorting them to follow the Lord.

Children began obeying their parents again. Disobedient people were turned to the wisdom of the just.

Those who truly repented turned to God, were trusting him wholeheartedly,

so that when his salvation, his solution to their sin appeared in the person

of Jesus, they were ready and they believed in him.

So what do we do with this? How do we respond to this? That's our final point.

Let's flip back over to Luke 1 for that.

First of all, we need to not respond the way that Zechariah responded to this angel.

Look at verses 18 through 20 with me again.

Zechariah said to the angel, how shall I know this?

For I'm an old man and my wife is advanced in years. In other words, this can't happen.

And look at what the angel says to him. He says, I am Gabriel.

I stand in the presence of God. And I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news.

And behold, you will be silent and unable to speak until the day that these

things take place because you did not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time.

Next week, we're going to look at how same angel, Zechariah,

Gabriel comes to Mary and Mary responds very differently.

She responds in faith. We're going to see that next week.

But Zechariah responds in unbelief. He hears a promise from God. God sends him an angel.

We say things like, if God would send me an angel, then I'd believe. No, we wouldn't.

We wouldn't. He's given us the word of God and we hear it and we are not believing.

We would not believe an angel if an angel came.

So the first thing we need to consider as we think about how should we respond,

we ought not respond in unbelief to God's word.

We ought to respond in faith. We ought to respond with open hearts and open

minds and say, God, yes, you can do a new work in my life.

Things don't have to keep going the way that they've always gone.

You can do a fresh work in my life. I believe that because you're God Almighty.

And as we'll see next week, nothing is impossible with God.

That's what we need to do first. We need to believe this Christmas could be different.

We need to respond and prepare ourselves for God to move powerfully in our lives.

Advent, which we call this time of year, it just means coming.

It's waiting for the Lord's coming.

Advent reminds us that the story of the entire Bible,

as Peter Mead says it in his Advent devotional, he says, the solution to the

devastation of sin and death is not a what,

what we must do, but a who.

It is the seed of the woman who would deliver a lethal blow to the head of Satan.

And this point is so crucial if we will get repentance right.

As we seek to turn from sin in our lives, the focus is not on a what, but a who.

It's not on what I do, but on what God has done.

The focus cannot be in my repentance. The focus cannot be all on me.

Yes, I need to look at my life. I do need to see where I need to repent of sin.

But then I quickly need to turn my eyes to Jesus, the one who paid the penalty for my sin.

Because the solution to our sin is a who? It is a person, Jesus Christ,

the son of God, the sacrifice for my sins. That's the solution.

And so repentance is an act of faith.

Let's read that one more time from David Guzik that he says,

Repentance must never be thought of as something we must do before we can come back to God.

Repentance describes the very act of coming to God. you can't turn towards him

without turning from the things he's against.

This is what repentance looks like, and it prepares our hearts and lives for a great work.

It rolls out the red carpet for the Spirit of God to come in power and work in our lives.

All through Scripture, the Bible promises that if we return to him with all

of our hearts, he'll be merciful to us.

Remember the guy, Martin Luther, Protestant reformer?

You might know he started the Reformation by nailing the 95 theses to the door in Wittenberg.

You know what his first thesis was?

He says, when our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, repent,

in Matthew 4, 17, he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.

He's so right about that. Repentance isn't something we do one time when we first trust in Jesus.

It's something we do every day. It's something that we constantly have to do because we are sinners.

Christians are never done turning from sin to God. And I want to leave you with this.

Nothing leads to greater joy in your life than repentance. Nothing. Nothing.

Acts 3 verses 19 and 20 say, repent therefore and turn back that your sins may

Acts 3:19

be blotted out that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord.

Refreshing, seasons of refreshing. That's what I experienced in 2009 and many

other times in my life when I've had a great return to the Lord.

It leads to God doing things in our lives that we would never imagine He would do.

If you're here this morning and you're not yet a Christian, let's say you haven't

ever for the first time repented of your sins and turned to God in faith, That's your first step.

The first step is believing that Jesus did die for your sins,

that he paid the penalty for your sins.

It's turning from your sins for the first time and trusting in him.

That's how we become a Christian.

Interesting thing is that even if you are a Christian, it's the same response over and over again.

We never stop looking to the gospel, the good news that Jesus died for our sins,

that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, that he's offering

us new life. We trust him.

That's repentance. That's faith. That's what we do when we first believe and

it begins brand new life for us.

And it's what we keep doing until the day we die.

Jesus will return one day. That's the other thing we're celebrating in Advent.

We're waiting for Christmas Day to celebrate his first coming,

but Advent is also the reminder that he's coming again.

And when he comes again, it will not be in the form of a little baby.

He's coming back to judge the earth.

If we have believed in him, if we have repented in him, then that will be a

glorious day. And if not, it will be a day of judgment for us.

This Christmas, I just want to encourage every one of us to heed the message of John the Baptist.

Jesus has come and he is willing to move in great power in our lives today if

we will prepare the way. Let's pray together.

Lord, thank you for the gospel. Thank you that you have come,

that we can be as sure of that as the rising sun every morning.

Thank you, Lord, that you've prepared a way for us to be forgiven,

that you have dealt with our sin, that you were the lamb of God who takes away

the sins of the world, that you died on the cross to pay the penalty for our

rebellion against the holy God.

Lord, I pray that that would never grow stale to us, that we'd never grow weary

of hearing that good news.

And I pray this Christmas that we would repent, that we would turn back to you

in every way possible in order that our lives would be prepared for you to do a mighty work.

Do a mighty work in our lives, Lord.

Come, empower, we pray in Jesus' name, amen.