John the Baptist | Repentance

This morning's reading is from Mark chapter one, verses two through eight.

It says, As it is written in Isaiah the prophet, Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.

John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him, and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

Now John was clothed with camel's hair, and wore a leather belt around his waist, and ate locusts and wild honey.

And he preached, saying, After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.

I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

A couple of announcements before we get started in our text for today.

Immediately after the service at 11, we are going to uh host a town hall meeting for those of you that are interested in knowing changes that are taking place for Redemption Kids.

So if you have kids that attend Redemption Kids uh uh or you're interested in what's happening there, uh please stick around after the service.

It'll be about a half hour, and we're gonna talk through some updates and bring everybody up to speed.

We've got some exciting developments that are we're moving forward on already, so we want to bring the church uh into the know on those things.

Also, beginning this Friday is our next four-week-long Bible study.

So we begin each of these studies with a kickoff dinner.

The studies themselves will take place on Wednesdays, and it's every other Wednesday.

But we like to start with a kickoff dinner where we don't have anything prepared, we don't, well, we have food prepared, we don't have uh any readings or anything that we're discussing, we just take some time to eat together as a group so that we can get to know each other.

And we found that it really helps when we get into that first study.

All of a sudden, we're able to just open up and talk together.

Um, instead of taking those first couple of studies to kind of warm up, we want to be able to dive in.

This study is about prayer.

We're going to be going through a book by a man named Paul Miller called The Praying Life.

And it's one of the most profound books on prayer that I've read.

As we're doing it, we're going to read through all 150 Psalms in the study.

Now, I think that this is one of the most important investments that you could make.

Our intention with this study is not that you leave having new information about prayer.

Likewise, it isn't to just for four weeks in a row be told you aren't praying enough, you need to be praying more, you aren't praying enough, you need to be praying more, uh, because I don't think that works.

Um, but instead, we'll get to experience together and cultivate this habit of prayer together.

It's going to be really focused on practice, on praying itself beyond just talking about prayer.

Prayer is so important because it allows us to explain our emotions before God, to understand the world and the story that we are living in, and to be able to act wisely in that world.

If you consider areas of your life where you require steadfastness, where you need to speak the truth, where you need to remain unwavering in your faith.

If you're wondering, like, how am I ever going to cultivate that?

How am I ever going to develop that level of character?

I've heard someone say we grow two ways in the Christian life.

We grow by prayer and by suffering.

And nobody prays enough, which means we all suffer a lot.

But we, which is hilarious.

We but we all grow by prayer.

Uh so I want to invite you into that study.

Uh, child care is provided for each Wednesday, as well as dinner for each time that we meet.

So it's like taking something off of your plate to join one of these studies.

Uh, we ask that uh yeah, participate with us.

Also, on October 11th, we have our first ever members meeting.

So uh if you are not a member, we recommend becoming one uh or seeking out membership with Redemption Church.

And that will uh the way to do that is email info at redemptiondenver.com and we can take you, start taking you through the membership process.

Uh but immediately after the service, October 11th, if you are a member, uh this is like, you know, mandatory.

This is what you thought you wanted when you became a member.

Congratulations.

All right, let's pray.

Father in heaven, thank you for revealing your son to us that we might know you.

We pray that as we move through this study in Mark, that we might see a clear picture of Jesus.

And in seeing who Jesus is, by knowing him, we might know the Father.

We might know God as He's revealed to us in Christ.

Lord, we pray that this morning you would give us a picture of what a heart that meets Jesus requires, that you might draw us into a repentance that makes us utterly dependent on you, because you are sure and trustworthy.

Lord, you can do this in your word, and we pray that you would accomplish that in the hearts of the people here and those gathered online this morning.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So last week we saw that Jesus Christ is a new beginning.

He enters into the world and he is the start of a new creation.

The kingdom is coming, the old is going away, the new has arrived.

But to say that Jesus is new, that he's a beginning, is not to say that Jesus is without any context.

When he arrives, he arrives in the midst of a developing story, a story that's been taking place since Adam and Eve first sinned in the garden.

When they first sinned, God committed to their rescue.

Their sin resulted in death, but God promised that out of it he would bring new life.

That the serpent that deceived Eve would be crushed by Eve's offspring down the road.

In that we see that the death would not be immediate, but a new story would develop.

And this is the story of redemption.

That's the very story that Jesus enters into.

God chooses his covenant people, the Israelites, and he makes a promise with them.

And he promises them that through them the entire world will be blessed.

It begins with Abraham, who becomes a family, who becomes a tribe, who becomes a nation.

And through this nation, it is intended that the entire world will be blessed because God made his promise to them.

But in that covenant promise between God and this particular group of people, we see the pattern of all humanity start to unfold.

And that is, as God presses in closer and closer to the Israelites, as his faithfulness remains more and more steadfast, the rebellion of the human heart is more and more highlighted.

The human heart is not rebelling generally.

The human heart is rebelling against our creator.

So when our creator, when God presses in on us, our particular rebellion against him is more deeply highlighted.

And that's the story of the people of Israel.

This is the Old Testament narrative that God promises this ultimate covenant faithfulness to his people and remains completely faithful to them throughout their entire history, but they constantly rebel, constantly turn against him, constantly fall short of being this people through whom the whole world was meant to be blessed.

But amidst that promise, amidst this covenant relationship, God enters a new promise where he says that he will change their very hearts.

The covenant will not be annulled because one party can't uphold it.

Instead, God will uphold both parts of the covenant on behalf of his people, such as his faithfulness towards us.

Now Jesus enters into this story.

Jesus is the true Israelite who represents the whole nation and through whom the whole world will be blessed.

In order for us to understand that context, Mark begins his gospel by drawing together a quotation from several different scriptures in order to demonstrate the context that Jesus is entering into.

So in Mark 1, verses 2 through 3, there's a prophet who is promised.

Mark 1:2–3

And this prophet is going to describe to us who the Christ is, who the promised one is.

In Mark 1, 2 through 3, it says, as it is written in Isaiah the prophet, behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.

So hundreds of years before, in Isaiah, as well as in Malachi, which are the two sections that Mark is quoting here, although he only references Isaiah.

By the way, the reason that Mark is able to do that, and you might notice this in your Bible study, where you look at Paul, for example, or Mark, and they quote an Old Testament passage, and you're like, oh, they're quoting that passage.

And you go back and you look at the Old Testament quote that they're making, and you're like, well, this isn't saying the same thing.

This doesn't line up.

Has that ever happened to you?

Yes.

All right.

So let's talk.

So the reason that they have such freedom and liberty in the way that they're quoting, and they don't quote academically in the way that we do, because we're like, oh, you're just deceiving us because you're trying to sneak one past us when it doesn't really say this.

That's not the case.

They offer their interpretation in the quotation because they're able to assume such a familiarity with the text among who they're speaking to.

This is especially true of Mark here, writing to the early church.

And he's able to assume this deep familiarity with the text so that they see, oh, when you're when you're quoting in this way, you're also offering an interpretation.

It's just a helpful Bible study tip.

But what we see in this particular passage that's quoted here is a promised prophet, a messenger who goes forth to prepare the way of Jesus.

And this messenger is crying out in a particular place in the wilderness.

And when he's crying out in the wilderness, he's crying out to prepare the way of the Lord.

So there are three things in this quotation that Mark presents that he'll use to reinforce.

This is talking about John the Baptist.

That's the argument that he's making.

That this scripture, hundreds of years before, is talking about John the Baptist, someone who was alive within the generation of Mark's readers from the original reading audience.

So he's saying that was John the Baptist.

And here's the argument.

And he makes it in three cases, becomes the outline of the rest of what Mark says in this text.

That this messenger creates the way, that he speaks in the wilderness, and that he makes the way for the Lord.

Now think of this passage in Isaiah to that reader.

They would have heard this is speaking to making the way for the Lord.

Now Mark is saying the one who made the way for Jesus was making the way for the Lord.

Do you see the implications of this claim?

Jesus is Lord.

God, who we've known throughout all of his faith, covenant faithfulness throughout the whole Old Testament, is coming on the scene in the person of Jesus.

So let's look at this.

It is the way, excuse me, the way, the wilderness, and the Lord.

Those are the three aspects of John the Baptist's teaching.

First, the way.

Mark 1, 4 through 5.

John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins, and all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

Alright, so he's preparing the way.

And supposedly we'll have one next year.

But when a city prepares for the Olympic Games, for the arrival of the torch, you know, you prepare for the arrival of all these athletes.

The whole city is taken over.

And you create this monument for the torch to show the games have arrived and they're here.

And you spend tons of money that your city never recuperates.

But you do it for the glory of these games that are arriving.

We're saying we're preparing the way for the Lord.

That's the call of what John the Baptist is doing.

And so what would you expect?

They would create this monument in downtown Jerusalem that would that would lead right into the most holy place in the temple because the Lord is arriving.

There would be paved roads and it would be a glorious thing to behold.

But that's not what we see.

The preparing of the way of the Lord is a man in the wilderness calling people to repentance, calling people to embrace the forgiveness of sins by repenting.

What does this tell us about the way of the Lord?

The way of the Lord is through human hearts.

That's what's being prepared.

Where is Jesus coming to travel through?

What is the medium through which he is going to be operating and moving?

What is the Lord most concerned with transforming and demonstrating his glory through?

It's human hearts.

You have one of those.

I can tell just by looking at you.

That is the medium that God works through.

So when he's preparing the way, he prepares the hearts of the people to see Jesus.

And the way that he prepares this way is calling them to repentance.

What's repentance?

We often use the metaphor of life as a journey.

And repentance operates in that same metaphor.

Life is a journey.

But when you discover that you're walking the wrong way and towards the wrong goal, then you need to change what you're aiming towards in your life.

And turn from what you were walking towards and then walk towards the right thing.

Now, repentance is kind of an archaic word, right?

It may even be thought of as like kind of a backwards way of viewing things.

Because repentance assumes a lot.

Repentance assumes that because we even have other phrases for the life is a journey metaphor.

Oh, one of them, you know, Gandhi says, life is a journey, yes, but all roads lead to the same mountaintop.

Or it's not the destination, it's the journey.

We have ways of removing the journey from where it's headed.

That way we're able to say it doesn't matter where any of us are really headed, we can look at each other completely non-judgmentally, and then look at ourselves completely non-judgmentally, and say, meaning is likely impossible, and it can't be discovered, especially not at the end of anything that our life is heading towards.

Therefore, let's try and cultivate some meaning here in the middle that doesn't tie to anything else.

But repentance assumes the exact opposite.

Repentance assumes that there is a wrong way to be headed, that there's a proper outcome of life.

That if you're not headed towards that thing, you need to repent.

If you're not headed towards the proper outcome of life, you need to turn from whatever it is you're headed towards and walk the other way, admitting you're wrong and walking the other way.

That's what repentance is.

It implies a right and a wrong.

It may seem archaic, but want to put it in maybe something a little more tangible or less tangible.

We'll find out the hard way altogether, right now.

Facebook, one of my favorite websites, all my friends are on there.

The they have a goal.

Uh in their mission statement, they state this goal: helping one billion people connect to meaningful communities.

That's their new goal.

Help one billion people connect to meaningful communities.

Is that a good goal or a bad goal?

Okay.

I think it depends.

What does meaningful mean?

The answer, this is a meaningful community, has to deal with what that community is gathered around.

Are they gathered around something of a real purpose, something that actually lasts?

And a question of meaning is a question of purpose, which is what is what is this designed for?

I love Leslie Nubigan and I love Tim Keller, and Tim Keller quotes Leslie Nubigan, so I love it.

And he uses this example, uh, and he says, This watch is terrible.

I've been using it to hammer in nails all day, and it can't do it at all.

You say, Well, well, of course it can't.

It's a watch, it's meant to tell time, it's not a hammer.

And we understand that the quality, the goodness of an object has to do with it being in its proper purpose.

Meaningfulness has to do with being in a real purpose.

Are we to assume that the question of the purpose of community, that what defines meaningful community, is just a settled matter at Facebook, that there's no debate as to what makes a community meaningful and what doesn't make a community meaningful.

At Facebook, if you're hired on, you just have to know the meaning of life.

And then you'll be able to establish meaningful communities.

Uh and for for quite a few people, you know, a sixth of the world.

Here's the point.

The Bible describes to us what our purpose is.

Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you?

But to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the Lord.

This I'm commanding you today for your good.

That's what Moses wrote.

That's a pretty good mission statement.

What does the Lord require of you?

Fear the Lord your God, walk in all his ways.

On what do all the law and the prophets hang?

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

The uh Westminster Catechism.

What is the what is the chief end of man?

It is to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

See, you have a purpose.

It's one that is found in relating to the very thing that your heart constantly rebels against.

Your creator, glorifying him, finding your highest joy in him.

That is your purpose.

And when we try and define meaning outside of that, we've lost the shape of the human heart.

And so what does this have to do with repentance?

Let's bring this back.

Repentance implies that your life has a real meaning.

You can get rid of repentance and enjoy your autonomy that says, I'll get wherever I'm going, and that's all that matters.

I'll enjoy the ride and that's all that matters.

And then you won't have to deal with something like repentance.

But when you get rid of repentance, you're also getting rid of meaning.

You can't have it both ways.

You can't have meaning and no repentance.

Repentance implies there's a right way to be headed.

There's something I was made for.

When I'm not headed in that direction, I'm going to turn towards, heading towards it again.

That place where so what we see in this picture of what John the Baptist is doing is he's gathering together and he's calling out the nation, calling out the city of Jerusalem and calling out the people of Judea.

And he's saying, Come to the river, repent, and you'll receive the forgiveness of sins.

And the community is described as confessing their sins to one another.

What a meaningful community.

A whole community that gathers together and says, there is a meaning in our lives.

These things we're getting in the way of it for us personally and as a group, will confess those things to one another and pursue that meaning together in the Lord.

That's a meaningful community.

Now, John the Baptist isn't in downtown Jerusalem.

He's not at the city gates where they would have been trading.

And he isn't in the temple, uh, gathering the people together at the center of their religious life, at the center of their fellowship with God.

Instead, John the Baptist is in the wilderness.

This is our next point.

We saw the way.

It's the human heart and repentance.

But where does it take place?

Where's John the Baptist?

Is he in the wilderness?

That's what it says in Mark 1.6.

Now John was clothed with camel's hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey.

Nobody read that and thought, oh, he's one of those.

You know, this uh uh it is a strange description, and that's because John the Baptist is in the wilderness, but there's a sense in which he himself is the wilderness.

You know, he's like the wilderness embodied.

He eats just what can be found out there, he wears just what can be found in the wilderness.

When we hear wilderness, we think like we went to Golden Gate Canyon State Park with all the rest of you on Saturday to look at the leaves.

And they uh uh it's there are so many people there.

And it was like a tree museum, like in uh that song.

Um and Big Yellow Taxi.

And they uh um I got I lost my train of thought, I apologize.

Okay, anyway, John the Baptist, he is the wilderness.

I can I don't know where I was headed.

Why does he go?

Oh, when we hear wilderness, we think of something beautiful like that.

Uh we should think desert.

That's where they are.

This is the desert.

Now, a traditionalist calling for repentance says, we've been good in the past, and we just need to get back to that.

This is what the Renaissance was.

The Renaissance was a rediscovery of classical literature.

Wow, look at these amazing Greek and Roman civilizations.

We need to get back to that.

And so it's a traditional call to repentance.

Repent from the way that you're going and get back to when things were good again.

Some may say great again.

But it's a traditional call to repentance, you see.

A modernist, and what that offers is what John might have said then is you need to come back to the temple.

We've got the temple and you've all left it.

You need to come back to the temple.

So John would have met them in the temple.

What they would have received was a safety of their traditional culture and environment, but he calls them to the wilderness.

A modernist would have said, you need to shake off the shackles of your traditional culture.

And you need to come out to the city, outside, past the wilderness and into the city that's that's just uh on the other side of the wilderness.

And you'll find that those god, that God that you left back there is nothing compared to this multitude of gods that allows you to express who you truly are in your heart.

That's what the modernist calls us to.

You throw away the traditionalism of the past, you shake off the shackles of where you've come from, and then you express your heart.

But he doesn't call them to the city, he calls them to the wilderness.

What is the wilderness?

It is a place of utter dependence on the Lord.

When you're in the desert, you can't farm, you can't hunt.

You need to be provided for by God.

That is the wilderness.

And what he does when he calls them to repentance in the wilderness is he demonstrates their repentance by baptism.

And it's the perfect example for Israel's history.

Because when they were first driven out of the city and made a nation, that took place at the Exodus.

And uh Moses says, Let my people go, Pharaoh says no, that repeats ten times.

Finally, Pharaoh says yes, and then once they leave, Pharaoh says, uh, but you know what?

Let's go get them back.

And when the Israelites are fleeing, they are pressed between the desert behind them with the pursuing army of Pharaoh following them, and then they're pressed up against the Red Sea.

It is a place of utter dependence.

And what happens?

God parts the sea, he brings the nation of Israel through the water, and then he washes away their captor behind them so that they are set free.

They are rescued through the judgment of the Egyptians.

Rescued through judgment.

It's the way God seems to do things.

And so baptism becomes this fitting symbol for the Israelites to represent their repentance as they pass through the water in the wilderness in a place of utter dependence, and they turn and cast themselves upon the grace of God alone.

This is what their repentance means.

This is what repentance towards Christ means.

It has to take place in the wilderness.

The wilderness is where we see that we cannot save ourselves.

Our hearts are in such a condition of rebellion that when we repent, we are repenting away from our own salvation and towards the rescue of the Lord.

We cast ourselves upon the grace of the Lord.

It is not like a New Year's resolution where we move from one habit that we've been living in and then we turn towards our own ability to cultivate a new habit.

That is not what repentance is.

Not in this circumstance.

Repentance is saying, I need to be provided for.

That's what your repentance is.

I think a lot of you have never repented to Jesus before.

You've made New Year's resolutions, confessed again and again the same things, and just developed new strategies for you to be continually resting on your own will, your own discipline, your own ability to get yourself out of this.

The repentance in the wilderness to Christ begins with saying, I can't provide for myself here.

You cast yourself upon the grace of Christ.

That's the good news.

It's where our forgiveness is.

Now, as we've said, he repents towards the Lord.

So who is the Lord?

This is Mark 1, 7 through 8.

And he prayed, and he preached, saying, John the Baptist preached, saying, After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.

I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

The straps of whose sandals I'm not worthy to untie.

Kneeling down and untying the straps of uh someone's sandals was a job that would have been done by a servant.

And in a Jewish community, it was only allowed to be done by a Gentile servant.

That was how lowly they viewed the role, and lowly they viewed the position.

John is saying, I would not even be worthy to hold the lowest position our society allows before this king.

That's how glorious this Lord is who is coming.

He can't get low enough.

And why is this?

He says, Look, I'm I'm baptizing you.

I'm the prophet that God called to usher in his own way.

But all I can do is baptize you with water.

The one who is coming is so much greater than I that he will be able to baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

What does that mean?

A ritual washing of baptism is compared to baptized in the Holy Spirit.

This is what Christ offers.

I think there are two reasons that we don't really repent.

One is a blind optimism.

There's no real need to repent.

We don't actually have that type of, we aren't utterly dependent.

We aren't really in the wilderness.

Instead, we're just a couple of strategies away from getting our lives together.

We're just the right therapeutic approach away from be able, from being able to establish good, meaningful lives.

We're so close.

That's the blind optimism.

The other is a cynicism.

And that's usually an informed cynicism.

That's one that says, look, I've seen people try and repent before and it never works.

I've tried to repent of these same things over and over again, and it never works.

I've seen people try and change the world, it only makes things worse.

We can see one, the blind optimism, that's kind of like Facebook, right?

We'll just make a billion meaningful communities.

What's a meaningful community?

Come on, we all know what meaningful communities are.

And then ISIS is like, yes, we do.

And then they high-five.

Everybody high fives.

But a cynicism in our culture, it often passes off as maturity.

We see a cynic, and we often think, yeah, they they're just world-wise.

They see how things really work.

And so when we try and cultivate cynicism, or try and cultivate maturity rather, oftentimes we're just trying to cultivate more and more cynicism.

So we become hopeless, but at least we aren't so hurt by the cycle of not being able to change or see the world take any positive trajectory.

So we become cynics.

Christianity is the only worldview that has the guts to approach life far more optimistically than the optimist, and far more cynically than the greatest cynic.

Christianity is not a middle ground between optimism and cynicism.

It is both of those in their deepest reality, far more extreme than you would ever think could be held together.

The cynic often says, you know what the cynic has going for him?

At least he's right.

There's one person in the world that can see the way things really are and the way things ought to be.

But the Christian says, I'm far more cynical than that.

It's not just that I can see how wrong everything is.

It's that I don't even trust myself to understand how wrong everything is.

That's how backwards and twisted I know my own heart to be.

Far more cynical than the cynic, but far more optimistic than the blind optimist.

Because they say that not only will things improve, they'll improve towards the glory of God.

They can be unswayed by how many times they need to come back to God and repent, knowing every time they will be forgiven.

Their repentance will be effective, their hearts will be changed, their communities will be meaningful, the world will be made glorious in a new heavens and a new earth.

It's an optimism that goes far beyond the greatest optimists you could find.

Christian repentance requires both.

See, it makes us more cynical than the cynic, and it makes us more optimistic than the greatest optimist when we come to Christ.

Those two things that keep us from repenting in their extremes in Christ, they drive us towards the only solution, which is repentance.

And here's the good news.

Here's the good news of baptism in the Holy Spirit that Christ can offer.

Imagine hearing the offer of a repentance that is guaranteed to work.

Imagine that.

When you repent towards Christ, it works.

It's effective.

Because you you aren't casting yourself upon the hopes of uh some quality that you've developed or some habit that you've made or some motivational strategy.

It's nothing like that.

In helplessness, you cast yourself completely upon Christ, and he lifts you up.

You know, John the Baptist wasn't uh worthy to stoop down and untie the sandals of Jesus.

Jesus, just before he goes to the cross, he invites in his disciples and he stoops down before them and he unties their sandals and he washes their feet.

And he says, if I wash you, you will be clean indeed.

We establish a meaningful community around that.

A confessing community around that.

When Jesus washes us, we are clean indeed.

Go to him in repentance.

It works every time.

Are there any questions?

Serge, no questions.

We remember that our repentance can be effective in Christ because of his broken body and his poured out blood.

And so we'll take communion together in remembrance of that.

First Corinthians 11, 23 through 26, Paul writes, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Let's proclaim the Lord's death, the reason that our repentance is effective.

Can tear off the top for the wafer and then drink from the bottom.

Holy Father, we praise you.

We thank you for this offer that if we come to you in repentance, it will work.

You change our hearts in Christ.

Lord, we repent of all the other ways that we've tried to find real change when you have been staring us in the face.

Lord, let us seek you as a church, trust you for the repentance that you offer, find our satisfaction in you.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.