John’s Announcement

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In certain very limited circumstances, I have figured out the secret to getting my children to get in gear and get things done. And I’m going to share that secret with you tonight. Again, I said this works in very limited circumstances.

But the secret is two words. Why are y’all laughing? The secret is two words.

Mama’s coming. Y’all thought it was going to be a different two words, didn’t you? That’s why you’re laughing.

Mama’s coming. You see, Charla has gotten involved with some things here with the ladies Bible study and her coffee gatherings that have led to me being at home with the kids. And do not call it babysitting when it’s your own children.

It’s called parenting. I don’t know why, but that’s a pet peeve of mine. So I’ve been home parenting and they will make a mess out of the playroom.

I’ll put them all four up in the playroom so I can clean the dishes or whatever else I need to get done, and it will look like a tornado went through up there. Seriously, we need a storm shelter on the second floor for whatever they do up there. And I will tell them, this playroom needs to get cleaned up.

And they’ll lollygag, and they’ll act like I said everything but that. And Charla normally will call me and say, I’m on my way home. Do you need anything from Sonic?

Because she knows I’ve been with the kids. We don’t drink alcohol, but Coke Zero, just as good. So she’ll call, and so I’ll know she’s on her way home, and she’ll be home in about 20 minutes.

And I’ll go up the stairs, and I’ll say, y’all better get that playroom cleaned up. Mama’s coming. And suddenly, they kick into gear, because they know mama’s coming.

Now, it works the other way, too. She will fight with them all day with school, tell them, you’ve got to get your work done. I don’t you would want to take eight hours when you can get it done in four or five, but sometimes they do.

I guess they just like sitting there in front of it. Get done, get done, get done. They just act like they’ve got the parking brake on.

And then she says, daddy’s coming. And suddenly, like magic, all the schoolwork is done. They know if I come home early, actually sometimes if I come, there was a day a couple weeks ago I came home sick.

I walked in, daddy’s home early, and Madeline said, who’s in trouble? But the announcement that somebody’s coming spurs them onto action. And it’s that way with us too.

You get that phone call that so-and-so is stopping by. They’re going to be there in 10 minutes. You start thinking, what can I hide of the mess in my house?

Can I get by with hiding the dirty dishes in the oven? That sort of thing. It spurs us onto action so they don’t see how we really live, right?

Hey, if I announce the male lady’s coming down the street, Charla jumps up go out to the mailbox. The mail lady’s coming. She wants to see if her package is there.

If we announce Granny’s coming, Charlie, from wherever he’s been hiding, he’s right down the stairs. Or say Poppy’s coming and Jojo shows up. Or Nana’s coming and Benjamin shows up.

Madeline just loves everybody. You can say anybody. You could say the devil’s coming.

She’ll still be out there, maybe not that bad, but still be out there to greet them. The idea that somebody’s coming, that announcement spurs us on to action. Tonight, I want us to start a study of the gospel of Mark.

The Gospel of Mark is, of the four Gospels, the one that I am least familiar with. Not that I’ve not read it, but it’s the one I’ve probably spent the least amount of time in. I can tell from looking back over years and years of notes that it’s the Gospel I’ve spent the least amount of time teaching.

And I thought, I want to spend some more time in Mark studying it and seeing what it has to say. And so y’all are coming along for the ride with me. We’re going to be in the book of Mark for the foreseeable future on Sunday nights.

If we need to, we may take detours into something else, but we’re going to be in the gospel of Mark. And the gospel of Mark starts out with an announcement that Jesus is coming. It starts out with the story of John the Baptist and his preaching that the Messiah is coming.

And the reason that Mark starts with that announcement, the reason that John the Baptist focused his ministry on that announcement, is because he wanted to spur people on to action. The Messiah is coming, so do something about it. And so we’re going to be in Mark chapter 1 tonight, and we’re going to look at the first eight verses of Mark chapter 1.

If you would, once you turn there with me, if you’d stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, if you don’t have your Bible tonight, it will be on the screen, or you can find it on your phone through our bulletin, through a link there. But starting in verse 1, it says, The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, as it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you. The voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

John came baptizing in the wilderness and preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins. Then all the land of Judea and those from Jerusalem went out to him and were all baptized by him in the Jordan River, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair and with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.

And he preached, saying, There comes one after me who is mightier than I, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to stoop down and loose. I indeed baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. And you may be seated.

Now John came to be a prophet. You could say that he was the last of the Old Testament prophets. And he was one of the prophets that the other prophets pointed to, which we’ll look at in just a moment.

But he came as a prophet. Some of the details that we know about John that kind of strike us as odd point to him being a prophet. This idea of him wearing camel’s hair.

In my studies, there are a lot of scholars who indicate that they think this camel’s hair is not woven camel’s hair, but is some kind of skin garment with the fur of the hair of the camel still on it, which is important when you know that Jewish tradition, at least certain Jewish traditions, say that Elijah likely wore a garment of the same type. And so for him to wear camel hair, I’ve heard this preached that John the Baptist just was viewed as sort of a wild man by the people in his time. Everything about him was odd and stood out and was peculiar, but when you look at the context of the things that he did, the historical context, it’s really not that odd.

If he was somebody coming in the mold of Elijah, then for him to wear the same kind of camel hair garment that Elijah is believed to have worn makes total sense. Elijah’s clothing was a symbol of his office and of his authority. It’s not what gave him that authority or that office, but it was a symbol of that.

That’s why Elijah passed his mantle onto Elisha. He took his garment and gave it to him as a symbol of that office, as a symbol of being the next one called by God to fulfill that role. And so this detail of John wearing the camel hair coat is very likely a way of identifying him with Elijah.

And then also I remember as a child, not only hearing about the camel hair coat, but about him eating locusts and wild honey. And people thought he was crazy because of that. I’ve even heard preachers try to explain it away as though there is a fruit called the locust. That may be.

But there’s a simple explanation for it that if John spent his time in the wilderness alone with God, people that live out in the desert, they’re going to eat whatever they can get their hands on. It’s not that John had his pick of food. It’s not like John said, Whataburger, no thanks.

Chick-fil-A, I’ll pass. I’m going to go with the locust. All right, he’s out in the desert, so he’s going to eat what’s available to him. People in the desert, they’ll even eat insects, if that’s what’s available.

And of that kind of stuff, that creepy crawly stuff that’s available, locusts are one of the few that are clean according to the Old Testament law. So it makes total sense that he would have eaten things like that. He was out there, he was following God’s law, and he was coming in a way that was designed to show that he was a prophet along the lines of what Elijah had been.

So he came just as all these other prophets had, announcing the coming of the Messiah. He was in the line of those prophets like Moses and David and Jeremiah and Isaiah and Micah and Zechariah and Malachi and Elijah who had announced the coming of God’s kingdom and of the Messiah. The difference between John and these prophets who came earlier in the Old Testament is that John expected to see the fulfillment of these promises in his lifetime.

The others knew that God would do something off in the future, way off. John expected to see it happen soon. And so when he came announcing and when he came preaching, there was a sense of immediacy to his message that the Messiah.

. . It’s not just that one day the Messiah will come back.

It’s not like me telling my children, Mama will be home in several hours. She comes to your ladies’ coffees. We never know how long she’ll be here.

She’ll be home in several hours. There’s a sense of immediacy. She’s on her way home now.

He wasn’t saying, in generations, God will eventually send us a Messiah. He was saying, He is on His way now. And so He preached with a renewed sense of urgency.

Guys, this is happening now. It’s coming soon. You need to be ready.

He was trying to prepare them. John announced the coming of the Messiah so that the people might be prepared. Because we do need to prepare ourselves for somebody important coming.

Mark, when he introduces the idea of John and his ministry, here in verses 2 and 3, some of you might see italics in your Bibles. That’s where he’s quoting, or at least paraphrasing, passages from the Old Testament. He quotes here from Malachi 3, verse 1, when he says, Behold, I send my messenger before your face who will prepare your way before you.

And Malachi talks about a messenger who would come like Elijah, come in the spirit of Elijah. And then right after this, we see in verse 3 of Mark chapter 1, he says that this messenger will be the voice of one crying in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. And he’s quoting there from Isaiah 40 chapter 3.

And this whole idea is that John would come as somebody who would prepare the way for the Messiah to enter. God essentially sent someone ahead of time so that the people would be ready to hear from Jesus. He sent somebody to prepare the ground, so to speak.

He sent somebody make sure everything was arranged and everything was in place. So this would be like, well, there are any number of circumstances where we send somebody ahead. If you’ve ever done a business deal and needed a reference from somebody, that person who was the reference for you, that person who knew both of you and provided the reference, prepared the way for that business deal to happen.

How many of you have ever been in middle school? Everybody except you two, I think, in this room. You’ve been in middle school and maybe there was that guy or that girl that you thought was pretty special. Most of us didn’t just go right up to that person, did we?

No, we sent a mutual friend. Do you like so-and-so? We laugh because it’s silly, but a lot of us did that kind of thing.

We sent somebody to prepare the way, right? Sometimes as adults, we still do that. I’m doing this kind of thing in my garden as well.

You have to prepare the ground before you can sow the seed. You need the way prepared. You have to get rid of the big rocks and the weeds.

It’s a challenge, especially the first year, let me tell you. We do this all the time, this idea of preparing the way. And sometimes we will send another person to prepare the way.

Well, that’s what God did. He sent John the Baptist right before the coming of Jesus to announce the coming of Jesus and prepare people so that they would be ready to hear and ready to respond when Jesus came. And one example of this, there are several examples, but one that we know the name of is the Apostle Andrew.

See, when Jesus found him and called him to follow him, he was a follower of John. He was somebody who had been studying under John and following the ministry of John and looking for the coming of the Messiah. He was somebody that was paying attention, who was out there saying, I know the Messiah is coming soon.

I want to know him. I want to find him. I want to recognize him when he comes.

And that was due in large part to the way that God used John’s ministry to prepare Andrew’s heart. And we know that there were numerous others who were in the same boat, who were looking for Jesus when he showed up, because John was there to prepare them to hear from him when he came. We just don’t know their names.

God had been preparing Israel for the Messiah for thousands of years. Now he was preparing that particular generation for the imminent fulfillment of those promises. There’s something different in saying it’s going to happen at some point versus it’s right at our doorstep.

And they needed to be ready. It’s sort of like what I told you about this morning as we’ve been going through these stories of the pictures of Jesus in the Old Testament. Now certainly most of Israel in his time rejected Jesus, but there were people who understood who he was and followed him.

And the reason for that, the reason why they knew what to look for, the reason they understood what he was there to do, those who did, is because God had been preparing them for thousands of years. He had put things in place like the sacrifices, things like the priests, things like the serpent on the pole, things that were ingrained in them that they would understand he had prepared them. And now he was sending John to make last-minute preparation so that when Jesus showed up, they would be ready.

But John announced the Messiah so that people might be prepared, but he also announced the Messiah so people might recognize him. And this is what I put in my notes, but maybe I need to clarify what I meant by that, because as I was looking over it again, I thought, I’m not necessarily clear on what I meant there. A lot of people still did not recognize Jesus.

A lot of people didn’t recognize Jesus because they didn’t want to recognize Jesus. But John announced Jesus so that those who were paying attention and those who were inclined to accept him would recognize who he was. Not just recognize, oh, Jesus is the Messiah, but have a fuller understanding of what that meant and what He came to be.

Because he says in verse 7, let’s look at verse 7. John says of the Messiah, there comes one after me who is mightier than I. He’s not just talking about being stronger.

This morning there were a couple of guys in here talking about, well, I could whoop him, I could whoop him, they weren’t fighting. It was just good natured. But this isn’t like Jesus and John were having a contest to see who was physically stronger, who could whoop who or whom, right?

When he says one that is coming is mightier than I, he’s talking about spiritual things. When he says that this one that’s coming after me is mightier than I am, he’s pointing out that he’s not coming in the same way that I am. He’s not coming just as another prophet in a long line of prophets.

This one who’s coming after me is of a greater kind altogether. Not just that Jesus could bench more than John could. He’s pointing to the fact that he’s mighty in a completely different way.

Where these that have come before up to and including John have been human prophets, the anointed one of God is the one that’s finally coming. God’s son is the one who’s going to show up. And he points to the holiness of this one who’s to come when he says, his sandal strap, I am not worthy to stoop down and loose.

Now we read things like that and we think that’s hyperbole, that’s exaggeration. Sometimes we will exaggerate a little bit to make a point. John is not known for mincing words.

John is not known for being unclear about what he’s trying to say. When John the Baptist says, I am not worthy to reach down and unhook his sandals for him, I believe that’s exactly what he meant. It’s not false modesty.

It’s not flattery. He’s saying, I literally cannot, I am not worthy to touch his feet. And his reason for saying that is because the Messiah, Jesus, is holy.

He’s announcing that there’s somebody that is coming that is holier than I can ever consider dreaming about being. If we were to look at all the most religious people that have ever lived, including the most religious people in that day, the most devout people, John is out there as a preacher of repentance. He is bringing the unpopular message that people needed to turn from their sin and repent and turn toward God.

He’s bringing that message and yet he’s saying, I am not devout enough, I am not holy enough even to reach down and unbuckle this man’s shoes. It’s not just a figure of speech. He’s pointing to the absolute incredible holiness of the one who’s coming after him.

And he wanted people to understand that the Messiah that’s coming, the one he’s announcing is not just another human prophet. He’s not just another man. He’s mightier and he’s holier.

He’s something different altogether. And because of that, he can do something completely different. Look at verse 8.

He says, I indeed baptized you with water. By the way, that’s something almost all of us are physically able to do. Being able to dunk somebody in water.

Now understand, I’m talking about the physical act of it. The physical act of dunking somebody in water does not require all that much talent or skill. Now the skill is getting them back up.

I haven’t always mastered that real well. We need to install some kind of pulley system where people just need to stop fighting me when I try to pull them back out. But he said, I baptized you with water.

I did this outward thing. I did this symbolic thing with you. I baptized you with water, but the one who’s coming after me, he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.

And listen, that’s something John could not do. That’s something that the prophets of the Old Testament could not do. That’s something that no preacher today can do is baptize you in the Holy Spirit.

But he said, this one who’s coming after me, he’s going to do something more incredible than any of us have been able to do. We can baptize you in water. He can baptize you in the Holy Spirit.

What he’s saying is we can walk you through the externals and what you need to do, but there’s one who’s coming who can transform you from the inside out. There’s one who is coming who is so powerful, who is so different from anything we’ve ever seen before, that he can bring this total spiritual transformation. So if the one that John was announcing was so completely different from any person, from any human religious leader, John wanted them to recognize that when he showed up.

This guy is not just another teacher. He’s not just another rabbi. He’s not just another prophet.

He’s not just another priest. He’s not just another political leader that’s going to try to overthrow Rome and restore the kingdom of David to Israel. that they were talking about something supernatural here, that they were talking about God the Son in human flesh. And John would later on say, Behold the Lamb of God.

He would point at Jesus and tell his followers, Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. That’s not something a man can do. And so John announced the Messiah so that people might recognize him for who he was and for what he was.

And John also announced the Messiah so that people might repent. It wasn’t just an announcement so that our curiosity could be satisfied. It was an announcement so that something would happen.

Again, I talked about that announcement of somebody coming, spurring us on to action, and that’s what John was getting at here. Look back at verse 4. John came baptizing in the wilderness and preaching a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.

He was calling on them to be baptized as a sign of their repentance. Now, I want to be clear here. This word for can be a difficult one in the Greek.

It can have a couple of different meanings. It can mean to obtain, it can mean because of, sort of like when we say in English, I’m taking aspirin for a headache, you could take the aspirin to get a headache, or you could take the aspirin because you have a headache. Now most of us are going to take aspirin because we have a headache.

I don’t know, you could have some weird allergy to aspirin, or you’re going to take it and it’s going to give you a headache. The Greek word here that’s translated for can have those meanings as well. And so sometimes people will look at that word, they’ll look at it here, they’ll look at it in Acts chapter 2, where he talks about being baptized for the remission of sins, and they will say, see, you’ve got to be baptized in order to be saved.

That word can also mean because of. It can mean for in the sense of because of. To be baptized because of the remission of sins.

To be baptized as an outward expression, as an outward profession of what God has already done in remitting and forgiving our sins inwardly. I realize that those verses are widely debated, but in my estimation, the latter idea, the second one, fits better with the whole context of Scripture. That Jesus Christ has paid for our sins in full, and we then are baptized in response to that.

We are baptized as a show, as a demonstration of that repentance. So he says here to be baptized for a baptism of repentance for the remission of sin. What He’s calling on them to do.

He’s not just telling them the Messiah is coming. He is calling on them to repent. He is calling on them to change their minds.

And I have explained this to you before, but I want to explain it again because I feel like every time I explain it, somebody else goes, that makes sense. So I think we can’t explain this enough. Repentance does not mean changing your life.

It does not mean turning your back on your sin. That should be a result of repentance. But the Greek word for repentance, metanoia, means to change your mind.

When God calls us to repent, when his prophets call us to repent, it is talking about a change in our minds, not just an intellectual change, but the realization and the admission that what God says is right and what we’ve been doing in direct contradiction to what God says is wrong. In other words, we as sinners say, I don’t care what God says, I’m going to keep doing what I want to do. Repentance says, I recognize that God is right about this.

And we go from over here, hating God and loving our sin, to repenting and saying, instead, I love God and I hate my sin. It doesn’t mean that we never sin again. It means we should try to sin less as a result.

But understand, the repentance is not the turning away from our sin. The repentance is not the cleaning up of our lives. Those things come as a result of the repentance.

The repentance itself is getting on the same page with God. changing our mind about God and about that sin. And so I’ve told you before, the difference between a rebellious sinner and a repentant sinner is not that the repentant sinner never sins again.

The repentant sinner tries not to. But the real difference between the rebellious sinner and the repentant sinner is the rebellious sinner loves his sin and hates God. The repentant sinner loves God and hates his sin.

He’s calling on them to break out of this rebellion, to break out of this slumber where they’ve been going on for so long, ignoring God, not caring about the things of God and just doing what they wanted to and to recognize that God is holy and that they were sinful and to acknowledge that and to desire to be right with God again. He’s calling on them to change their minds. And again, as I said, I don’t want to leave that with you.

Oh, the idea that I just changed my mind and then I can live however I want. If that’s the mindset, then our mind hasn’t really changed. It’s the idea that my mind is changed and God then begins to change my heart and my life.

He’s calling on them to repent. And He’s calling on them to be baptized as a sign of that repentance. Because it’s easy to make a commitment to ourselves and then let it go by the wayside.

Every Sunday morning, I say, I’m going to quit eating like that. Because usually over Friday and Saturday, my wife and my mother-in-law have brought all sorts of delicious temptations into the house that I should not be indulging in to that extent on Weight Watchers, and I just let it go. And then I get to Sunday morning and I say to myself, I’m going to do better.

This is not right. It’s okay. She’s pregnant.

She’s allowed. I’m trying not to look pregnant, all right? So I tell myself, and you could apply this to any number of things.

We tell ourselves, I’m going to do better. You could apply it to, I’m going to be more faithful about reading my Bible. I’m going to do this.

I’m going to do that. And we tell ourselves, I’m going to do better. If we just keep it to ourselves, we’re not as likely to follow through.

I do better when I tell my wife, okay, I’m really going to buckle down this time. I last a few days longer when I do that. They weren’t supposed to just repent inwardly, where they’re going to let themselves go back to the old way of thinking.

He says, repent and tell the world about it. Make it public. Commit to this.

That’s why he’s calling them to be baptized. Telling them to make a public commitment to follow through with what God’s been doing in their hearts already. So he says, be baptized as a sign of this repentance.

And so they responded, we see in verse 5, by confessing their sins. Many people did the very thing that John was calling them to do. They knew the Messiah was coming.

They knew the time was short. They knew things were urgent and they needed to move. And so they responded by confessing their sins.

They responded by not just giving it lip service, but by showing themselves to be repentant and getting baptized as a way to proclaim that repentance to the world. Now with baptism today, that’s part of it, but there’s more on top of it. It’s a profession of faith in Jesus Christ specifically.

But at that time, it was a way to demonstrate to the world that you really had repented, that God really was doing something in your heart and in your mind. And John announced the coming of the Messiah so that the people would repent, so that they would go ahead and change their minds. And by that, they would be ready for when the Messiah came.

And John was sent to spread the word to people. God sent him as a messenger, as one to prepare the way, to spread the word to people because there is no bigger news than the news that Jesus is coming. There was no bigger news in that day they could receive than that the Messiah they had been waiting for for thousands of years was finally on his way.

He’s not generations off. He’s coming at any moment. It was the biggest news they could possibly have received and they needed to be prepared.

And folks, where this will intersect with our lives, is that we’re kind of in the same boat. The news for us today is that Jesus is coming. Now, He’s come once before.

His Word teaches that He’s going to come again. I’m not going to tell you we’re in the end times. I hear all this speculation.

Oh, I can just tell we’re in the end times by the way the world is. People have said that in every generation. We could be.

We could not be. I’m not going to set dates. I’m not going to speculate dates.

I’m going to say Jesus can come back whenever He well feels like it. He doesn’t need my permission. He could come back tonight.

He could come back in another thousand years. That’s up to Him. But what we know is that He is coming, and sooner or later, He will come for each of us, or He will come for all of us.

And if He’s coming, then His coming deserves a response, just as it did in that day. They were called on to repent. They were called on to prepare themselves.

They were called on to look out for Him and to recognize who He was. They were called to all these things, and if it’s good enough for His first coming, then it’s good enough for His second folks those of us who are waiting and again I’m I’m not saying it’s I’m not giving you a date but you notice what I said sooner or later he’s coming for each of us or he’s coming for all of us he will either come for us in death or he will come for all of us as a group knowing that we have that appointment knowing that he’s coming that he’s that it’s a very short time our lives are very short knowing that it’s a short time folks we need to respond in the same way we need to be prepared we need to be ready. We need to be looking for Him.

We need to be repentant in those areas where we are not in line with what God wants for us. In those areas where there’s hidden sin, we need to be confessing it. We need to be repenting of it.

We need to be getting on the same page with God about it and asking Him to change us from the inside out. And we need to be prepared to recognize Him for who He is. We need to be in His Word, doing all that we can to understand who He is, to learn more about him and the things that he wants and the things that he does and falling in love with Jesus all over again, preparing ourselves to meet him when he comes.