Malachi 3:1-5 | Psalm 126 | Luke 3:1-9 | 1 Corinthians 4:14-21
There are some words that should not be sugar-coated. Some realities, some words that we do ourselves no favors by shaving off the rough edges, by making them easier to digest. Some words, some realities are like a surgeon's scalpel, more dangerous when blunted.
Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. Repent for the kingdom of God is at hand. Turn around for the rain and rule of God has come close, is coming close, is on the step, is about to knock. Repent for the king is on the outskirts of town. How will you stand when he enters the city center tomorrow and makes judgment before his friends and his enemies? Repent.
Now in our second week of our Advent journey, John the Baptist enters the scene. John, this woolly and wild man cut from the cloth of the Old Testament prophets, comes and he wastes no time. He enters urgently upon our need to announce the kingdom that is coming and to prepare us for it. And he says, repent.
John had a message for those that he addressed in his first-century context, people who were waiting for the first coming of the Messiah, and he has a word for us, those who wait for the second coming of Jesus, to come and make all things new. He has a question to ask us. He says, you say this prayer, you call out, come, Lord Jesus. Do you know what you are asking? How can you talk the talk of Advent longing, John asks us if you do not walk the walk of full surrender to his coming kingdom? How can you long for his kingdom to come if you do not now live in the rhythm of surrender that is true of all those who are citizens of that kingdom?
Repent for the kingdom of God is near. This word that John the Baptist speaks to us this morning and it spoke to those his first hearers. He speaks with uncompromising urgency, but please do not mistake his tone for one of hate. John speaks to us out of an urgent love, out of a serious love for those who are in real serious danger. Sin is serious, John says. It is the abrupt word of the alarmed parent who watches as their child raises their foot to step off the curb into oncoming traffic and they yell toward their child, stop, turn around, go a different way.
Wake up, John tells us. He has plenty of cold ice water to throw on us to help us wake up. And this morning we are going to look at John, the person of John, the words of John, the path of surrender that John puts before us out of the Gospel of Luke in chapter three. I invite you to turn there with me. As we look at John's life, the beautiful life of surrender that John lived, and the words that he spoke, the beautiful words of surrender, the challenging words, we are going to notice just a few facets of that diamond of surrender. It is a beautiful thing. It is a challenging thing, but it is a beautiful thing.
We are going to notice a few things. First, we are going to notice today the gate. John is inviting us onto a path of surrender and there is a gate he wants us to enter through, a kind of surrender that is fundamental to all other kinds of surrender that we are going to engage, a gate that he wants us to enter through, and he wants to warn us against two places where we divert from that path, two ways that we hide from that gate, from entering on the path of surrender.
So first, what is this central gate, this way onto the path of surrender that John puts before us? He says first, surrender your false innocence. If you want to be someone who walks in the path of surrender with Jesus, who expects the coming kingdom of the Messiah and does so with a heart that has integrity, who cries out come, Lord Jesus, as one who has already surrendered to him, you must begin by first surrendering your false innocence.
You see, John was no fool. John was an incredibly popular figure, someone who drew out massive crowds, the scriptures tell us, to come and hear from him and be baptized by him. But John was not deceived by worldly popularity to shave off his message, to soften it, to make it easier to digest. Instead, he spoke to these crowds; he saw in them the reality that is true of all of us, that they believed that they were better than they were, that they were happy to live within the illusion of false innocence. And so he throws a bucket of cold ice water; he says, you brood of vipers, you brood of snakes.
Now John is not just name-calling here; this phrase has a lot of meaning. Brood, what does that mean? A brood is the offspring, right? The sons and daughters of something. And here they are being called the sons and daughters of snakes. Snake, of course, is a biblically loaded word, right? The serpent in the garden, the snake who is the deceiver. What is he saying? You, crowd, are being deceived and walking in the way of deception, you are showing yourselves to be the children of the evil one.
Not to the point, John. John says wake up, what was core to the deception in the garden, right? A lessening of the consequences and the reality of sin, what does the snake say? You will not surely die. Don't take it so seriously; it's not that big a deal, you won't surely die. And this is what we do as well. We like to lessen our sin and our brokenness; we like to pretend that we are better than we are. We like to live in the illusion. We're doing okay, we're pretty good people.
I had a professor in seminary who, in highlighting this point, told us that when his church would sing the beloved song, I Surrender All, in order to keep himself honest, he would instead sing this under his breath: Some to Jesus I surrender, some to him I freely give. I surrender some to thee, my blessed Savior, I surrender some. And isn't that the truth? Who among us can say that that is not the truth of our lives? We draw a line in the sand of our hearts, we draw a line in the sand of our lives, and we make our stand there. And against the oncoming tide of God's movement into our lives, we stand on that line and we say to God this far and no further.
We like to pretend that that's not true, but maybe you say things like this to yourself. You can have my Sunday attendance, God, but on Monday morning at work, I call the shots. I'll give my money to the church, some of it, but the rest of my finances—that's my domain. I'm a very faithful spouse. It was just a little flirtation with my co-worker. I just needed to unwind; it was only a few drinks, a little porn, some TV binging. I'm a super nice person, but that guy had it coming. All my life is yours, God, as long as it looks like this.
We stand on that line that we've drawn in our hearts and our lives. We say to God, this far and no further, and there on that line, Jesus meets us. Gentle Jesus, loving Jesus, honest Jesus. And he says to us, as far as the curse is found. There are no half measures in me. As far as the curse is found, I will not let you fall asleep in your sin, cozy up to those parts of your life that need my renovation. There are no half measures in me. I love you far too much for that. I believe far too much in the person I have made you to be to allow that to be the truth of your life.
Now you might say to me, Ryan, this is way too heavy on sin. Isn't Jesus forgiving? Isn't that what Jesus was about? He loves me, and the main thing he wants to say to me is not look more at your sin, not realize that you're broken, but that I'm forgiven. Isn't that what Jesus was about? And I'd ask you to consider the question if that's you, if that's where you are right now. I'd just ask you to consider the question: Why is grace so amazing?
What does it mean to believe, as Christians, that the grace of God is so incredible if we have not been also people who are willing to look at the true depth of our own brokenness, who have been willing to brave with Jesus those places in our lives where we have not allowed him? We are only cheating ourselves of that deep, beautiful experience of the true, rich, powerful grace of God when we stand on that line and we say, God, you're not allowed here. I don't want to look at it. Because to realize your full brokenness is to make grace truly what it is: amazing. Beautiful. Rich.
Charles Spurgeon, the famous preacher, put it this way, saying basically the same point: They think they have only a little sin and believe in a little Savior. It is all little together. But when you get a great sense of sin, you want a great Savior. Thanks be to God, we do have a great Savior.
Grace—the grace that he shows us—is sizable, costly, won for us on the cross. And that costly grace, walking in that way, does have the effective power to renovate and change our lives. Not in a little piece of it, but in the whole of it—every area of our lives, every area of sin, every area of brokenness. But if we're going to enter into that path, we have to heed John's warning. We have to dismiss our false innocence. We have to accept the reality. Brood of vipers. Deceiving one. I am one who is prone to deceive myself, to believe that my sin is smaller than it is. Lord Jesus, show me. Help me. I want to know the full power of your grace. I want to know the full power of your transforming work in my life. I don't want to look at it, but I believe that if I walk into that reality with you, you have the power to hold me up. You have the power to walk with me in it.
So John invites us to lay down, to surrender our false innocence, and to walk into full surrender to Jesus, to know that he is the one who wants to raise up every valley, bring down every hill, straighten every path—the whole of creation, the whole of our lives, as far as the curse is found.
But the reality is, of course, that there are lots of other places we'd rather turn our attention. And there are two places, I think, John highlights in the way he addresses the crowd—two hiding places. So if the gate to this way of surrender is surrendering our false innocence, John wants to say, there are two little rooms on the side of that gate, that when you see that mirror coming at you, showing you the reality, these two places, you're more likely to hide.
The first one is in false allegiance. When faced with the mirror, I'm more likely to resort to false allegiance to protect myself, to hide from that. False allegiance says, I am the right kind of person because I belong to the right kind of group. I'm not a broken person in all those ways. I'm not one of the bad people. I'm one of the good people. I'm in the group that has allegiance to this person or this way. We can hear this in the background of the murmuring crowd as John says, You brood of vipers, because what does he say? 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.
Faced with that mirror—You brood of vipers—what do they say? They say, No, no, no. We're not Gentiles. We're not pagans. We're not tax collectors. We're children of Abraham. We have the right allegiances in our lives. We have the right way.
How familiar is this? This is what we all do. When faced with that reality that I need to grow, that I need to change, that I need to become someone who looks more like Jesus, what do we say? No, no, no, no. I'm the right kind of Christian. I have the right kind of political ideology. The right kind of academic. I read the right kind of books. I have the right kind of news that I take in. I'm one of the good ones. It's those people over there.
Maybe you don't say that explicitly, but implicitly, that's kind of the way you live. Well, I'm okay. I'm doing all right. It's really those people that need to have that hard look in the mirror. We have to lay down these false allegiances if we're going to look with Jesus into that mirror.
I want you to know, I'm not saying that we aren't to be discerning in our lives. We're not to—we need discernment. We need to choose what kinds of political parties to affiliate with, what kinds of vocations to pursue. These are good things. But be careful, because there is a fine line. There is a deceptive line there where those identities, those allegiances can become this cocoon of insulation that we use to avoid walking in full surrender, avoid laying down our innocence or false innocence.
The other hiding place that John highlights is a kind of abstracted obedience—a false abstracted obedience. So faced with that mirror, I'm also going to avoid by highlighting this kind of abstracted obedience. No, no, no. I'm not a brood of—I'm not one of the vipers. I'm the person who attends Torah observ—I attend religious observances. I study the Torah. I pray. I fast. I do the right kinds of things.
In response to this, John puts before his original hearers an imminently practical kind of obedience. What does he say when they ask, What are we supposed to do? He says this: Listen to how not abstract this is. Whoever has two tunics is to share with him who has none, and whoever has food is to do likewise. John is cutting through abstracted obedience that would keep us in the place of illusion about ourselves and is saying, Love your neighbor as yourself.
Yes, of course, study the Torah. Pray. Fast. Do all of those things. John's life certainly was steeped in those realities. But if those things aren't issuing out of your life into practical, lived, loving obedience, you have reason to look in the mirror.
So we lay down our false allegiances. We lay down our abstracted obedience. And we enter by the way of recognizing our own brokenness, of surrendering our false innocence.
I know that John's words are uncompromising. They are hard. They are difficult words. They're not easy words to hear. We should never read from the gospels about John the Baptist and walk away just being like, All right, sounds good. He's a challenging guy. He had a message that was important and hard to hear.
But what I want to emphasize in concluding here is just to focus us on the point. John is not saying these things—not to his original hearers and not to us now through the scriptures—these things are not said so that we would walk around in this kind of shame and condemnation. John, I believe, is actually telling us what he believes is the secret of his obedience. He's letting us in on this invitation to live as truly free, radically free people.
You read about John's life. He was a radically free person, free in obedience. He was undaunted by public shame, by people's anger with him, by the threat of violence done to him by powerful people. He was also undaunted by the kinds of things that we find ourselves just so wrapped up in—status, power. When you remember the story, when John's disciples come to him and they're starting to leave and they want to go with Jesus, what does he say? He must increase, and I must decrease.
He lived a joyful life because he was the friend of the bridegroom and rejoiced that the bridegroom is coming. It was about Jesus and not about him. I think that this is what John is inviting us into—the way of surrendered, whole, radical obedience. And in that obedience, we can cry out for the coming kingdom of Jesus, not with half a heart but with a whole heart. We can live as people who are surrendered to that kingdom, surrendered to Jesus, the king.
And we can say with the whole church throughout time, with a full heart, Come, Lord Jesus.
May it be so.