SPEAKER_01: Or um teams are organized on there.
SPEAKER_01: So if you'd like to be on that, or if you're committed to the church, then you need to get on that, if if at all possible, so that you're in loop on updates and stuff that's happening.
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna be in Luke.
SPEAKER_01: Luke chapter 3.
SPEAKER_01: That's why you need your that's why you need your Bibles.
SPEAKER_01: Because Luke chapter 3 is a meaty session.
SPEAKER_01: I'm so stoked about this passage.
SPEAKER_01: I'm like, love this chapter.
SPEAKER_01: So Luke chapter 3, let's um let me read to you the first 23 verses.
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, what first are you in?
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna be in the CE version, right?
SPEAKER_01: Just because I got this Bible for free to Pastor's Conference, and I like how it feels in my hands.
SPEAKER_01: Many of you have a um NIV version in your hands, and it's it's somewhat similar.
SPEAKER_01: These are both kind of modern translations.
SPEAKER_01: Um Luke Luke chapter 3.
SPEAKER_01: We've been going through Luke since uh the beginning of December.
SPEAKER_01: And we're in chapter 3.
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna cover a whole chapter today.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, Luke 3, 1 through 23.
SPEAKER_01: It says, in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, while Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod was Tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip was the Tetrarch of the region of Eturi, and Tronidas and Licinius, Tetrarch of Albin, during the high priest of Annas and Caiphus, God's word came to John, the son of Zachariah, in the wilderness.
SPEAKER_01: He went into all the vicinity of the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for forgiveness of sins, as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah.
SPEAKER_01: A voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight.
SPEAKER_01: Every valley will be filled, every mountain and hill will be made low, the crooked will become straight, and rough ways smooth, and everyone will see the salvation of God.
SPEAKER_01: He then said to the crowds who came out to be baptized by him, Brood of vipers, who warns you to flee from the coming wrath?
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, produce fruit consistent with repentance, and don't start saying to yourselves, We have Abraham as our father.
SPEAKER_01: For I tell you that God is able to raise up children from Abraham from these stones.
SPEAKER_01: The axe is already at the root of the trees, therefore every tree that doesn't produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.
SPEAKER_01: What then should we do?
SPEAKER_01: The crowds were asking him.
SPEAKER_01: He replied to them, The one who has two shirts must share with someone who has none, and the one who has food must do the same.
SPEAKER_01: Tax collectors also came to be baptized, and they asked him, Teacher, what should we do?
SPEAKER_01: And he told them, Don't collect any more than what you have been authorized.
SPEAKER_01: Some soldiers also questioned him, What should we do?
SPEAKER_01: And he said to them, Don't take money from anyone by force as false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages.
SPEAKER_01: Now the people were waiting expectantly, and all of them were questioning in their hearts whether John might be the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: John answered them all and said, I baptize you with water, but one who is more powerful than I am is coming.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not worthy to untie the strap of his sandals.
SPEAKER_01: He will baptize you with Holy Spirit and fire.
SPEAKER_01: His widowing shovel is in his hand to clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into his barns.
SPEAKER_01: But the chaff he will burn with fire that never goes out.
SPEAKER_01: This all then, along with many other exhortations, he proclaimed the good news to the people.
SPEAKER_01: But when John rebuked Herod Tetrarch because of Herod Herodius, his brother's wife, and all the things that he had done, Herod added this to everything else.
SPEAKER_01: He uh Herod added this to everything else, and he locked up John in prison.
SPEAKER_01: When all the people were baptized, Jesus also baptized as he was praying.
SPEAKER_01: Heaven opened, and the Holy Spirit descended on him in physical appearance like a dove.
SPEAKER_01: The voice came from heaven, you are my beloved son, with you I am well pleased.
SPEAKER_01: As he began his ministry, Jesus was about thirty years old and was thought to be the son of Joseph, son of Heli.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_01: God, we thank you for this passage, this chapter, and as we study it here over the next few minutes, we pray that you would speak to us by your spirit.
SPEAKER_01: We believe that you, God, are the pastor, the true pastor, the head pastor over this church, and that your word is the authority in our lives.
SPEAKER_01: And we believe that by the word of the Holy Spirit it can be applied to our lives, and that you can take and draft your word into our story.
SPEAKER_01: You know where each one of us are at.
SPEAKER_01: You know the anxieties of our hearts, the hopes, the wishes, the dreams, the plans, Lord, that we walk in this door with, and we lay those things at your feet, and we ask God that you would work in our life.
SPEAKER_01: We give you permission, Lord, to have your way in us.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, do you just infuse us with your life by your presence?
SPEAKER_01: We pray this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: So the version, just so you know, because I always I have been using this version a lot, and I said it's the CE version.
SPEAKER_01: That's the new, as of like this year, version of the HCSB.
SPEAKER_01: So if you have a Bible app and you go, it's probably not under CE.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, okay.
SPEAKER_01: It's probably HCSB.
SPEAKER_01: Sorry about that, yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's a it's a good I I've been enjoying it.
SPEAKER_01: It's a good um version.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so the book of Luke, it's written in 62, 63 AD.
SPEAKER_01: It's volume one of two volumes written by Luke to Theophilus.
SPEAKER_01: We talked about these things.
SPEAKER_01: It was written as a scroll that would be rolled out, written down in columns.
SPEAKER_01: The scroll probably would have been about 35 feet long, and Acts would have been about 32 feet long if it was all the way rolled out.
SPEAKER_01: So Luke writes this to Theophilus, and right at the beginning of both books, he says the purpose behind it is to help Theophilus have a greater sense of certainty about the things that he believed.
SPEAKER_01: So it sounds like Theophilus has already believed in Jesus, the Messiah, but Luke wants to give Theophilus a greater account to add certainty to the picture.
SPEAKER_01: And we're going to see that right in the first verse that we're looking at this evening.
SPEAKER_01: So a significant portion of this book is also found in Mark.
SPEAKER_01: We think that probably Mark was a source document for Luke.
SPEAKER_01: And Luke was a traveling companion of Paul, the great missionary who brought the gospel to the Gentiles all across southern Europe and North Asia, modern-day what we would call Turkey and Macedonia and Greece.
SPEAKER_01: All of that area is where Paul took the gospel and Luke tagged along.
SPEAKER_01: And it's probable that Theophilus was paying the way for Luke to go on this trip.
SPEAKER_01: It's probable that Theophilus was the patron, paying for Luke as a doctor for his services.
SPEAKER_01: And that made it possible for Luke to assemble these various accounts.
SPEAKER_01: So there's three great themes in the book of Luke.
SPEAKER_01: The first is that God is king, or the kingdom of God is emphasized.
SPEAKER_01: The second great theme is the unfolding plan of God.
SPEAKER_01: We see repeatedly that God has a plan.
SPEAKER_01: And that it started well before Jesus was born to Mary.
SPEAKER_01: It started way back before time.
SPEAKER_01: And that plan has been unfolding, and Jesus coming on the scene fulfills prophecy.
SPEAKER_01: That's how that's one of the reasons we think this is a theme to Luke, is because he keeps pointing and saying, when Jesus did this, or when John the Baptist did this, it fulfilled this prophecy that God gave 700 years earlier to these prophets.
SPEAKER_01: So Luke isn't just looking at a historical Jesus, but he's looking at Jesus in the history and the context of, or he's looking at him in the context of history.
SPEAKER_01: So this idea that Jesus isn't an accident, but that God has this beautiful plan in how he's carrying out his work of redemption across the earth is emphasized by Luke over and over again.
SPEAKER_01: So we read this book and there's a sense of comfort because we are reassured and reminded that when we trust in the God of the Bible, we're trusting in a God who has a plan.
SPEAKER_01: And he said in Ephesians that he has plans for us, that he's laid out, he has works for us, that he wants us to walk in.
SPEAKER_01: So that's the second great theme.
SPEAKER_01: And the third great theme of this book is again to give a sense of certainty about Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: So Luke is just laying down evidences for the veracity of Jesus, that he is a reliable person to trust your life in.
SPEAKER_01: The things that he said are reliable.
SPEAKER_01: It is a historic account.
SPEAKER_01: So the first ten verses start off with eight people being named.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not going to go through and struggle through the names again, but there are eight characters that are listed in just verse one.
SPEAKER_01: And here's the crazy thing: all eight have been discovered through archaeology over the last 150 years.
SPEAKER_01: Every one of these characters, including John the Baptist, we have outside sources other than Scripture telling us that these are historical characters.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, in the book of Luke, he references 32 countries, 54 cities, and nine islands.
SPEAKER_01: And we've confirmed the existence of all of them through archaeology.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, there's a man named Sir Ramsey who was an anti-Christian.
SPEAKER_01: He was opposed to Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: And he decided that he would research and he would go to Israel and he would dig up Israel and by archaeology disprove scripture.
SPEAKER_01: And the opposite happened.
SPEAKER_01: The more he dug up around Israel, the more he discovered inscriptions and coins and mosaics that confirm the message of not just Luke, but these all these historical sites.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, there's 25,000 historical references within Scripture.
SPEAKER_01: It's either people, places, governments, and most, every year that goes by, there's new discoveries.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, just go, if you want to go look up something fun, look up the top 10 archaeological, biblical archaeology discoveries in last year.
SPEAKER_01: Because every year they have to just wind it, you know, whittle it down to 10 because there are so many awesome discoveries.
SPEAKER_01: I had a friend who was on a dig at what was probably Sodom and Gomorrah.
SPEAKER_01: And remember the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, that's the in uh Genesis, that was the a city that got burnt with fire from heaven because of the sin of that city.
SPEAKER_01: So the crazy thing is they're digging up the Sodom, and what they find on the stones that are clearly cut by hand is a glaze over these stones.
SPEAKER_01: The only way to create this glaze over the stones is by a heat greater than was able to be produced at the time when the glazing took place.
SPEAKER_01: You know how you glaze pottery?
SPEAKER_01: We can do that in like a kiln.
SPEAKER_01: Well, there's this glaze over these rocks that could only come from a certain degree, temperature or degree, and that technology was not known in that day.
SPEAKER_01: So archaeology is just every year proving scripture to be more and more true.
SPEAKER_01: So Luke kind of writes this crazy first verse, listing off these different characters, and we're just like, who is this?
SPEAKER_01: Just really quickly.
SPEAKER_01: Uh Luke mentions Licinius.
SPEAKER_01: Now, up until I think it was 1961, uh, there were people, critics of scripture, who would say, nope, Luke got it wrong.
SPEAKER_01: Because the Licinius was actually born in 42 BC, before the time of John the Baptist.
SPEAKER_01: And then they found a second Licinius.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, there's two inscriptions to this second Licinius that were discovered and uh that mention Licinius' names.
SPEAKER_01: One of them dated from A.D.
SPEAKER_01: 14 through 37.
SPEAKER_01: It identifies Licinius as the Tetrarch of Abila near Damascus.
SPEAKER_01: So it just aligned perfectly with chapter one.
SPEAKER_01: So you've got to appreciate, even though sometimes it's hard to read these foreign names, you've got to appreciate the fact that Luke said at the beginning of this book, um, Theophilus, I want you to trust in this Jesus and to know that these accounts are viable.
SPEAKER_01: And he's doing that for us still to this day.
SPEAKER_01: Now, um, Luke goes on, and as he's explaining John the Baptist, you know that the um word came to John the Baptist as he's out in the desert.
SPEAKER_01: And I don't have time to explain the Essenes, but they are a third sect.
SPEAKER_01: You have the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes.
SPEAKER_01: The Essenes are a very interesting group, probably the closest you could get to kind of like a biblical um Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: They had a practice of baptism that was um, you know, very similar to how we do baptism.
SPEAKER_01: Um, they were ascetic, they had some very um interesting views about end times events that um interpreted Old Testament prophecy literally, and um they got a lot of stuff right.
SPEAKER_01: So it's not surprising that that John Baptist may have been a part of the Essenes and then uh received God's call upon his life in that setting.
SPEAKER_01: So we're told um in the narrative that he got this call, he began to preach, it says, and then Luke quotes Isaiah chapter 40.
SPEAKER_01: And here's what it says in Isaiah, or here's the quote: a voice of one crying out in the wilderness, prepare the way of the Lord, make his path straight, every valley will be filled, and every mountain and hill will be made low.
SPEAKER_01: The rope crooked will become straight, and rough ways smooth, and everyone will see the salvation of God.
SPEAKER_01: So, seven hundred years earlier, Isaiah the prophet had prophesied this very thing.
SPEAKER_01: Isaiah 40, you can look it up later in your in your Bibles.
SPEAKER_01: Isaiah chapter 40, verses 3 through 5, talks about this messenger in the wilderness who's going to prepare the way of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: So again, Luke is just helping us see how John is connected with Scripture.
SPEAKER_01: And just, I didn't have this in my notes, but we should be able, as we're doing life, we should be able to say, like, I do this in my life because of this verse.
SPEAKER_01: Do you remember on in Acts chapter 2, um, when this is after Jesus has ascended up into heaven, they're waiting for the promise of the Father, which is the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: On the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes down, there's like the tongues of fire over their head, and they start speaking in foreign languages, not in tongues.
SPEAKER_01: And the crowd says, Wow, they must be drunk.
SPEAKER_01: Somebody says, they must be drunk.
SPEAKER_01: And Peter, what does he stand up and say?
SPEAKER_01: Peter stands up and says, No, what you're seeing, this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel.
SPEAKER_01: Joel chapter 2, there's no chapter back then, but Joel chapter 2, this is it.
SPEAKER_01: This is what was prophesied about.
SPEAKER_01: Again, what you're seeing here relates back to this verse there.
SPEAKER_01: That's how we want to be as Christians.
SPEAKER_01: We want to be a people that are people of the book, that we live according to God's word, that our life looks like chapter and verse.
SPEAKER_01: Before any one of your friends, or your five by five, come with you to this church or to church with you, they're gonna be reading your life first.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: They are going to see the scriptures lived out through your life and my life.
SPEAKER_01: And so, Luke here, as he's talking about John, says this is, and he's preaching, he's saying, This is the one who's coming to fulfill Isaiah chapter 40.
SPEAKER_01: So note the message of John, right?
SPEAKER_01: So you go right out of the prophecy, um, ending in verse 6, and then we go into the message of John in verse 7.
SPEAKER_01: He then said to the crowds who came out to be baptized to them, You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come or the fire to come.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, produce cons uh consistent, or let your fruit be consistent with repentance, and don't start saying to yourselves, we have Abraham as our father, for I tell you, God is able to raise up children from Abraham from these very stones.
SPEAKER_01: And then he goes into the acts of the tree as lay at the root of the tree.
SPEAKER_01: So here's this message.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, here's this message from John.
SPEAKER_01: He's preaching to them, calling them to repent.
SPEAKER_01: It's it's repent, and then as a sign of repentance, come and get baptized.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: So, um, and uh so this, what places that John preached is it struck a chord with masses of people.
SPEAKER_01: So in these villages around Israel, John was traveling, he had a band of his own disciples, they would go into the city, he would preach this message, the people would respond.
SPEAKER_01: And their response was, okay, I am on board, I want to repent of my sins.
SPEAKER_01: So they would come down, they would get baptized into the water, he would bring them back up.
SPEAKER_01: That was called the baptism of repentance.
SPEAKER_01: And then they're also asking these questions, which is kind of the next part here from verses 11 through 14.
SPEAKER_01: We see three groups that are saying, What should I do?
SPEAKER_01: First the crowd says, What should I do?
SPEAKER_01: And and John the Baptist says to them, if you have two coats, give one away.
SPEAKER_01: If you have extra food, give some of your food away, right?
SPEAKER_01: So it's just this charity, this caring for the needs of others.
SPEAKER_01: Then the tax collector, what should we do?
SPEAKER_01: He says, Well, don't overtax people.
SPEAKER_01: And then the soldiers, what should we do?
SPEAKER_01: He says, Well, be content with your wages, right?
SPEAKER_01: Don't don't um don't compel people through violence to do anything.
SPEAKER_01: So there's these there's this responsiveness of the people.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think now's a good time to interject the fact that John the Baptist had this baptism of repentance.
SPEAKER_01: And once we go past Jesus' ministry into the book of Acts, we see that if you were baptized by John's baptism, that wasn't enough.
SPEAKER_01: So Peter and Paul would run into different groups of believers who had responded to John's message, but they didn't yet know about Jesus' message.
SPEAKER_01: So they'd kind of taken the first step, preparing their heart for the way of the Lord, but not yet responding to Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And so in Acts 18 and Acts 19, we see these two different groups who they've heard about John's baptism, but they weren't yet familiar with Jesus' baptism.
SPEAKER_01: And it's an important distinction that, you know, maybe when we go through the back, we'll cover it a little bit more.
SPEAKER_01: But but there is a difference that exists.
SPEAKER_01: Um the crowd responds, they get baptized.
SPEAKER_01: In other accounts, we see that there's an exchange between the Pharisees and John.
SPEAKER_01: They get into like a fight, and John's kind of you know rebuking the Pharisees.
SPEAKER_01: But Luke's giving us an encapsulated version of what happened on many different occasions.
SPEAKER_01: Um he's simplifying it for us here.
SPEAKER_01: Then in verses 19 and 20, or no, in verses 15 through 18, we see that the crowd is wondering, is this the Messiah?
SPEAKER_01: Is Jesus the Messiah?
SPEAKER_01: He says, I'm not the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: He describes Jesus as the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: And then in verses 19 through 20, we see that John is imprisoned because he calls out Herod, who is the leader, to repent for his sin.
SPEAKER_01: Herod had stole his brother's wife, amongst other evil things that he had done.
SPEAKER_01: And then we see in verse 21 through 23 that Jesus is baptized, and then we close off the chapter with a lineage of tracing Jesus' lineage through Joseph back to uh all the way back to Adam, which is quite a lineage, and a bunch of names.
SPEAKER_01: So that's kind of the outline.
SPEAKER_01: So let's let's talk about this for a second.
SPEAKER_01: Like, how does this how does this relate to us?
SPEAKER_01: First of all, let's just start with the fact that if you're if you're not a believer, if you don't know Jesus yet, there is stuff in this text that you can relate to.
SPEAKER_01: There's reality described in this text that you don't have to be a Christian to agree with.
SPEAKER_01: First of all, there is this um response of the crowd to John's preaching.
SPEAKER_01: It's it's um what I would call like a mini moral awakening.
SPEAKER_01: That, yeah, there's there's imperfection in me, yeah, there's a fruitlessness that's in my life.
SPEAKER_01: And whether you're a Christian or not a Christian, this is a human experience that the world is not perfect, that there's injustice in the world, that I'm not living up to expectations, that that uh life isn't just about me, or my dumb decisions do really hurt other people, or I need to give back to society.
SPEAKER_01: Um, or maybe, you know, like recently, powerful men shouldn't be allowed to sexually assault women.
SPEAKER_01: Um, unarmed black men shouldn't get shot by police.
SPEAKER_01: Neighborhoods shouldn't be segregated, uh, kids shouldn't suffer in classrooms without heat in winter.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, a culture wrestles and has these like mini moral awakenings.
SPEAKER_01: They don't know necessarily what to do about it, you know, like a hashtag me too.
SPEAKER_01: That's great.
SPEAKER_01: That's great, right?
SPEAKER_01: I'm glad that that women should be prepared.
SPEAKER_01: But it doesn't remedy the situation.
SPEAKER_01: Like you can be putting the hashtag me too on your Twitter account or your Facebook account, but still be an evil person, right?
SPEAKER_01: Still know your own fruitlessness, your own sin.
SPEAKER_01: And so when we look at this crowd, who they they're responding, they're having this mini moral awakening that Paul's calling to.
SPEAKER_01: And they they're deciding, and Paul, I mean not Paul, John is giving them a way to respond, right?
SPEAKER_01: You gotta love just these little responses.
SPEAKER_01: How what do we do?
SPEAKER_01: You know, how do they get baptized?
SPEAKER_01: What do we do?
SPEAKER_01: Well, you got an extra coat, go ahead and give it away.
SPEAKER_01: That doesn't that doesn't mean these people are saved once they do that.
SPEAKER_01: It doesn't want the tax collector, once he stops over taxing, it doesn't mean that that you know the tax collector is saved.
SPEAKER_01: But what was John's job?
SPEAKER_01: His job was to prepare the way of the Lord, right?
SPEAKER_01: So he's preparing hearts for God's message.
SPEAKER_01: So it is our experience, um, human experience, to have the light kind of switched on at points in life where all of a sudden we look in the mirror and it's like, I was made for more than this, or I suck, you know?
SPEAKER_01: That's a human experience.
SPEAKER_01: And here's the good news of scripture is that God agrees with you.
SPEAKER_01: You suck.
SPEAKER_00: But beyond that, beyond that, and I suck.
SPEAKER_00: Beyond that, though, he has a remedy, right?
SPEAKER_01: He has a solution, he has an answer, which we'll get to.
SPEAKER_01: But I'm just I want to just point out some of these common experiences.
SPEAKER_01: Another thing, you're reading the text, you don't have to be a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: Christian, to understand the experience of the idea that good human leaders, having a hope that a good human leader will be the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: You remember the crowd?
SPEAKER_01: They're impressed with John.
SPEAKER_01: And so they begin to ask John, because this crowd was Jewish, they're anticipating, they're waiting for a Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: They begin to wonder, is this the Messiah?
SPEAKER_01: The word Messiah means Christ, anointed one.
SPEAKER_01: And within Judaism, the Messiah was this anticipated figure.
SPEAKER_01: And the Jewish prophecies spoke of the Messiah coming and doing all these amazing things, right?
SPEAKER_01: Now the people didn't fulget what Jesus as the Messiah would do, but there was certainly an anticipation of the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: So John comes on the scene, he's having an impact, and these people are going, Are you the Messiah?
SPEAKER_01: Man, as a human, we do that, right?
SPEAKER_01: What happened this week on Friday morning in Baltimore City?
SPEAKER_01: Police Commissioner.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: So we get a new police commissioner, and there's this temptation to put to have a little bit of a new expectation.
SPEAKER_01: I wonder if you'll be able to solve problems.
SPEAKER_01: Now I didn't look at that and go, he's the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: But it's this idea of we can have expectations rise up that maybe this is the answer, maybe this is the solution for my problems.
SPEAKER_01: We are a people that are birthed to hope.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, what's the great character quality in children?
SPEAKER_01: They are hopeful, right?
SPEAKER_01: They haven't experienced enough life yet to become cynical and realize and get their hopes dashed enough times to have a heart to be heart sick.
SPEAKER_01: Baltimore is a heart sick city.
SPEAKER_01: It has had its heart dashed over and over again.
SPEAKER_01: I have never met so many people with heartache and broken hearts who just need, they need a messiah.
SPEAKER_01: They need a true messiah to meet them in their time of need.
SPEAKER_01: So here we have this human experience of hope, a hope that we will have a messiah.
SPEAKER_01: One other one.
SPEAKER_01: Let me just give you one other really quick human experience that you can relate to.
SPEAKER_01: We see Herod, who is the governor at the time.
SPEAKER_01: Herod, it says, was evil.
SPEAKER_01: So a part of our human condition is leaders.
SPEAKER_01: God allows leaders.
SPEAKER_01: Do you know God?
SPEAKER_01: It's God's plan to have human leaders raised up.
SPEAKER_01: Government reflects God's authority in the world.
SPEAKER_01: Because ultimately, God's authority is going to be known in the world.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus is going to be the ultimate king.
SPEAKER_01: In the meantime, he allows human authorities to be raised up, judges, governors, presidents, to be raised up to hopefully reflect his authority in the world.
SPEAKER_01: But here, what do we see about Herod?
SPEAKER_01: Was he a good reflection of God?
SPEAKER_01: No, it says he was evil.
SPEAKER_01: And so again, we can relate.
SPEAKER_01: The Bible says that there, while there are leaders that are raised up by God, they can make decisions to be evil.
SPEAKER_01: And we have it.
SPEAKER_01: We have a nation right now that is led by a man who sometimes is not godly.
SPEAKER_01: He's not reflecting the heart of God or the nature of God.
SPEAKER_01: So whether you voted for him or you don't like him, you should have an expectation that whoever is present, whoever is leader, that they are reflecting, that they are temporarily governing on behalf of God, that they're reflecting God's justice, God's authority, God's structure into the world.
SPEAKER_01: And when that leader doesn't, it's fine to raise your hand and say, nope, that's not right.
SPEAKER_01: That's not in line with the nature of God.
SPEAKER_01: So we have these experiences that are laid out.
SPEAKER_01: I just want to point it out because sometimes people come to the scriptures and they're like, you know, you have to be a Christian to get this book.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: You have to, you have to be all in to get it.
SPEAKER_01: And I want to tell you something, before you ever come to Jesus, it agrees with many of the things you think.
SPEAKER_01: I met this week with a lady who used to be Catholic, now she doesn't want to have anything to do with the church, and her biggest issue is with the hypocrisy of the church.
SPEAKER_01: And you know what?
SPEAKER_01: Jesus agrees with her.
SPEAKER_01: He hates the hypocrisy of the church, right?
SPEAKER_01: It's not Jesus' problem, it's the church's problem.
SPEAKER_01: And that's the amazing thing about the Word of God is that it oftentimes, whether you agree with God's word, it oftentimes will agree with you in your characterization and your observation of the world around you.
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to put my Bible college professor hat on just for a second.
SPEAKER_01: We're going to go into hermeneutics because we have four figures of speech in this text.
SPEAKER_01: Four figures of speech.
SPEAKER_01: And this is really what's going to drive it home.
SPEAKER_01: The four significant figures of speech are this.
SPEAKER_01: First, in verses four and five, we have this picture of a path being cut through the mountains, clearing the path for God to reach his people, preparing the way of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Then in verse 7, John preaching says, You brood of vipers, flee from the wrath to come.
SPEAKER_01: And then in verse 9, we have an axe cutting down a tree that is unfruitful, and also he's throwing that tree into the fire.
SPEAKER_01: And then in verse 17, we have the wheat of the farmer harvesting.
SPEAKER_01: This is verse 17, the wheat of farmer harvesting and cleaning the wheat and then throwing the chaff into the fire.
SPEAKER_01: Now we read this together.
SPEAKER_01: Did you notice those four figures of speech?
SPEAKER_01: A figure of speech is uh a literary agent, right?
SPEAKER_01: It's a literary device that is used to drive home a point, an important point, by using a comparison.
SPEAKER_01: Well, if you're using a metaphor or simile, right?
SPEAKER_01: You remember in English a metaphor is an unexpressed comparison, and the simile is an expressed comparison.
SPEAKER_01: So these here are metaphors that are being used, and it's important as you read scripture to interpret metaphors well.
SPEAKER_01: Many cults and many bad teachings in Christianity are based off of poorly interpreting figurative language, either similes, metaphors, parables, um, or allegories, interpreting them poorly.
SPEAKER_01: So it is really important to understand that these are figures of speech.
SPEAKER_01: They're obviously not supposed to be taken literally, but they're conveying a beautiful point.
SPEAKER_01: Let's take, for example, this um prophecy about John the Baptist, right?
SPEAKER_01: John the Baptist is called to prepare the way of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: And then it says of him that to make every valley is to be filled, and every mountain hill is to be made low.
SPEAKER_01: The crooked will become straight, and the rough ways will be to be smooth, and everyone will see the salvation of God.
SPEAKER_01: So he's using the language of cutting a path through the mountains.
SPEAKER_01: But then we watch John the Baptist do his ministry, and he doesn't put on a work cap.
SPEAKER_01: He doesn't get out a shovel and a pickaxe, right?
SPEAKER_01: He's not messing with roads, he's preaching a message of repentance.
SPEAKER_01: And so this metaphor here of clearing a path through the mountains, it's used to drive home a point that God wants driven home as he's giving this prophetic message to Isaiah.
SPEAKER_01: And here's the idea, right?
SPEAKER_01: The idea is that in order for God to reach the people he wants to reach through the Messiah, this path needs to be cleared.
SPEAKER_01: Now, there's this, it just so happened that like last week on Twitter, there was this featured moment on Twitter.
SPEAKER_01: Uh maybe you guys saw it, this man who's in eastern India, who is cutting, on single-handedly, cutting a 15-kilometer path for his kids to get to school.
SPEAKER_01: He's cutting it through six mountains.
SPEAKER_01: Here's what it says.
SPEAKER_01: Um, while there are some cases where, so his name is uh Jalhandahar Nayak, while there are some cases where the whole government machinery finds it difficult to build roads on land, Jalandahar is the one-man machine which has already scraped two mountains to build five to six kilometers of road for his family at Gumi village under Tabuja Panjat.
SPEAKER_01: Uh Pandat, believe it or not, he's been using his crowbar pickaxe and grub hoe, plus tenacity and determination to succeed in his endeavor, which is to carve a 15-kilometer road through five mountains.
SPEAKER_01: Driven by his need to build roads and equally stirred by the specter of no government intervention, Jalandahar began his mission one and a half months back.
SPEAKER_01: He has already completed five to six kilometers of road and seems undeterred till he has reached Subduli, which is where the uh school is, which is 15 kilometers from his house.
SPEAKER_01: There's pictures they go along with this guy cutting this path.
SPEAKER_01: Here's the idea, right?
SPEAKER_01: As you look at that man cutting that path, that's that's the spiritual work of John the Baptist.
SPEAKER_01: Oftentimes the message of Jesus doesn't just show up and it's not just received.
SPEAKER_01: Us as humans, God has to do this work in people's lives to prepare their hearts for the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: And sometimes it's a painful work, sometimes it resembles the cutting through the mountains in our life, or your neighbor's life, or your friend's life.
SPEAKER_01: So that's why, as a church, as we talk about people getting saved, I mean that's why we're starting a church, is so that new people who don't know Jesus, who are far from the gospel, lost people will come to know Jesus, we understand that there is a uh a mountain-cutting process that God has to do with people's lives.
SPEAKER_01: And it sometimes involves that plow and that um, you know, that pick and crowbar and whatever needs to be used to get through there.
SPEAKER_01: And but we have this picture of John doing the work, of preaching the gospel, of sharing the gospel message, and uh calling people to repentance.
SPEAKER_01: That's what it looked like for John to prepare the way of the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Now, one other note about metaphors in Scripture.
SPEAKER_01: Three times fire is referenced in this chapter.
SPEAKER_01: Fire is referenced in regards to these brood of vipers.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe in your NIV version it talks about the fire, the root of vipers.
SPEAKER_01: Then we see fire referred to that he says you're like a tree that needs to be a fruitful tree.
SPEAKER_01: You need to bear fruit.
SPEAKER_01: If you're not fruitful, what do you do with a unfruitful tree?
SPEAKER_01: You cut it down, you throw it in the fire, he says.
SPEAKER_01: If you're unfruitful, you're gonna get cut and thrown in the fire.
SPEAKER_01: And then he talks about the guy who harvests wheat.
SPEAKER_01: You knock the husk off of the wheat kernel, you take the cup, the husk, and you burn it up.
SPEAKER_01: It's not good for anything, it's it's useless, right?
SPEAKER_01: Three times it's used.
SPEAKER_01: So a couple weeks ago we had a question.
SPEAKER_01: Somebody had asked a question because they had been at another church and the other person was kind of diminishing their baptism experience and saying, Well, you need the baptism of fire.
SPEAKER_01: That's what you need.
SPEAKER_01: You need the baptism of fire.
SPEAKER_01: So we went and we looked at it and we said, well, where is that in scripture?
SPEAKER_01: Well, the baptism of fire, it's here in chapter three, and we don't know necessarily what the baptism of fire is.
SPEAKER_01: But in the context, here, what we have is we have fire referred to, not in a positive sense, three times.
SPEAKER_01: The fire that's referred to here, you and I don't want.
SPEAKER_01: We don't want to be the tree that's cut down and thrown into the fire, or the husk that's, you know, shelled, and we want to be the kernel of wheat, right?
SPEAKER_01: So it is important as we interpret metaphors that we're interpreting them within context.
SPEAKER_01: Because we don't know what the baptism of fire is, but we can see in the context where that is referred to.
SPEAKER_01: Here it is, um seems to be pretty clear that fire is a negative thing in this particular passage.
SPEAKER_01: So we have these beautiful metaphors.
SPEAKER_01: Let's finish off with this.
SPEAKER_01: In verse 8, in verse 8, John says to this group, you need to repent.
SPEAKER_01: You need to repent and produce fruit, fruit that's consistent with repentance, and don't start saying to yourselves, we have Abraham as our father.
SPEAKER_01: I want to close with this.
SPEAKER_01: Because this group was had the option to either repent and to acknowledge their sin, or they could hide in their Jewishness and say, I'm good.
SPEAKER_01: I'm Jewish, I'm born of Abraham.
SPEAKER_01: I don't need, I don't need to repent.
SPEAKER_01: It's easy as we encounter these moral moments, these moral, these mini moral awakenings with our culture, to go and and and put, use hashtag me too, or go, yeah, you know, shame on that guy, or shame on the president.
SPEAKER_01: And you know, it's easy to kind of wrap ourselves in clothe, clothe ourselves with self-righteousness, so that we feel like somehow we've improved upon our righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: But you know what?
SPEAKER_01: We are we need to be with this crowd who's ready to receive the baptism and repent.
SPEAKER_01: We do not have a leg to stand on before God.
SPEAKER_01: We don't have good works to stand on, we don't have anything to offer God.
SPEAKER_01: We truly need to be a people that are humble before God and say, God, I'm not gonna lean on any good work, no lineage, no you know, socioeconomic class, no job, no resume.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not relying on any of that stuff.
SPEAKER_01: I'm relying upon the work of Jesus Christ on the cross to put away my sin, pay for my sin.
SPEAKER_01: I want to clothe myself in with the robes of righteousness, the robes of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: So if that's if that's you, if you've never trusted in Christ, maybe you've had these more many uh awakenings in your life where you're like, you've recognized the world isn't perfect, and I'm a part of that, right?
SPEAKER_01: That's a good first step.
SPEAKER_01: That's that's the Lord preparing your heart for the Messiah, Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus came to put away our sin, to forgive our sin, so that we could be clothed with the righteousness of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: That's the key issue.
SPEAKER_01: A lot of people think Christianity is about sin.
SPEAKER_01: No, the core issue of Christianity is righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: What we need is righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: God didn't come to just point out your sin.
SPEAKER_01: That's the first part that He needs to deal with our heart and show us that we have a sin problem.
SPEAKER_01: But that's just the problem.
SPEAKER_01: That's just the diagnosis of a doctor.
SPEAKER_01: You don't get mad at a doctor for diagnosing you, neither should we get mad at God for diagnosing us as sinners.
SPEAKER_01: Instead, what we should be grateful for is that God had the anecdote, he had the remedy in his son, Jesus, to put away our sin.
SPEAKER_01: And that's what we're grateful for.
SPEAKER_01: We're a people that are grateful for the forgiveness of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Gosh, that's like half the sermon, but we're out of time.
SPEAKER_01: Such a great text.
SPEAKER_01: I love this text, man.
SPEAKER_01: There's just so much of Jesus coming through this as he's uh, you know, just he comes on the scene, and the father says, This is my son in whom I'm well beloved.
SPEAKER_01: Now we can't miss that, so we'll have to cover that next next uh time we're together.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray, and we'll have um Cindy and the team come back up and lead us at a few more a few more songs.
SPEAKER_01: God, there is a um there's a self-righteousness.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, you know, as I was reading this, there was a part of me that wanted to be like not in the crowd, not saying, What must I do?
SPEAKER_01: I kind of like wanted to look down on these people for not knowing how to respond.
SPEAKER_01: Because I'm proud.
SPEAKER_01: And we're we're self-righteous, proud people.
SPEAKER_01: And um, and we're sorry, God.
SPEAKER_01: We we really do need you, Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: We need the forgiveness of our sins.
SPEAKER_01: And so, God, as we um just as we worship you, as we we kind of celebrate the victory of Jesus uh here as we close out, um just just lay on our hearts, Lord, how we how we need to change, how you want to take this text and apply it to our lives and magnify Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: You're the hero, you're the you are our victim, and we celebrate you.
SPEAKER_01: So thank you, thank you for saving us.
SPEAKER_01: Praise this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: All right, so let's uh worship.