Message from the Wilderness
Sunday, December 09 2007, 01:10 PM EST
Contributed by: Sam Stone
Read Matthew 3:1-12
Typical of last minute Christmas shoppers, a mother was running furiously from store to store. Suddenly she became aware that the pudgy little hand of her three year old son was no longer clutched in hers. In a panic she retraced her steps and found him standing with his little nose pressed flatly against a frosty window. He was gazing at a manger scene. Hearing his mother’s near hysterical call, he turned and shouted with innocent glee: "look mommy! it’s Jesus - baby Jesus in the hay". With obvious indifference to his joy and wonder, she impatiently jerked him away saying, "We don’t have time for that!" (From "The Wonder of Christmas” by Glenn Pease.)
It’s scary to realize that our busyness of Christmas season can drive us to having no time for the reason of the season. How many of you have done your shopping? I dropped Clarence to the mall yesterday and it was quite jammed up and there were police everywhere to direct the traffic. I hardly go to the malls because I do all my shopping online. I have noticed that online shopping is more tempting than shopping at the malls because, if you shop at the malls, you have to be at the malls to actually buy things, but if you shop online things are just right at your face. And if you have bought once from one place, they will send you email every day telling you that they have a sale going on every day. So, the temptation is right there every day, especially when you see something that you know is definitely a good deal.
Organizational Expert Peter Walsh (left) exploring the house
There was an Oprah show a few weeks ago about a woman who filled her house with incredible amount of stuff that she bought and filled up her 3000 square feet home. (Look at this picture...this is their bed room, the young man is Organizational Expert Peter Walsh, and their bed is hidden behind these piles of stuff.)
After throwing away 75 tons of garbage which filled up 15 industrial size dumpsters, with a labor of 100 member clean up team, they filled up additional 1,800 large crates of resalable stuff, enough to fill 3 semi trailers.
The scene 1,800 crates in Oprah's studio
(These are the boxes that they used after the cleaning.) And this is a picture of the rummage sale; the picture covers only about a quarter of the scene (third slide.) They got more than $13,000 from the sale, which included more than 3,000 handbags and 3,000 pairs of shoes.
You know how she got all the stuff? She said, she looked at the advertisements from the stores and she was so good at identifying good deals and over the years she bought those things knowing that you couldn’t get better deals than those. More than 75% of the home’s furniture was destroyed by black mold and other infestations because they were covered by the stuffs she bought.
Partial view of the Rummage Sale
So, beware! Good deals can generate addictions too. After the Black Friday, we are in a continuous purchasing season until the end of the year. Consider how many of those things that we buy, we actually really need them. It can clutter our home leaving no room for the coming of Christ. Sometimes, it is not our house that is cluttered, but our heart, or our spiritual life is cluttered.
The scripture lesson this morning talks about John the Baptist, the forerunner of Jesus Christ. His life is a great contrast to what we have just seen. John the Baptist is the voice in the wilderness and he sends us three important messages that are very timely for us to hear at the time of year as we prepare for the coming of Christ. The first message is that you must...
1 – Examine the way you live
Socrates said, “Unexamined life is not worth living.” John the Baptist’s life prompts us to examine our life. The Bible says John’s wardrobe is very simple; he wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist; and his diet is even simpler; he ate locusts and wild honey. Clothing made of camel’s hair and leather belt sounds cool for us, but they were actually garments of the poor in those days. How about eating locust? I know none of you have tried that, but I have eaten a lot when I was back in Burma; they actually looked like large crickets. It was a seasonal diet. In fact, it is very delicious depending on the way you cook it. It is very nutritious and a great source of protein too. I have never thought of eating that with wild honey though; maybe I should try that when I go back and have the opportunity to eat them again. It might taste even better with honey.
John’s dress made him look like the Prophet Elijah in the Old Testament, who was promised to return right before the coming of the Lord himself. If John represents the return of Elijah, there would be more reason to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. In any case, his way of life challenges us to look at the way we live. I am not saying that we all should live like he did, but we should consider the reality that we actually don’t need much to survive, and sometimes things can keep us busy rather than simplifying our lives.
This week I made a list of questions for myself to read before I buy a new thing. One of the questions is “Would it simplify my life?” Otherwise, I won’t buy it. You know I love gadgets. But, now I’ve realized that each time I buy a new gadget, I have to learn to use it. Sometimes, I learned it, but stopped using it for a while, and when I came back to use it again and I had to relearn it. The point is some stuff can downgrade our quality of life than upgrading it. If a new stuff is going to make me busier, I rather not have it. For example, the digital video camera has become cheaper and easier to use, but how many people after shooting the pictures and movies have the time to download them, process them, and then upload them and enjoy them?
John’s life is teaching us a stewardship lesson here. Douglas W. Oldenburg, our former moderator, told us a story about a young man who had worked hard and struck it rich. He became very successful and wealthy, but found himself working 70-80 hours a week. He woke up one day and discovered that his hectic schedule was keeping him from doing so many of the things he valued most of all. He found that whenever he wasn't working at his job, he spent maintaining all the things he had, including two cars and two homes. He had always enjoyed visiting with friends, reading good books, and listening to classical music but because of his work schedule and maintaining all his possessions, he wasn't able to spend much time on those things.
So he decided to undertake a rather radical experiment for a year: he decided to reduce the number of things he owned to 250 things-every sock was one, every dish was one, every eating utensil, pair of pants, book, chair, CD and so on. Each time he bought something new, he had to give away something he owned, so the number would remain at 250. After a year of that self-imposed discipline, he found that he had actually done all the things he valued and had not been able to do before. He had spent more time visited with friends, he had read more books, he had had more time listening to classical music, and his life was much fuller and richer. And he decided to spend the rest of his life owning only 250 things.
I suggested that discipline to Sophie, and we agreed to “try” to reduce our stuff to 500 things for each of us to begin with. We will try, and I think it’s worth trying because when we simplify our lives we have more room for Christ.
The second message of John the Baptist to us is we must
2 – Examine the way you think
John said “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” The word “repent” in Greek literally means “to change your mind” or “to change the way you think,” just like Paul said in Romans 12:2a, “Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think.” (NLT)
With Hebrew understanding of the word for repent—“naham” meaning “to be sorry for one's actions" and “sub” meaning "to turn around to new actions"—it means feeling sorry for the past actions and changing behavior from now on. The word repent in English normally represents “feeling sorry for my actions” and does not necessary include the changing of my behavior. The Chinese translation of this word is more accurate, it is a combination of two words Hui-Gai, meaning repenting and changing. The point is repenting without changing our behavior is useless repentance. John said in verse 8, “Bear fruit worthy of repentance.” Ultimately our fruit will tell whether our repentance is real.
John’s target audience here was mainly the religious leaders of his day. He called them brood of vipers. It was a very strong word in those days because people commonly believed that vipers hatched inside their mothers’ wombs, then gnawed their way out to freedom, killing their mothers in the process; and parent murder was the most reprehensible of sins. [Source:
Roger Van Harn, The Lectionary Commentary : Theological Exegesis for Sunday's Texts (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2001), 13.]
What’s interesting about John’s baptism is that the Jews came to receive his baptism. In those days, they only baptize the gentiles that came to join Judaism, to wash them and cleanse them from their past way of life. But John’s made it clear that our ancestor’s faith cannot be passed on to us. Just because they are Abraham’s descend, that doesn’t mean that they are automatically saved. In our case, just because our parents believe in God, it doesn’t mean that we are automatically saved. Each of us has to repent and take responsibility for our own faith.
The third message of John is that we must...
3 – Examine the way we worship
This is the message of the Advent. John said, “I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” John is telling us about Jesus’ identity. He said that he is not worthy to carry his sandals. In his day, the job of carrying someone’s sandals is the job of a slave. He is saying that he is not even worthy of being a slave of Jesus Christ.
John said, Jesus will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. That is to repeat the prophecy of the Old Testament prophets that God would judge the wicked with fire and pour out his Spirit on the righteous (e.g., Isa. 44:3; 66:15–16; Joel 2:28–29). Who except God himself could be thought to pour out God’s own Spirit?
Matthew says, “This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said,
“The voice of one crying out in the wilderness:
‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’ ””
The logic is simple, John is the one that prepared the way of the Lord, and the one that he is preparing for is Jesus Christ. Therefore, he is saying that Jesus Christ is the Lord. There is no ambiguity here about Jesus’ divinity and there is no way to deny it. Jesus is the Lord that came to us in flesh. He came to give his life on the cross to redeem use from our sins. His resurrection proved that he is God and revealed to us what our life will be like in eternity. John is telling people to wait for him and worship him.
John said that he baptized us with water for repentance, but Jesus will baptize us with the Holy Spirit. Being baptized with the Holy Spirit means that being given the power to transform the world. Jesus said we must worship God with spirit and truth, which actually means worshiping in action with our way of life that is summarized in the Great Commandment and Great Commission.
So in this second week of Advent, as we wait for the coming of the Lord, let us examine the way we live, examine the way we think, and examine the way we worship.
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