What Jesus Wants (Second Sunday of Advent - Peace)

Life of the Church

Good morning everyone, Happy Sunday to you and welcome to our worship service. It’s good to see you here with us.

I have a couple of announcements that I’d like to highlight from your bulletins.

It’s Christmastime (Merry Christmas, by the way, I never get tired of saying that), so that means we’re busy being blessings for people in our church and our community.

Christmas gift bags for our homebound friends will be assembled and delivered on December 14. We’ll be taking donations for those, and you can leave them in Sue’s office.

We’re also baking cookies to be delivered to Stuarts Draft retirement community on December 21. We’ll get you more details on that as the date gets closer.

[Tree] or Della

We have a copy of the covenant up here for you to sign if you didn’t get the chance to last week.

Thank you to those who have agreed to serve on our security team, David, Fred, Barry, and Jennifer. We’ll be setting up our first meeting in the next couple of weeks to begin work on making our church safer.

Please continue to keep Linda and Kenny in your prayers for the passing of Betty Steele. It was a beautiful service yesterday out in Eagle Rock.

Also, please keep Ronnie Chandler in your prayers. Ronnie couldn’t have his surgery this week. His doctors are going to start some alternative ways of treating his tumors, so please be praying for Ronnie and for those who will be caring for him, and for Connie as well. God is good. God is always good.

And for some really good news, Petie’s little great-granddaughter Johanna had her surgery this week, and she’s doing very well. Please continue praying for her and her family.

Jesyka, do you have anything?

Sue, do you have anything?

Opening Prayer

Father we come to You during a season when we honor the birth of a baby, and in so doing acknowledge that You reached down to bless us all. To walk in the world as You once did in Eden, but in the form of a baby, in whose fragile body lay all the signs of sacrifice, the fulfillment of every prophecy of old, and all the promise and hope of eternal life for all who trust in You. This day and every day, we worship Jesus, our Savior and King, and we give thanks to You in His name, Amen.

Lighting of the Advent Candle

On this second Sunday of Advent, we light the second candle of our wreath, which is the candle of peace. This candle is a reminder that the Christ-child will bring peace into a troubled world. And boy, could this world use a whole lot of peace.

It’s important to always keep in mind that peace doesn’t mean no war or no conflict or no fighting. Peace isn’t the absence of something, peace is the presence of something.

Christ comes to fill us with peace. And he does this not with military might or political smarts, but with his very presence in our lives.

In Isaiah 9:6, we read:

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

{Light candle}

Will you pray with me:

Father we are so thankful for the peace you offer to the conflicts in our world, and also for the conflicts within us. And as your son brings peace, Father, let us bring peace as well. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console. To be understood as to understand. To be loved as to love with all our hearts. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.

Lottie Moon

As it’s Christmastime, that also means we turn our giving focus to Lottie Moon. This week is our week of prayer for International Missions. Our goal this year is $5,000, so please consider giving to that as you’re able, and please be in prayer for our missionaries. Harvey has a video for us on how important your Lottie Moon offering is.

Sermon

One of the first things we’re taught on the road to becoming Christians is that every one of us is bound by sin. Doesn’t matter who we are or how hard we try, we’re always either doing what we know we shouldn’t, or stumbling over something we know we should stay far away from, or choosing what we want over what’s right.

That’s the fundamental problem of being human. All the messes in the world that you read about and see every day, whether it’s a war or inflation or protests, can all be traced back to one of those three ways we’re bound by sin.

It’s either because somebody’s doing something they know they shouldn’t, or it’s because somebody’s stumbled over something they shouldn’t have been around, or it’s because somebody’s chosen what they want over what was right.

Another reason sin is a problem — and this reason is much bigger — is that sin keeps us from the one person we need and the one person who loves us most, and that’s God.

God is perfectly holy. That means God and sin cannot exist together. And God is perfectly just — He’s a God of justice, perfectly rewarding good and punishing evil — so He can’t just ignore our sin. So there’s a conflict between sinful us and holy God. There’s a separation between us and Him.

And that separation is the biggest problem of all, because there’s not a single thing we can do on our own to fix it.

God can’t stop being holy, and we can’t stop doing things we know are wrong — things that don’t just hurt us, don’t just hurt others or the world we’ve been given, but things that hurt God Himself. Every sin is a sin against Him.

That’s an important point that we don’t often think about — every day, we break God’s heart.

Imagine that. Here’s the all-knowing, all-powerful Creator of our universe, and He pours every bit of His love and creativity and care into making you. He gives you life, He gives you gifts and talents, He gives you a heart to go out into the world and do good, He calls you His precious child, and what do we do with all of that?

We throw it all away and live for ourselves. We toss away all of those blessings so we can chase after the temporary things of this world instead of the eternal things of the next, and we can’t even help it.

He created paradise for us to live in, and what did we do? We it threw it away, so God had to chase us out of Eden. The human race that was the apple of His eye, ones He made a little lower than the angels, grew so wicked that eventually God had no choice but to destroy the world in a flood, keeping only a single man and his family alive.

He was going to give us a chance to start over. And so what did we do with that chance? We just kept on being wicked. Kept on breaking God’s heart. And now here we are all these thousands of years later, so wicked that we don’t even need God to destroy our world anymore. We can do that just fine ourselves.

And all the while, that gulf between our evil selves and our holy Maker just kept getting wider and wider.

So what’s God supposed to do? I’ll tell you what He should do. He should just cut us loose. He should say, “If this is the way you want it, fine. Go ahead, have it your way. Make your choices and suffer your consequences.”

That’s what we would do, isn’t it?

But, you see, God isn’t us. If you ever find yourself wondering what you can be thankful for, that’s it right there: Get down on your knees and thank the God you love that He isn’t like you.

What’s God do instead? He says, “Those people I created who deny Me, those ones that carry a spark of Me inside them but live as if they hate Me, can’t possibly overcome the sin in their hearts on their own. So I’m going to help them. They can’t possibly rise up to reach Me, and so I’m going to lower myself to reach them.”

And because of that, we have Christmas.

That’s what Christmas is — it’s God reaching down to us because we can’t possibly reach up to Him. It’s God making the ultimate sacrifice just so we can be with Him again, and be at peace with His justice and holiness. That’s what this second Sunday of Advent is all about. It’s about a child who brings peace — peace between sinful you and a holy God, and also peace in the midst all of your life’s struggles.

Traditionally, the second Sunday of Advent is focused on the work of a person who was the bridge between the Old Testament prophets and the coming of Christ. That person is John the Baptist, and that’s who we’re going to be talking about today. Turn with me to the gospel of Mark, chapter 1. We’ll be reading verses 1-8:

The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

As it is written in Isaiah the prophet,

“Behold, I send my messenger before your face,

who will prepare your way,

the voice of one crying in the wilderness:

‘Prepare the way of the Lord,

make his paths straight,’”

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

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

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

And he preached, saying, “After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

And this is God’s word.

Who’s Mark? If you look through the list of Jesus’s disciples, you won’t see anyone named Mark. So if this man named Mark wasn’t one of the disciples, how can we trust anything he writes?

Well, in the years of the early church there was a Greek man named Eusebius, who’s called the Father of Christian History. We find out from his writings that just like Peter was a disciple of Jesus, Mark was a disciple of Peter.

When Peter was preaching in Rome, his words were so powerful that the crowds begged Mark to write down everything Peter said so they could read it over and over again. Peter was so humble that he didn’t think he was qualified to write a gospel, so Mark did.

This gospel is called Mark because Mark was the writer. But they’re Peter’s words, copied down from the sermons that he preached in Rome.

There’s no genealogy of ancestors here like you’ll find in Matthew. No story of the nativity like you’ll find in Luke. There’s no beautiful poetry like you’ll find in the first chapter of John.

Instead, Mark just jumps right into it, and verse 1 is all the introduction he gives. Notice what Mark says: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” But then Mark starts talking about someone other than Jesus.

Now that’s really interesting, isn’t it? Most of us would say that the gospel of Christ began with his birth in Bethlehem, or when he started his ministry. But Mark says the gospel actually begins with John the Baptist.

All of the gospel writers wrote their books to different audiences. If you remember last week, Peter was ordained to preach to whom? To the Gentiles, to the people who weren’t Jews. That’s who Mark is writing this book to. These are people who have absolutely no idea who the God of the Hebrews is. They don’t know all of those Old Testament stories or prophesies.

So the best way that Mark can describe Jesus to people who don’t know about the Old Testament is the way he describes him here — Jesus is the Son of God. He’s equal with his Father. He has the same sinless nature, the same eternal existence, and all the same perfection.

The gospel, then, according to Peter and written down by Mark, began with the appearance of John the Baptist. And in this passage, Mark says there are four things that made up John’s ministry.

First, the Old Testament prophets promised a coming Christ. Second, John appeared in a wilderness according to those promises the prophets made. Third, John announced the way to God. And last, he assured people that all of what he preached was true by baptism. Let’s look at each of these.

First, let’s talk about how the Old Testament prophets anticipated Christ. Look at what Mark writes in verses 2 and 3.

Now the translation that I use, which is the English Standard Version, gives Isaiah as the quote for those two verses. But in a lot of the earlier translations, the first part of verse 2 just says, “As it is written in the prophets ... ”

Meaning that in the original texts, Mark might have left out that it’s Isaiah who wrote that. And that makes sense, because remember who Mark is writing to. He’s writing to the Gentiles, and these were people who wouldn’t have even known who Isaiah was. So he would simply say, “as it is written in the prophets.” But it is Isaiah who first wrote the words quoted here.

There’s also the prophet Malachi, who wrote: “Behold, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and awesome day of the LORD comes.”

That prophecy is quoted in Luke’s gospel, when an angel visits Zechariah to say that his wife will give birth to a son named John. Luke 1:17 says, “ ... and he will go before him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready for the Lord a people prepared.”

Remember last week when Jesus asked the disciples who the people thought he was, and one of the answers he got was that people thought Jesus was Elijah, just like they thought John the Baptist was Elijah.

Well, they were right in a way. Both Isaiah and Malachi prophesied that before the Messiah would come, a messenger would be sent before him to prepare the way. That was John the Baptist. He wasn’t Elijah, but he fulfilled the role of Elijah according to these two prophecies by Isaiah and Malachi.

And John’s message would come at the greatest moment and with the greatest importance. That’s why the first word of verse two is that beautiful word, “Behold.”

Whenever you see that word in the Bible, it means you better pay attention to what comes next, because it’s both important and amazing.

God says through Isaiah, “I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way ... ”, and then down in verse 3 he says, “‘Prepare the way of he Lord, make his paths straight.”

There’s something very specific that Isaiah is talking about here. It was an ancient custom called “the king’s highway.” When two nations went to war, the king who won would leave his kingdom to visit the land his forces had just conquered. It was a way for the new ruler to establish his authority.

But the king wouldn’t travel alone. There was a long caravan of wagons and people and armies who would go along with him, which meant that all those miles of wilderness between where the king started out and where he would end up had to be prepared. A way had to be made.

One poet said that for a king’s highway to be built, “valleys were filled up, and hills leveled, the rough places were made plain and the crooked places made straight for the march of the great army.”

And going before that great caravan would be what was called a herald, who would call all of the people to prepare for the king’s arrival.

Isaiah uses all of this imagery to describe the kingdom of Christ. The wilderness was the world, and we’ll talk more about that in a minute. Leveling the hills was bringing down of spiritual pride of people who thought they could earn they way into heaven. When the poor in spirit were lifted up, the valleys were filled. When people renounced their sins, the rough places were made plain and the crooked places were straightened.

And going before that great caravan of the Messiah would be a herald telling the people to prepare for the coming king, and that herald was John the Baptist. John would prepare the way for the Lord, just as Isaiah and Malachi prophesied.

Now the second thing that made up John’s ministry — he appeared in the wilderness.

Look at verse 4: “John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

John preached in the desert region that stretched from Hebron to the Dead Sea. It was a dead, barren place almost entirely without life, with valleys of jagged rock more than a thousand feet deep. The Hebrews had a name for that wilderness. They called it “Jeshimon.” It means “the horror.”

Sounds like the perfect place to start a church, doesn’t it? Why in the world would John choose such a place of death and emptiness to be the place where he taught and preached?

Because the wilderness was a symbol. Because the desert John preached in was a picture of our world, and it was also a picture of us — of our dry, empty, barren lives. Because remember what we said at the start. Every day, we do what we know we shouldn’t, and stumble over what we shouldn’t get close to, and we choose what we want over what God says we need. How can that result in anything but barrenness in life? And how can that barrenness lead to anything but a lack of peace?

We’re constantly chasing after things that we think will make us happy, but they never do. So we go after the next thing and the next, and we find ourselves in despair because we have this deep hunger that none of the things we chase after can fill.

That’s the desert we live in, and so that’s the desert that John preached in. Because John knew the truth. We have a hunger that nothing in this world can satisfy because we’re not made for this world. We’re made for another, and the way to that new world is to discover a new life. John pointed the way to that new life by proclaiming what’s written in verse 4: “a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”

That’s John’s ministry in just a few words. That’s his message. Repentance is the way we come to God, and the result of that repentance is the forgiveness of our sins, and the result of that forgiveness is peace both with God and inside our hearts.

Of all the blessings you have, is there any greater than forgiveness? Is there anything our hearts need more than the peace of being right with God? That’s what the people in and around Jerusalem were looking for. And they found it when they went into the wilderness to listen to John.

But now wait a minute. John’s out there in the desert baptizing people. How can he do that? How can sins be taken away before the death of Christ happens? Because it’s your faith in Jesus and his resurrection that allows your sins to be forgiven, right? So what’s John doing here with this baptizing?

Here’s what he’s doing: he’s teaching that forgiveness needs to be understood before it can be practiced. Somehow we’ve all gotten the idea that the only way forgiveness happens is when somebody apologizes for something. If someone’s done something wrong to you, and if you can get them to say they’re sorry, then you forgive them.

But that’s completely wrong. Forgiveness has to start way before the person who hurt you comes to you. That’s the lesson of the prodigal son, isn’t it? The prodigal son comes home after wasting all of his father’s wealth. He’s broken and humbled. But the moment his father sees him, he flings open his arms and runs. Before the son can even ask for forgiveness and say he’s sorry, the father’s holding him in his arms and planning a feast.

You see? Forgiveness doesn’t start with someone who’s wronged you saying they’re sorry. Forgiveness starts with you, in your heart. It starts with being ready to forget the hurt they caused, because that’s what forgiveness really is for God. He forgets how you’ve hurt Him. He treats your sins like they never happened.

John’s message is that God will offer that forgiveness, but you have to repent first. And in verse 5, we see how much that message resonated with the people. All the country of Judea were going out to John. All the people in Jerusalem. Does that mean every single person came to hear him preach and be baptized? No. There will always be people who won’t respond to God’s call.

What Mark means is that every kind of person came. The rich came. The poor came. The famous, the unknown, men, women, children. The powerful and the weak. John’s words pierced the hearts of every kind of person because his message was God’s message, and God’s message is to everyone in every time.

Then starting in verse 6, Mark moves from John’s message to John’s appearance. Mark doesn’t mention these things just to create a picture of John the Baptist in our minds. He mentions them because they’re all symbols of his mission. Everything about John was the message he preached. That was the focus of his entire life.

He wore clothes made of camel hair. Camel hair is rough. It’s coarse. It feels like sackcloth. When people in the Old Testament would repent of their sins, they’d put on sackcloth. It was an act of humility. In Psalm 30, David talks about how genuine repentance leads to forgiveness when says that God “loosed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy.”

John says, “Peace is yours, but you have to repent.”

He says, “Heaven is yours, but you have to turn away from this world before you can embrace the next one.”

He wore a belt made of leather. Remember the belt of truth? Soldiers would tuck their robe into that so they could run in battle. People who weren’t soldiers would do the same thing. They’d tuck their robes into their belts so they could work.

And for John, life was all about work. That was his message too. Real life, the life God wants you to have, is the furthest thing from boring.

His diet was simple, and this was another way for John to show his separateness from the world. Locusts were sometimes ground into a paste and then mixed with flour and water to make cakes. Other times, people just put a little salt on them and popped them right into their mouths. Wild honey came from hives John would find in trees or in the hollows of rocks.

Food at his most basic. And again, this is consistent with John’s message. Stop living like this world is the only one that matters, because everything in this world just points to the next one.

That’s quite a picture Mark paints, isn’t it? Most of us think of John as this rugged fearless guy who preached judgment and torment. But if that was the message John preached, would anyone have gone all the way out into the wilderness to hear it? John didn’t preach like that. He preached the gospel. And what does the gospel mean? It means the good news.

That was what drew all of those people away from their cities and towns to the desert to hear. That was food for a hunger they couldn’t feed, and water for a thirst they couldn’t quench. It was an offer of peace from a God of love. And what does love drive out? Love drives out sin.

And what is sin? It’s always good to get a little refresher on the basics from time to time, so let’s do that right now. What is sin?

Sin is basically self-centeredness. We sin because we’re not thinking about God, we’re thinking of ourselves, indulging ourselves, looking out for ourselves.

And sin always produces guilt. We hate ourselves because of what we do. We hate the hurt we cause in others, but we still do it. We feel responsible for the damage we do in other people’s lives, but we still damage. And we feel guilty. Talk to any psychologist, they’ll tell you that the greatest problem that people wrestle with is self-hatred. Self-hatred is just another word for guilt.

So we sin, and we can’t stop sinning, and that leads to guilt. And guilt always leads to fear.

But there’s hope, and that hope comes in the form of unconditional love. Look at verses 7 and 8:

“And he preached, saying, ‘After me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”

To stoop down and untie a person’s sandals was a servant’s job. John’s saying he’s not even worthy of being called a servant of Christ. But Christ’s love makes us worthy, and John says, “I baptize you with water, but he’ll pour out his spirit on you so completely that you’ll be cleansed of every sin.”

That’s the message Isaiah promised. That’s the message of Christmas. It’s a child born as a gift for the whole world, one wrapped not in flesh and bone but in the love of a God who will do anything to pursue you because He refuses to give up on you. Refuses to leave you broken and alone. Refuses to let you go another moment without knowing how much He cares for you.

Last week, we learned that this is the season for hope. It’s the season for peace, too. It’s a reminder that God came to dwell among us because we’re all a wilderness inside.

This can be a hard season for a lot of people, and I’m including Christians. Just because you’re saved doesn’t mean you can’t be hurt, or can’t be grieving, or can’t feel alone.

But Christmas is a time for gifts. God gave you Christ. Christ gives you peace. So the question is, What gift will you give to your Lord this year?

Or let me put it another way: What’s the best kind of gift you can give somebody you love? Because there are really just two kinds. You can give them what you think they need, or you can give them what you know they want.

When it comes to Christ, you can’t give him what he needs because he doesn’t need anything. Christ lacks nothing. The only gift you can give him, then, is what you know he wants. And what does Christ want? What does Christ want from you?

1 Peter 5:7: “ ... cast all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you.”

Psalm 55:22: “Cast your burden on the LORD, and he will sustain you ... ”

Matthew 11:28: “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”

You want to give Jesus a present this Christmas? Then give him what he wants. He doesn’t want your joy. He doesn’t want your peace. He doesn’t want that fake smile you wear that says, “Everything’s fine, I’m doing great,” when he knows everything isn’t fine and you’re not doing great at all.

Jesus says, “I know you pretend with your friends, with your family. I know you even pretend at church. But you can’t pretend with me. So give me what I want. I want your hurt. I want your grief. I want your worry and your disappointment.

“I want all those things that weigh you down, because then I can flatten every hill in front of you. I can fill every valley you’re lost inside. I can make straight every crooked way you keep taking. I’m going to make the king’s highway right through your heart. Then you’ll have joy. Then you’ll know my peace.”

That’s what Jesus wants for Christmas. So if you’re ready to give him all of your mess, all of the junk you’ve been carrying around, then I’m going to invite you up here as we sing our closing hymn. Come up here to this altar, and cast your burdens. Or you can just shut your eyes right where you are and do the same.

Either way, Christmas is a time for gifts. God gave you His greatest gift, His greatest care, wrapped up in a child. All He asks in return, all God wants, is that you give Him your greatest cares too.

Let’s pray:

Father so often the cares we have in this world steal the peace that you moved heaven and earth to provide. That’s true especially during the Christmas season. We’re thankful for a baby in a manger. We’re thankful for angels and shepherds and wise men. But don’t let us forget to be thankful of that peace you provide in that little boy. Remind us, Father, that just as You gave us all we need to find peace with You forever, you also want from us all of our fears, all of our grief, all of our earthly cares, because only when we surrender those things to You will You grant us the peace we so desperately need. For it’s in Jesus’s name we ask it, Amen.