John Sends His Disciples to Jesus

Welcome to the teaching ministry of Kungsvinger Lutheran Church. Kungsvinger is a beacon for the gospel of Jesus Christ and is located on the plains of northwestern Minnesota. We proclaim Christ and Him crucified for our sins and salvation by grace through faith alone.

And now here's a message from Pastor Chris Roseberg. The Holy Gospel according to.

John the Baptist in Prison and the Question of the Messiah

St. Matthew, the 11th chapter. When John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, Jesus answered them, The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, the poor have good news preached to them, and blessed is the one who is not offended by me.

And as they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John. A reed shaken by the wind? What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings' houses.

What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. This is he of whom it is written, Blessed. Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you.

This is the gospel of the Lord. In the name of Jesus. So what would you do if you only had maybe a week or two or maybe a month to live? Think about it. There's kind of certain things that are standard procedure, if you would.

Oftentimes when somebody gets the bad news, if they're healthy enough, then it's time to take that trip that they've been putting off. Maybe head off to Australia or New Zealand or go and see the Orient or maybe Europe or something like that.

You only live once. That's kind of a standard thing to do. Get a couple of things off the bucket list. And then you think about others. Maybe important people who may have been heads of state or something like that.

What do they do? Well, they don't wait to the last minute. Well, one president did. But they begin to write their memoirs to talk about the important stuff that they did in office. I think of Ulysses S. Grant.

Great general, terrible president. Great general. He was the guy who kind of put the math together and figured the only way we're going to win this is if we kill a lot of guys. And since we have a lot of them, let's just throw as many as are necessary into winning the war against the South.

And that's what he did. And after the assassination of Lincoln and after just a short amount of time, he was elected president in the United States. Eight years he served in the United States. And it's a low watermark in our history.

It's just full of griff, graph, scandal, waste. It's a mess. And what happened with Ulysses S. Grant, you'll note that throughout his career as a general and also as a president, he's often depicted as smoking a cigar.

He was a cigar-chomping kind of guy. And as he got older, he got word that he had throat cancer, inoperable, he was going to die. And what was interesting is that prior to that, after he had left office in the United States as a president, he joined on as a partner in some kind of a major financial firm.

And one of the partners embezzled a huge amount of money and bankrupted the company. And he lost his entire fortune as a result of it. Talk about a bad move, right? And so with the news that he has only so long to live, how did Ulysses S. Grant spend his last days?

Writing his memoirs. Writing his memoirs and his history. And that's how he spent his last days, kind of ruminating, thinking through about the things that he did. Now, in his particular case, after writing his memoirs, when they were published, they were such runaway bestsellers that his family fortune was restored.

And his family was able to actually have an inheritance, something that it didn't look like they were going to have. But all that being said, you'll note that we human beings have a tendency to turn in on ourselves as we get closer and closer to death.

Well, in our gospel text today, John the Baptist has already been arrested. He's in prison. In fact, he's in the palace of Macarius, and that's where we know where he was imprisoned. And the caterers for Herod's party have already been hired.

The decorations have started to arrive. He hasn't got very long to live. But if you remember John the Baptist, he was prophesied by the prophets. Even Jesus makes it clear that John the Baptist was the one who the prophets spoke of.

Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you. In fact, John the Baptist began his work of preparing people for the Messiah all the way back when he was in utero. He leapt when he was in the presence of Christ who was in the womb of the Virgin Mary, filled with the Holy Spirit.

It overflowed into his mother, Elizabeth. It's kind of a fascinating thing. But here's where we're going to pay attention to what's going on here. There are those who read this text and think that John the Baptist, as he's drawing near to the end of his life, that he's somehow having a crisis of faith.

Maybe, just maybe, he'd wasted his time and he pinned the tail on the wrong Messiah. And as a result of it, that's the reason why he's sending his disciples to kind of shore up his flagging faith as he is cooling his heels in prison.

And I, and many others, strongly disagree. Strongly disagree. Think of it this way. John the Baptist, in our text, has disciples. Jesus has already come on to the scene. Was John the Baptist sent to create John-ites?

No. He was to prepare the way for people to become Christians. Those who believed and trusted in Christ. In other words, the fact that he has disciples is actually the problem. We'll kind of explain this here.

In fact, his disciples, we learn from another passage in the Gospel of John chapter three, that they kind of thought about ministry the way a lot of guys think about ministry. It's kind of a zero-sum game turf battle.

You've got to make sure that your ministry has the right amount of people and the other people are not quite as spectacular as you are. But listen to what it says in John chapter three. A discussion arose between some of John's disciples and a Jew over purification.

So they came to John and they said to him, Rabbi, he who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you bore witness, look! He is baptizing and everyone is going to him. Gasp. Whatever shall we do? Right?

Isn't that the whole point of John the Baptist's ministry? That everybody would go over to him? And so you'll note, we learn from this cross-reference that John's disciples are a little bit competitive when it comes to ministry.

And they don't understand what's going on. So listen to the words of John the Baptist. John answered, well, a person cannot receive even one thing unless it's given to him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness that I said I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.

The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. So he's basically saying, listen, I'm one of the invited guests to the wedding. I'm not the bridegroom. He's actually part of the bride, but that's a whole other discussion.

So the friend of the bridegroom who stands and hears him, he rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's voice. Therefore, this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase. I must decrease. And you see, that's, I think, a good way to kind of frame this.

So John's disciples, well, he still has disciples, and John's trying to shoo them away. Get on with it. You're supposed to be going over to Jesus. I'm in prison, cooling my heels, right? So John heard in prison about the deeds of the Christ.

He sent word to his disciples and said to him, Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another? You see, John's really not worried about this. He already knows. He has said previously that Christ must increase, he must decrease, and that his joy is complete.

The bridegroom has arrived. And so the question is asked by John's disciples for the sake of John's disciples, who are still kind of glomming on to John. So Jesus answered them, you go and you tell John what you hear and see.

And by Jesus saying these words, it's almost as if, you can kind of see it, that John's disciples show up earlier in the day, and Jesus is busy doing things. And so maybe they talked to Peter, or maybe they had a conversation with John, and they said, you know, we're a little busy right now, but you're really important.

We'll get you to Jesus as soon as he has a moment. But if you'd like to stay and see what the Lord is doing, well, by all means. And Christ said, you go and tell John what you've seen and what you've heard.

They saw the blind receive their sight. They saw the lame walk. They saw lepers cleansed. They saw the deaf giving their hearing back. They even saw the dead raised and heard the good news preached to the poor.

That's quite a day's work, right? How many miracles have I performed? Zero, right? Oh, by the way, how many did John perform? None. Right. And see, this kind of gets at something that we have to talk about.

And that is that there's always been a temptation to think of ministry as my ministry, right? Or a pastor thinks, I am, this is my church. This is my thing. Oy yi yi. Knock it off. And then what happens is, unfortunately, there are a lot of people who kind of follow along with this.

And they create this celebrity pastor culture where the pastor can do no wrong. He doesn't walk on water, but they treat him like he does, right? And if you offer a criticism, they say, touch not. God's anointed.

Oh, come on. Seriously? Right? And it's in the immediate context before our epistle text that Paul takes this on head on. The church at Corinth was doing that. Some were saying that they were followers of Paul.

Others said, no, we like Apollos. And Paul's just going, oy vey. Right? Kind of what John is doing here. So let me read the immediate context from chapter 3. Paul writes, I, brothers, I could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ.

I fed you with milk, not with solid food. You couldn't even keep that down. I had to give you a burpee cloth and a binky, right? You weren't ready for it. Even now you're not ready. You are still of the flesh.

For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For one says, I follow Paul. Another says, I follow Apollos. Are you not being merely human?

Yeah. And then he asks the question, what then is Apollos? What's Paul? By the way, the answer is going to be nothing. They are servants. Think of us as slaves. Servants through whom you believed as the Lord assigned to each.

I planted, Apollos watered, God gave the growth, and then listen to verse 7, so neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. The great Apostle Paul, who wrote most of the New Testament, the great Apostle Paul, who is an eyewitness of the resurrection of Christ, what does he say he is?

Nothing. I'm a servant. Yeah, that's what he says. So here's the thing. This kind of takes all the steam out of the concept of celebrity pastors. If somebody says that they're a disciple of Stephen Furtick, or Rick Warren, or Brian Houston, or Phil Pringle, or name the super important T .D. Jakes, or something like that, and that's the problem.

You go into a Christian bookstore, or you go into a normal bookstore, and they go to the Christian section, and always and again, you can always tell the celebrity guys. How? Because their books have their face on the cover.

This is backwards. Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything. By the way, I don't have any disciples. If you think you're my disciple, we need to have a chat. We're all here to be Christians.

We're disciples of Christ. There are no Chrisites. That's a heresy. Let's just get that on the table. And the guy who's going to follow me, he's going to preach the same gospel I preach, and he's going to be just as much a servant as I am.

And if he isn't, sack him. That's kind of the idea. So the one who plants and the one who waters, they're not anything. It's only God who gives the growth. So he who plants and he who waters are one. Each will receive his wages according to his labor.

For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field. You are God's building. So then here's the next bit of this, and this is kind of fun. You've all heard that pastors and those who teach in Christ's church, they have a stricter judgment.

That's what this looks like coming up next here in this passage here in chapter 3. The stricter judgment. Here's what it looks like. So according to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder, I laid a foundation.

Someone else is building on it. So let each one take care how he builds upon it. No one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one's work will become manifest, for the day will disclose it because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done.

So let's just put it this way. Pastors and teachers in the church are tempted just like everybody else. They can be motivated by vainglorious things and think, oh, I need to build a kingdom to myself.

Well, using Paul's analogy here, the person who does that is building on the foundation of Christ, and they're building on the foundation with hay and straw. It's almost like the three little piggies story, right?

But rather than the big bad wolf blowing their house down, Jesus on the last day says, ah, what a, wow, what'd you build there? Well, that's cute. Let's test that thing, shall we? And here's the fire.

Sets it on fire. It's gone. So a lot of these guys who are out there into the rapid growth, we're going to put away the gospel, we're going to put away the Bible. We'll only get maybe one or two verses out of context and give people, well, life tips on how to make their life better.

That's about as hay straw as you get, right? Well, it's all going to be tested by fire. And all that growth that they bragged about, it's going to all be burned up, right? The fire will test what sort of work each one has done.

If the work that anyone's built on the foundation survives, he'll receive a reward. If anyone's work is burned up, he'll suffer loss, even though he himself will be saved, but only as through fire. Do you not know that you are God's temple?

Not mine. God's. You are God's temple. God's spirit dwells in you. If anyone destroys God's temple, God will destroy him. For God's temple is holy. You are that temple. So let no one deceive himself. If anyone amongst you thinks that he's wise in this age, I am so smart.

I have studied so much. I am just the bee's knees when it comes to biblical knowledge, right? When somebody's like that, if anyone among you thinks that he's wise, let him become a fool so that he may become wise.

For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. For it is written, he catches the wise in their craftiness. So the Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are futile. So let no one boast in men.

That's a command from God. Let no one boast in men. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the world or life or death or the present or the future. All are yours, and you are Christ's and Christ is God's.

And then we get to our text. So this is how one should regard us as servants of Christ, stewards of the mysteries of God. And over and again, you've heard that phrase, I even mentioned it before, touch not God's anointed, belog not.

Because here's an important distinction. All pastors are supposed to be stewards of the mysteries of God, but it is required of stewards that they be found faithful. Yeah, just because you're a pastor doesn't mean you're a faithful pastor.

Just because you're ordained doesn't mean that you are being faithful with the mysteries of God or that you're rightly preaching the truth. So as soon as we lose the, oh my goodness, he's such a popular pastor, to get down to business and ask the question, is he faithful with the mysteries of God?

Is he rightly preaching Christ? Then we can begin to ask the right questions. And stop thinking in human terms. And that's exactly what John the Baptist is doing in our Gospel text today. He's sending his disciples to Jesus.

Go guys, go. And what's weird is is that it's only the Gnostics today that actually claim any kind of lineage to the teaching of John the Baptist. A little bit of a note. It's kind of a weird thing, but true.

So Jesus told them, you go tell them what you heard and what you saw. They saw the blind receive their sight. They saw the lame walk, the lepers cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead raised, oh and the poor, that's all of us, good news, preach to them.

And blessed is the one who is not offended by me. Jesus knows full well that he wasn't meeting the popular expectations of the Messiah. They expected him to come in riding on a war horse and to get rid of the Roman Empire and set up the Davidic Kingdom.

You know, re-fire that thing back up. And what's Jesus doing? He's going to the absolute sinners and those who've been wrecked by sin. The blind, the lame, the deaf, even the dead. The wages of sin is death.

And Christ is the one having mercy on all of them. And rather than conquering Rome, he's instead conquering the dominion of darkness. And that's the important bit. And so Jesus then, after they leave, he affirms that John is exactly who the Scripture said he was.

But when you think about it, what did the Scripture say about John the Baptist? And this is where our Old Testament text is so helpful today. Because when we think of John the Baptist, we think of him kind of like a firebrand.

Obviously he had that weird diet. I'm still upset every time I have to mention it. Locusts and honey. I don't care how much honey you put on a locust. I ain't eating it. Somebody yesterday told me that locusts and grasshoppers taste like peanut butter.

I don't care. I'm still not eating a bug. It ain't happening. So he eats locusts with honey. He's dressed in rough camel hair, has a belt. Really, he kind of has the uniform of Elijah. And of course he's preaching repentance.

But listen to what the prophet Isaiah says regarding the ministry of John the Baptist and the task that he was given to do. And it begins with the word, comfort. Comfort. Comfort my people, says your God.

And isn't that exactly what the message of repentance and the forgiveness of sins does? It comforts us. Because each and every one of us know that we wrestle daily against the dominion of darkness that still dwells within our sinful flesh.

The world that tempts us to sin and to despair and to not have faith. The world that teaches us to be mean. To show hatred. To look out for number one. The world that teaches us that God isn't really important.

What's really important is entertainment. Or something else. Or money. Or power. Things of that nature. Each and every one of us, having heard God's law preached to us, knowing full well that we've earned the wrath of God, God does not want you to sit there and continue to fear him in his justice.

Fear that he's going to come to you in his wrath. Because in the first advent of Christ, Christ doesn't come to condemn sinners. He comes to bleed and die for them. And John the Baptist, who prepared the way for Christ, was given the task by God through the prophet Isaiah to comfort the people of God.

And to speak tenderly to Jerusalem. To cry to her that her warfare is ended. That her iniquity is pardoned. And that she has received from the Lord's hand double for all of her sins. I love this picture.

Because often times we are tempted for various reasons to think that maybe, just maybe, there isn't enough grace for me. Maybe, just maybe, I may have messed up so far this time that Christ's death will not cover it.

And the picture that we hear from Isaiah in the comforting command that he gives to John the Baptist is to assure people that Christ's death was not only sufficient, it was double what was necessary. That's helpful.

In fact that's super comforting. In fact, double is like one of my favorite words anyway. Because I like double doubles. Why have a single patty when you can have double? Animal style. But that's kind of the point.

Is that God doesn't give us a single patty hamburger of grace. He gives us a double patty. A double portion. A double forgiveness. A double pardon. Everything that you have done God gives you double the grace for it.

That's comforting. So in the wilderness then prepare the way of Yahweh. And by the way, the wilderness is a type and shadow of the life that we are living now as Christians. Life as we live now, having been baptized into the Red Sea of Christ, death and resurrection.

We are in our wilderness wanderings heading towards the real promised land, the new heaven, the new earth. And so in our wilderness we continue to prepare the way of the Lord. And by the power of the Holy Spirit cry out to God to make straight our paths, a desert in the highway for our God.

So that every valley of sin in our life, all the things that we have left undone shall be lifted up. That every mountain, all the ways in which we have transgressed God's law so high handedly, that they would be made low.

And that the uneven ground that we're all capable of producing in our sin would be leveled and the rough places buffed out and made plain. And the glory of the Lord will be revealed, the text says, for all flesh will see Him together.

Why? Because the mouth of the Lord has spoken it. And we are reminded then in our wilderness wanderings that our life is fleeting. And that's the next part of what we see in Isaiah. A voice says, cry.

And the person says, well what shall I cry? Cry out that all flesh is grass. All its beauty is like the flower of the field. The grass withers, the flower fades. When the breath of Yahweh blows on it, surely the people are grass.

And that's our story here. Youth lasts but a minute. And then the slow march towards death begins. And we've all begun that march. And we recognize that we are fading. Going to experience in our own body the wages of our own sin and transgression.

But here then there are comforting words. And the comforting words are this, that even though the grass withers, the flower fades, but the Word of Yahweh, of Elohim will stand forever. And you sit there and go, well how is that comforting?

I mean the Word of our God will stand forever, but we're fading like the grass. Do you not know who the Word of God is? Jesus is the Word. He has bled and died for you. You have been united with Him in His death and resurrection.

You are safely tucked into the wounds of Christ right now. And you have full pardon of all of your sins. And even though the grass withers and the flowers fade, Christ will stand forever. And because you are in Him, you will stand forever too, pardoned.

So brothers and sisters, let us cast aside all of our sin that weighs us down and trips us up. Let us lose this idea that we need celebrity pastors or somebody who can really bring in a crowd. And let's go back to the simple understanding that we are all disciples of Christ.

We are not disciples of men. We are disciples of the One who bled and died for our sins so that we can be pardoned and forgiven. And He is the One who speaks to us today. Be comforted, my people. Your warfare has ended.

Your iniquity is pardoned. You have received from Yahweh double for all of your sins. In the name of Jesus. Amen.

We thank you for your support. All of our teaching messages may be freely distributed as long as you do not edit or change the content of the message. And again, thank you for listening.

Amen.