Matthew 3:1-6 - Dec 17, 2023

Mount Zion Community Church

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All right. Well, good morning, everybody. And again, because maybe you were warned, maybe you already knew,

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I will tell you one thing that we can't compromise on and that we won't compromise on here is the time that we spend in the

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Word on a Sunday morning. So if you need to leave,

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I understand. I will not take it personally. And we're gonna jump right into this.

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So if you've never been here before, we are stepping through the Gospel of Matthew and we're looking at each and every verse.

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And this is what we're gonna be doing for an interminable length of time. So feel free to get out that little ribbon in your pew

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Bible and drop it in Matthew 3. For now, we're gonna look at verses one through six. But first, so we'll talk about where we've been.

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So we just went through the infancy narratives of Jesus Christ, that's about where he was born, the virgin birth, the genealogy.

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But now, we're gonna start getting into Jesus's actual ministry and the things that he did when he was here on the earth.

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But first, we have a little bit of an interlude. We have a little bit of a break in the story because Matthew is gonna introduce us to another character here who's very important to the

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Gospel story. This is somebody who has a tremendous amount of significance and you'll see him throughout the

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Gospel of Matthew. And this character is John the Baptist. And there's not only a number of lessons that we can take from John and who he is, but as is customary for Matthew, there are several things, some things that are obvious, some things that are not so obvious, that he has to teach us about who

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Jesus is as well. And I wanted to focus on one thing. This is not in our passage today.

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It's something we're gonna get to a few weeks down the road. But I want you to hear what Jesus says about John the

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Baptist as we get ready to see him. Matthew 11, 11 says this. Truly, I say to you, among those born of women, there is not arisen anyone greater than John the

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Baptist. And that's pretty high praise coming from the Messiah himself to say that no one has been greater.

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And it says a lot about who John is. And before we go any further, here's what

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I would like you to do. Let's do a brief exercise. I want you to get a mental picture of what you think about when you think about a great man.

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What does he look like? What does he wear? Where does he live? How does he interact with people?

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What kind of job does he have? What kind of food does he eat? You know, just develop as detailed a picture as you can of what constitutes a great man.

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I'll give you just a second. I'll take a sip of water, then we'll come back. All right, so we have in our mind a picture of a great man.

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Let's read our entire passage for the morning. Matthew 3, verses one through six. It says, now in those days

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John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

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For this is the one referred to by Isaiah the prophet, saying, the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make ready the way of the

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Lord. Make his path straight. Now John himself had a garment of camel's hair and a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey.

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Then Jerusalem was going out to him, and all of Judea, and all the district around the Jordan, and they were being baptized by him in the

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Jordan River as they confessed their sins. Now if your picture of a great man involved a camel hair garment and a leather belt around the waist and somebody eating locusts and wild honey, then you're free to go.

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You're holier than I am, and you already know what's going on. Sorry. Sometimes I make jokes that I shouldn't.

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But the way we get here is kind of an abrupt transition from Matthew. Because we were just looking in the life of Jesus at what happened when he was a baby.

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They had gone to Egypt, the angel of the Lord came and said it was okay to go home. Herod died.

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They went to Galilee. And then now all of a sudden, we're here in the wilderness of Judea with John the

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Baptist. I'll say this too. Other than the passage in Luke where we see a 12 -year -old

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Jesus who's left behind and we find him teaching and learning in the synagogue, scripture has nothing to say about his youth, nothing to say about his childhood, nothing to say about his upbringing, nothing to say about his life other than that until he's roughly 30.

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So then we also have nothing to say about his childhood either. Any kind of speculation about what he did, what he learned, things he might've participated in are all extra biblical, or unbiblical would be maybe a better word.

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So Matthew takes us straight to this scene that's gonna set up the ministry of Jesus. And to get us there, he uses this transition.

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The words that he uses in verse one are now in those days. And this is just a little bit interesting because that is essentially a literary device that means a period of time has passed, and it could be any period of time.

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So with that, here we have John the Baptist. And one more thing that some of you all might appreciate is the name

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John the Baptist. So partly because John is a common name in scripture, we're using the Baptist to sort of separate him from others but also this was an insult that was used for him.

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He's John the Baptist because he's out there in the middle of nowhere baptizing people. It's kind of like what they did with John Wesley when they called him a

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Methodist. Methodist was used as an insult for him and ultimately it became the name of a denomination.

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Now where we went from there, we're not gonna talk about that either. But John the Baptist. Now, I am by no means an expert in biblical

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Greek. Took some classes on it, I know a little bit, but I'm not an expert. And that's why there's a lot of value in reading additional material that addresses the original biblical languages.

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Because the thing that's actually really fascinating about these languages, Greek for the

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New Testament and Hebrew for the Old Testament, is that sometimes the words that they use are imbued with a lot of additional meaning.

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And they're imbued with meaning that doesn't come across in the English translations that we use. And part of this is because we don't have the cultural understanding, but also we don't have the exact words to describe it.

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And we looked at some different translations a minute ago. That's why there are different translations. Because sometimes different scholars are trying to get in the head of the writers and figure out what they intended by what they wrote.

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And intended in such a way that we can understand it in English. And that's why words vary sometimes, and that's okay.

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As long as you're not changing the meaning, we don't know. So there's room for different interpretations in that way.

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But I bring this up for a couple of reasons. In verse one, it says John the

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Baptist came. We see that, and we're like, oh, there's

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John the Baptist. But the word in Greek that's used there has actually a substantially different meaning, or just a more meaningful definition.

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So what I wanna share is what John MacArthur said in his commentary on that verse, because it is interesting, and it's significant to this verse.

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He says, came is from a Greek word which was often used to indicate an official arrival, such as that of the magi.

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This was used in Matthew 2 .1. Or the public appearance of a leader or teacher, which is gonna be used in Matthew 3 .13

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when Jesus shows up. So it's not as simple as just John kind of randomly walked into where he was.

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Matthew is using this language to show us that John the Baptist being here is a significant event.

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And this is just a short passage, right? So we read it, and we blow by it. But yeah, there's John the

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Baptist. I know, I've heard all this stuff before. There's more to it than that. It's deeper. The same concept happens with the word preaching.

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They translated it preaching because we understand that. Our cultural context does give us a definition for preaching.

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I'm preaching. Anybody who comes up here and speaks is preaching. You've heard people preach in other scenarios as well.

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But I'll go back to John MacArthur again. Because he says that the word we translate preaching comes from a

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Greek word whose primary meaning is to herald. And this was used as, used as, excuse me, used of an official whose duty it was to proclaim loudly and extensively the coming of a king.

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So this is where you can picture somebody who's going through the streets of a town, letting everybody know that the king is on his way, like an earthly king.

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So we have two words. We have the word come, and we have the word preaching. And this is just in the first verse. But what they really mean together in the

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Greek is that John has officially arrived, and he has officially arrived to herald something significant.

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He has officially arrived to herald the coming of the Messiah. And there's something else significant that we have to look at about the setting of what we're reading.

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And to understand it, we have to go back to the book of Malachi. You probably haven't been to the book of Malachi in a while either, right?

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So it's tempting for me to read the whole thing, but I'm not gonna do that. So what I wanna do is look at some of the section headings in your

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Bible, and then read a little bit of the third chapter and part of the fourth. So Malachi starts on page 1283 of your

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Pew Bibles. Here's some of the section headings. So the section headings give us like a 30 ,000 -foot view of what's going on in the book, right?

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We wanna read the words, but these'll tell us just kind of generally what's going on. So some of the headings are

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Yahweh's love for Jacob, which is also significant. It's synonymous for the people of Israel.

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Another heading, the priests defile Yahweh. I will curse your blessings.

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Judah profaned Yahweh's sanctuary. The messenger and the

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Lord. Now here I wanna read briefly from Malachi chapter three. This says, behold,

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I'm going to send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to his temple.

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And the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says Yahweh of hosts.

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Let's keep that in mind. More headings. You have robbed

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God. Arrogant words in the book of remembrance.

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Now that brings us to the fourth chapter of Malachi, which is very short, so I'm gonna read the whole thing. For behold, the day is coming, burning like a furnace, and all the arrogant and every worker of wickedness will be chaffed, and the day that is coming will set them aflame, says

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Yahweh of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings, and you will go forth and skip about like calves from the stall, and you will tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day which

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I am preparing, says Yahweh of hosts. Remember the law of Moses, my servant. Even the statutes and judgments which

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I commanded him in Horeb for all Israel. Behold, I am going to send you

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Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and awesome day of Yahweh, and he will turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and strike the land, devoting it to destruction.

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So the last couple of verses of Malachi are very interesting in light of what we're looking at here, because there's something historically relevant now to the passage that we're looking at.

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Now if you turn to Malachi in your Bible, you see that Malachi is the last book of the Old Testament.

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Malachi is the last prophet that we have in the Old Testament. The very next thing that comes in our Bible is

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Matthew, the start of the New Testament. And the reason that's significant is if you've ever looked at this history,

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Malachi contains the last words that God spoke to the people of Israel, the last words spoken by a prophet about the coming

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Messiah. And what happened after that was the people of Israel experienced a silence for 400 years.

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So after all these prophets, they heard nothing from God for 400 years.

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So think about that. This is a people who's used to God speaking directly to them through men, through men like Isaiah and Ezekiel, Jeremiah.

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But now they have nothing. And that could be anywhere from four to eight generations of Israelites have not heard a word directly from God.

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They have scriptures, they have the writings of the prophets, but they haven't heard from God. And this is not because somehow their status changed.

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Even in chapter three, God refers to the Israelites as my treasured possession, but he was still silent for 400 years.

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So put a little mental bookmark in that idea, okay? Just remember that we talked about that.

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Remember that God was silent to the Israelites for 400 years. Because it's within that context that John burst onto the scene.

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This is why it's an official coming. This is why it's a heralding, because they had heard nothing, absolutely nothing for 400 years.

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And all of a sudden, here is John the Baptist. And not just some guy, not just a

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Pharisee or a Sadducee, he's different. And there's a few different ways that we could tie

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John back to the Old Testament, but Matthew does it himself for us. He does it with this link in verse three.

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I'm gonna turn back to chapter three. He says, for this is the one referred to by Isaiah the prophet, saying the voice of one crying in the wilderness, make ready the way of the

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Lord, make his path straight. So, we turn back to Isaiah 40.

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And unfortunately I didn't put the page number in for that, so I'll just read it. Isaiah 40, verse three through five. A voice is calling.

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Prepare the way for Yahweh in the wilderness. Make smooth in the desert a highway for our

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God. Let every valley be lifted up and every mountain and hill be made low, and let the rough ground become a plain and the rugged terrain a broad valley.

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Then the glory of Yahweh will be revealed and all flesh will see it together for the mouth of Yahweh has spoken.

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So once again, let's picture the idea of a herald. Somebody coming to proclaim something.

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Somebody coming to tell of the impending arrival of someone important.

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If you've ever been anywhere that some kind of dignitary has come to visit, you might have seen something like this.

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People will come before this dignitary, usually their protocol staff or something like that.

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They'll come ahead, they'll make sure everything's in order, make sure everything's clean, make sure everybody looks the way they're supposed to look, make sure that the people that are bad workers are out of there and the people that are good workers are here so that our organization looks good.

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So some of you know, I'm in the Army Reserve and last July I went to New Jersey, to Fort Dix for an exercise.

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It was just a combat simulation kind of thing. But one day they called us all in because the one star general who was head of the exercise was gonna come by and visit our building.

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So this is exactly what we did. Somebody in our organization, I think it was probably our commander, he became the herald and he said, okay, the general is coming.

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You gotta throw those coffee cups away, you gotta straighten up these tables, stack all that stuff up so it looks nice, make sure your uniform looks right and then everybody's gonna sit around this table in an orderly fashion.

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We even ordered ourselves by our rank just to get ready for this general. So he was heralding the coming of this person who was important because we wanted to look right.

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We didn't wanna make a bad impression on him when he came in. And that's kind of what John's doing here. John's serving as a herald.

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But there's some important symbolism here that we don't wanna miss. What John is doing, what

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John is saying, what John is having happen when they baptize people and repent of their sins, we're not just clearing the way for some earthly dignitary.

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He's not just clearing the roads for Jesus so he can walk in there. He's not just paving the way for the king of kings and the lord of lords to physically show up.

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We read about the rough ground and the rugged terrain. Well, the rough ground and the rugged terrain that the people in this passage and us have to make smooth is the condition of our hearts.

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You wanna talk about rugged terrain for Jesus to try to enter, it's the sinful nature of our hearts.

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We have to get that ready. We'll talk about this later, but part of the way you do that is through repentance.

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And again, we'll give you some more examples of this. But one more word on John's significance that I have to share.

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This is something I came across in one of my commentaries. It was written by a guy named R .T. France, and it really helped refocus me on this passage.

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So here's what he said. He said, Christian interpretation has for so long taken it for granted that John's role was to prepare the way for the

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Messiah, that it is easy to miss the radical significance of Matthew's choice of a text.

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The coming one in Isaiah 43 is not the Messiah. It's God himself.

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And we've been talking for weeks about how one of Matthew's main goals was to demonstrate from his work that Jesus was

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God. Jesus was the Messiah. He was not just any person. And he does it again, just like the genealogy, just like the virgin birth, just like the visit of the

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Magi. He's bringing these scriptures in because the readers understand.

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The readers know what this means. It means that Jesus is Lord. And there are a couple more things that we have to look at in this passage because they're specifically emphasized by Matthew.

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These two things are John's appearance and John's location. So let's look first at the description of John again in verse four.

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Now John himself had a garment of camel's hair and a leather belt around his waist and his food was locusts and wild honey.

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So maybe lifestyle is a better description of what we're looking at here more than appearance, but we can start there.

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So what was he wearing? He was wearing a garment of camel hair and a leather belt. Now, I know, you're like, why are we focusing on this, right?

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Why are we taking our time to look at what he was wearing? Because just like everything else that we're looking at, there's a reason that Matthew put these details there.

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These details didn't have to be there. The details were inspired by the Holy Spirit and written by Matthew.

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The appearance and the mission of John would immediately bring to mind the prophet

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Elijah to the people that are reading at the time. We see this in 1

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Kings 1 .8. This is how Elijah was described. 1

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Kings 1 .8, and they said to him, he was a hairy man with a leather girdle girded about his loins.

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And he said, it is Elijah the Tishbite. This is the king that was saying this. So another commentator pointed out two things about John that would have been significant to Matthew's readers.

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He says John's garb, his clothing, tells Matthew's community two things.

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First, their Lord arrived exactly on schedule following the promised end time prophet.

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And second, John had to be a wilderness prophet like Elijah. So we point out the clothing.

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We point out the food because it has meaning. It has meaning to the readers, and therefore it has meaning to us.

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That clothing has significance because it's a link to the Old Testament scriptures. It's a link to Malachi, to 1

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Kings, to Isaiah. But leaving his appearance for just a minute, let's look at his diet.

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What does it say he was eating? Locusts and wild honey. Now there's practical reasons for this.

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They were easy to get. Locusts were probably actually just big grasshoppers that were there and are still there in this part of the region.

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And they were readily available, and so was wild honey. So these are a pragmatic choice, right?

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They're available, and they provided enough nourishment for him to get by. But just like other things, there's always another level of meaning.

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There's always another level of significance to the things that we see here. So when you take his appearance together, and his diet, and put those into his lifestyle, they show you something.

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They show a ruggedness. They show an austerity that means, or that would symbolize that he is a true prophet.

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But why? Why does this symbolize that he's a true wilderness prophet? Actually, you know what?

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Before we get there, let's talk about his location because it's all gonna tie in. So his location is the wilderness.

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We sort of flew by that in verse one, but that's what we see, that he was preaching in the wilderness of Judea.

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Now consider this. Think about what we know already about the chief priests and the scribes, the

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Pharisees and the Sadducees. These prophets, these priests, even pastors today, can have a sweet, cushy, easy lifestyle so long as they tell people the things that they wanna hear.

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So long as they don't threaten the authority or the message of politicians or leaders, people that are in charge.

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As long as they don't cross their agenda in some way, they can pretty much do whatever they want.

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That was as true in Israel as it is now. Another thing that we talked about before is how these priestly offices, while at one point they were all descendants of Aaron, they were

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Levites, or at least a lot of them were, it devolved to the point where they were political appointees.

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And a political appointee is probably not gonna speak against the person who appointed them, not if they're making a lot of money, they got a great office, they got a great place to be, people think they're important.

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So as long as they do the right things, they can carry out their ministry. But the thing about that is that's not what prophets in the

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Bible did. That's not what we see from them. At least that's not what we see from prophets who were actually delivering a true word directly from God.

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They were beaten, they were in prison, they were hated, especially by the people they were condemning as wicked, which were everyone from leaders to your run -of -the -mill person whose lifestyle they were criticizing as a result of God's word.

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And because of that, their lives were hard. Their lives were, frankly, terrible. Since we mentioned

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Elijah, let's look briefly at a scene from Elijah's life. So you wanna know what it was like to be a prophet who received a word from God, who was to deliver that word from God.

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Page 488 in your Pew Bible. We are looking at 1

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Kings 17. Hopefully I gave you the right page.

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Did I give you the right page? Okay, cool. Good, good, good. Here we go, okay.

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Now Elijah the Tishbite, who was of the settlers of Gilead, said to Ahab, "'As Yahweh, the God of Israel, lives before whom

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I stand, "'surely there shall be neither dew nor rain these years "'except by my word.'

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"'Then the word of Yahweh came to him, saying, "'Go away from here and turn eastward "'and hide yourself by the brook

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Cherith, "'which is east of the Jordan. "'And it will be that you drink of the brook, "'and I have commanded the ravens to sustain you there.'

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"'So he went and did according to the word of Yahweh, "'for he went and lived by the brook Cherith, "'which is east of the

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Jordan. "'And ravens were bringing him bread and meat "'in the morning and bread and meat in the evening, "'and he would drink from the brook.'"

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This is a prophet of God, appointed by God himself. And God told him, go live outside, buy this brook, and ravens are gonna bring you food.

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That's gross. Now because God has ordained this,

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I'm sure that the meat is not what I'm imagining a raven would bring to somebody if they were just out there and a raven was bringing some meat from one of these deer carcasses that are on the side of the road.

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But that's what he had to do. That's what God commanded him to do. He didn't command him to stand up in an air -conditioned or climate -controlled pulpit and comfortably preach to people listening attentively.

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Elijah had a hard life in his earthly ministry. But that's a story for another time.

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Because what we're driving at here is that John's location in the wilderness added to his credibility as an end -times prophet and as a real biblical prophet.

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And that's because the things he was preaching were things that would not have been readily acceptable to the people that were living in the cities.

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He couldn't preach this in Jerusalem because it was a threat to the lifestyles of the people.

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It was a threat to their comfort and a threat to the authority of the leaders, a threat to basically everything.

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And not only that, but his lifestyle was in drastic contrast to the religious leaders of the time.

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We see throughout the New Testament and throughout Matthew, Jesus criticizes these people because they love fine things.

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They love nice clothing. They love the best seats at the table. They love to eat in fancy places with other important people to be seen.

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Well, John was and had none of those things. His diet was utilitarian, his clothes were utilitarian, his location was

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Spartan, and nothing about what he did was easy. And that doesn't mean, just by the way, that doesn't mean that you have to create difficulty for yourself.

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There was a group of men, ascetic monks, right? They went out into the wilderness themselves and starved themselves and just did everything they could to make sure they didn't experience any kind of comfort or joy because they felt like that made them more spiritual.

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And it didn't. That was just another form of legalism for them. That doesn't make you more spiritual. You go where God has put you.

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That makes you spiritual. So very quickly, last two verses of Matthew three, verses five and six.

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Then Jerusalem was going out to him and all Judea and all the district around the Jordan going out to him.

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And they were being baptized by him in the Jordan River as they confessed their sins. So I just wanna point out quickly that these people were going out to him.

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They were inconveniencing themselves because of the message he was preaching. They weren't sitting back and just waiting.

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And it's because they wanted to participate in something that was real. Now, we're gonna talk about baptism next week probably.

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But with the time we have left, let's talk about some of the takeaways that we have. What are some of the lessons that we can learn from these six verses about John the

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Baptist and about this situation? Here's the first one. Just because you can't hear

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God doesn't mean he's not there. 400 years.

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Nobody in here is 400 years old. Not gonna repeat that.

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But in the 400 years where the Israelites didn't hear from God, things were still happening.

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God was still working. He had still put in motion what was to come.

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And we're starting to see the culmination of that here. And in many ways, this is similar to the time period that we're living in now, right?

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This is where we get controversial sometimes. But I don't believe that God speaks audibly to people the way he spoke to the prophets.

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I believe that has ceased. God's word is the way he speaks to us. Now, there are people that say they got a word from God.

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People will come up to you and tell you they got a word from God. Here's what you do. You wanna test that?

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Does it align with the Bible? Does God's word say that's what's gonna happen? If it doesn't, they're wrong.

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If what they say is gonna happen doesn't happen, they're not prophets because prophets spoke a word from God and a word from God is never wrong.

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But anyway, we're in this period. Some people call it the already and the not yet, right?

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Because Jesus has already come and he's coming back, but he hasn't come back yet.

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So we're waiting. We're waiting for that. And that's on a big scale.

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You probably experienced this in your life as well. You might be going through this right now. I know you have at some point.

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You had a time when the things that were happening to you meant you could only conclude that God was not there, right?

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You've had times in your life where things are going on and you're like, there's no way God is here because if he was, this wouldn't happen.

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That's a natural human response because it's hard.

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It's hard to see how anything good could come out of those silent times that you have.

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And I'm not making light of this in any way because if this is something you don't understand, it's probably something you will understand.

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And we have to be sympathetic to people and we have to encourage them. And it's really hard to encourage in that time, right?

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Because the words that you say, sometimes it's just good enough to be there because you can never say the right words.

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But what I wanna give you now is just something that is an encouragement that hopefully you can take with you.

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I mean, the idea of maintaining your faith in God through those times is the very essence of Christianity.

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And it's the very essence of our faith. And it's encapsulated in verses like what Paul writes in 1

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Corinthians 1 .20. And he says, for as many as are the promises of God, in him they are yes.

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Therefore, also through him is our amen to the glory of God through us. So the

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Bible is full of these promises. I think I read Revelation 21 last week.

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That's the ultimate promise. The promises are there and because God spoke them and because they came to us in the

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Bible, we know that they're true. I mean, just look at our passage today.

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After 400 years of silence, what happened? The Messiah came. So what do you do in the meantime?

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What do we do as a church? What do we do as a body of believers in this time of silence?

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And while we're waiting, you do what we read in Isaiah. You make ready the way of the

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Lord. You make his path straight. You clear the way. You knock down those mountains.

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You smooth out the rugged parts. And you do this by devoting yourself to the things of God in this time.

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This is why we look at every word of scripture. No matter how long this is gonna take us to get through.

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Prayer and reading God's word. But I have a very specific suggestion for you.

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I have a suggestion for a specific prayer that you can use and you can use this prayer anytime. So listen,

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I'm not a fan of altar call type prayers where somebody calls you up and you pray to God and you say stuff like,

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I accept Jesus into my heart. And the reason I'm not a fan of that, I know that sounds funny, but the reason

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I'm not a fan of that is because that's not what scripture shows. That's not what the

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Bible shows us about how to do that. Because we know that no one can come to Jesus unless the

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Father calls them, right? But scripture also tells us you can call on the name of the

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Lord and be saved. That's in Romans 10 .13. And Romans 10 .13, by the way, is based on Joel 2 .32.

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Just a little bit of trivia for you today. So here's the prayer. This is what you can pray. You can pray this anytime.

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You can add it to your prayers. Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.

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I need to be saved. Please save me. I call upon your name.

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There in those three lines, you have a biblical prayer that you can pray to the

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Lord. You can call upon his name and ask him to save you. Because once again, nothing you do yourself will save you.

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There is no. Sure, and we can talk about it afterwards, too. I said, Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.

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I need to be saved. Please save me. I call upon your name.

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And again, I can give that to anybody afterwards. So that's the first lesson. Just because you can't hear

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God doesn't mean he's not there. I promise you that he is. Lesson number two. Following God is not always easy or comfortable or convenient.

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And this really ties into lesson one. Because when you find yourself in a time where it seems like God is not there, that is not comfortable.

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But at the risk of sounding like a broken record, this is why we have Scripture. Scripture shows us what it means to be faithful in those times, and it shows us those promises.

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And throughout Scripture, we see heroes of our faith that have persevered in the face of difficulty, even if it wasn't in the face of silence, but refused to back down from the word of God, even when that word meant persecution.

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And I mean real persecution, not just like what we think of, like we lose our job, or somebody says something mean about us on Facebook.

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No, like actual persecution. We have Noah, we have Moses, Joshua, Elijah, who we just talked about,

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John the Baptist. We'll see later, he got his head chopped off. The apostles. Everything bad happened to the apostles.

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So here's another message that I have for you, especially if you're from a different church, or you're coming from a different tradition.

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Never believe anyone who tells you to follow Jesus so your life will be better.

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What kind of, that's a bad marketing message, isn't it? I'm telling you, do not believe someone who says follow

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Jesus so your life will be better, because when you get saved, your life will be harder. When you get saved, that's when the work starts.

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When you pray to God, please save me, and he answers you, it gets harder.

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I'm not gonna say it gets worse, but it gets harder. And there's a couple of reasons for that. Because when you are changed, when you are born again, and you have a new heart placed into your body, a heart of flesh replacing your heart of stone, you have to go to war with the sin that's in your life.

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You have to go to war with the things that you previously loved that are against the word of God. And you have to kill that sin so that it doesn't kill you.

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And that's just in your own life. That's hard enough because you live with yourself every day. But then you have to earnestly, earnestly intercede for others, and the concern for other people is gonna be overwhelming sometimes.

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People that you know are far from God that you have to pray for, and that reject you, and seem to hate your message, and you still have to pray for them.

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But then there's another way that it gets harder. And it's getting harder for us every day. But you have to fearlessly stand up for the word of God in the face of all manner and variety of evil that you find in your life that you come across.

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And some of it, it's gonna come from people who are supposed to love you. Because part of that might involve telling people the truth about the things that they're doing.

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It'll involve telling people the truth about the sin in their life. And they're gonna get mad at you.

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I'll tell you that right now. They don't wanna hear it. And I don't blame them. None of us wanna hear it.

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And if they're not Christians, they really don't wanna hear it. So you just continue to pray for those people.

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And then part of it will be standing up to a society that is absolutely bent on sin, and telling that society that the things they're doing is wrong.

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Telling people that abortion is wrong. Telling boys that they're girls, and girls that they're boys is wrong.

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Performing surgery to reinforce that on those children is wrong. Cutting off parts, or attaching new parts is wrong, right?

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Homosexual marriage is wrong. Premarital sex is wrong. Shacking up before you're married is wrong.

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Using pornography is wrong. See, we're equal opportunity here. I can say homosexual marriage is wrong, but it's not because I hate gay people, because that's not true at all.

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I love them, and I want them to come to Christ as well. But guess what? You can sit here in this pew, and you can commit sexual sins that are equally as despicable to God.

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Having sex with someone you're not married with, someone you're not married to, even if you're not married and they're not married. Living together before you're married.

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Gossiping about other people is wrong. Look, we gotta tell people this stuff is wrong.

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How do we know it's wrong? Because God says it's wrong. So the fruit of following God is that it makes your life harder, not easier.

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But it's worth it. It's worth it for the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus Christ as your Savior, as Paul writes in Philippians 3 .8.

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We're gonna talk more about that next week. Lesson three, don't be deceived by appearances.

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This is a pet peeve alert. Over the last few years, there's been a big movement. There's organizations that are dedicated to planning churches, which is a great thing, right?

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But their emphasis has been on planning churches in large cities. And why is that?

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Well, one of the reasons is because there's a lot of people there, right? There's a lot of people, there's a lot of sinners.

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There's a lot of folks who need the gospel. There's a lot of folks who need to know who Jesus is. So, we bring it to them.

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We make it easy for them to come to church, right? We don't want it to be inconvenient because if it's inconvenient, they won't come.

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And some of them do come. But there's other reasons to be in cities. There's a lot of cool stuff to do.

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You can live in a nice place. There's lots of nice restaurants, lots of nice entertainment.

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So, this high -minded idea of going to the place where the sinners are also comes with a lot of benefits. It comes with a lot of comforts.

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And I don't wanna impugn the motives of anybody, even though I clearly just did.

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But sometimes it seems like planning a church in a large city is more of a business decision than it is a gospel decision, right?

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Because we gotta run the numbers and we gotta make sure there's enough people there to generate enough giving to pay our rent and to continue to keep the lights on and to pay a salary so that we can have a house and we can have the chance to go to this entertainment and all of these restaurants.

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So, it's great to bring the gospel to people. But what do we see in scripture when they bring the gospel to people?

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What we don't see is a well -dressed, cultured man in a nice building in a city.

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And maybe John's outfit is a comment on my suit and tie, right?

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He wore camel hair. He wasn't trying to have some kind of fancy appearance. But in scripture, we don't see that.

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We don't see the fanciness. We don't see the nice facilities. We don't see people telling the things only that comfort them.

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There are comforting parts of scripture. Please don't, if you're not here or you're here for the first time and you're not coming back anytime soon, please don't take this as God hates you or God hates anybody.

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God loves you. There are parts of that in scripture. But I want you to know there's a lot to scripture and you've gotta look at all of it and you have to take all of it into account.

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So, what we see in scripture is some crazy looking dude telling people that they gotta get right with God because he's coming soon.

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And people are coming out of the cities to him. He didn't have to go plant his church there.

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He planted in the wilderness and they came to him. I heard somebody say one time, don't go to the church that's closest to you.

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Go to the church that's closest to the word of God, even if it's inconvenient to get to, even if you have to drive a little ways.

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So God's ways, also, don't be deceived by appearances. God's ways are often humble, inconvenient, and sometimes even unappealing to our sinful hearts.

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You know what was appealing? We're talking about like shiny things that look great. Then the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that it was desirable to make one wise.

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That's Genesis 3 .6. So when things look ultra appealing,

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Christian books, Christian shows like The Chosen, not good.

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Christian songs like you hear on the radio. A lot of times, get this, people are gonna think

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I'm crazy, right? A lot of times, those look Christian and they sound Christian, but they're from Satan to deceive you.

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They're not what they appear to be. If they don't line up perfectly with the word of God, they're temptations.

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So think twice and think deeper before you judge something on the way it looks.

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Because as we know, God sees not as man sees, and God's ways are not our ways.

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So even when it's difficult, even when there's silence, even when it doesn't look like what you want it to look like, seek the

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Lord for your salvation. Seek his word, seek his will for your life.

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Let's pray. Father, we thank you for the things that you show us in your word.

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God, we thank you that you judge not the way we judge and we thank you that your ways are not our ways because if we were left in charge, things wouldn't turn out the way they should.

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And God, you knew exactly what we needed and because you knew what we needed, you sent your son.

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You sent your son to die for our sins, Lord, and as we seek your grace and we seek your mercy and we pray to you,

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Lord, have mercy on us as sinners. We know that you hear it,

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God, because we pray your will and we pray according to your will.

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You hear it. So I thank you for sending your son. I thank you that we can celebrate that as a church family and we can celebrate that as the church body together in the community.

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Lord, we lift up our prayers again. We thank you for hearing them and we love you and we pray all this in Jesus' name, amen.