So we we started in the gospel of John uh before Christmas uh during advent season because the first chapter uh the first 18 verses of chapter 1 in the gospel of John are really significant in terms of uh advent in terms of the light coming into the world and uh as we mentioned while the other gospel writers start generally at Jesus’ birth or even at his baptism John starts way back at the deep in the cosmos before the creation of the world to tell us uh who this this son of God, who this word of God is. And before before he even writes the name of Jesus, he identifies the eternal word of God and who was with God who was God at the same time. He had no beginning. Through him were all things created. Uh without that within that word was life and that light was that life was the light of men. So John writes how that light plunged down to earth then and the word became flesh and he made his dwelling among us. And we pick up the story this morning with that eternal word of God. God in the flesh walking the same terrestrial ground as we walk every day. So that’s how John begins his gospel. At the very end of his gospel, the very end, chapter 21, he gives a bit of a personal affidavit saying, “I guarantee and I affirm that what I’ve written is true and accurate.” And that affidavit is followed by his final sign off just before the credits roll on his gospel. He says these words. He says, “Jesus did many other things as well. If every one of them were written down, I suppose that even the whole world would not have room for the books that would be written. And that’s an astounding statement. What he’s saying really is that the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, all they can give us is a summarizing series of snapshots of life with Jesus, but it’s nowhere near the whole story. The Gospels, maybe we can think of them as like movie trailers. They’re they highlight aspects of the film. They give us a sense of what the movie’s all about. But when John says the whole world wouldn’t be able to contain all that Jesus did and said, he’s implying that every day spent with the son of God on earth probably could have been made into a feature film in its own right. I mean, if you can imagine a day spent on earth with God in the flesh, what part of that day could you possibly edit out and leave on the cutting room floor? So the material covering Jesus’ brief three years of public ministry on earth was enormous. And for three of the gospel writers, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the material they selected for their movie trailers is actually very similar. Those three are referred to as the synoptic gospel writers because they include many of the same stories and generally in the same chronological order. But John has a different method and a different narrative in mind. You know, a full 93% of the gospel of John is not found in the other three gospels. For instance, John doesn’t refer to Jesus’ birth. He doesn’t talk about the details of Jesus’ baptism. Makes no mention of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness. There’s no casting out of demons in John. He doesn’t talk about Jesus transfiguration on the mountain or the Lord’s supper or the agony of Gethsemane or Jesus’ ascension into heaven. If you really like the parables, those homey little stories that Jesus tells to make deep spiritual points, John doesn’t include even one of those parables in his gospel. And we don’t know all the reasons for John’s unique approach in including the content he does. But we clearly know his purpose in writing his magnificent gospel. Again near the end of the gospel in chapter 20 he says Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples which are not recorded in this book but these are written and he gives us the purpose that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ the son of God and by believing you may have life in his name. So that’s the selective purpose John has for giving us his gospel to look at this morning and for the next few months. It’s so that we would first believe that Jesus Christ is the Lord, the son of God, and second that by believing we would find life in his name. So the book, it’s very evangelistic. If you’ve ever done an evangelistic Bible study, often the Gospel of John is used. It’s meant to change our lives and to take us from a place where we’re not we’re spiritually dead. We’re not spiritually animated. and bring that spiritual animation into our lives through faith. We believe that Jesus is the son of God. And second, by believing we find life in his name. So the first step he says is to believe. We might have all come into this room this morning for various purposes. Maybe maybe we’re generally look genuinely looking for some help in our lives, some good advice, some peace. We enjoy the music. We enjoy uh there’s some family tradition, nostalgia in coming into church. And we come in, we’re hoping for some help, stability in our relationships and in our marriages uh in our families, a proper work life balance. As a bonus, we do serve decent coffee here. We have a small snack. There are some safe people that you can talk to. All of that’s fine. All of that’s appropriate, but none of it’s the first thing we ought to be looking for this morning. We don’t come in scanning the room looking for the utilitarian benefits. So our first questions aren’t, “Will Christianity work? Will it work for me? Will it help me manage the circumstances of my life? Will it make things better?” No. The first and primary question always has to be, is this real? Did it really happen? Is Jesus who he said he is? Is this all true? If we start by asking the question, will Christianity work for me? it’ll never work for any of us. But ironically, when we believe, when we observe that the Christian story and Christian doctrine is true and it’s historically accurate and it’s reliable and these this ancient Bible speaks with accuracy and authority and relevance for our lives today, that’s when Christianity starts working in our lives. We we recognize a new reality. our sense of reality gets shifted and rearranged and our priorities get reconfigured. And as that happens, it really doesn’t matter quite so much that we leave here with any practical help. Although we don’t we don’t want to ignore practical help, but it doesn’t so much matter. It doesn’t even so much matter if the service makes us happy by the end or whether our prayer gets answered exactly the way we want it to get answered. When we believe that the Christian story is the true story of the world, it’s enough for us just be able to worship Jesus together to thank him for all that he’s done for us on the cross. When we believe in Jesus, it’s like he becomes allencompassing whether our earthly circumstances ever change or not. John writes his gospel, excuse me, so that we’ll believe that Jesus is the Christ by believing gain life in his name. You know, if you remember your high school biology, you probably had to memorize and regurgitate a few facts concerning the photosynthesis of plants. That’s the miraculous way that plants eat sunlight, which gets converted into chemical energy and it feeds their metabolism. And so mysteriously, if you leave a plant in a dark room, it starves to death. In sunlight, it thrives. I think John is saying that belief in Jesus is little like that. As we actively place our faith and trust in Jesus, the son of God sent to earth to deliver us from our sins, then the light of Christ engages us and and does something to our spiritual metabolism and we find this new life activated inside us. The Holy Spirit enters through the avenue of faith and we discover new life. So like a plant in sunlight, something that wasn’t there in us initially begins to thrive. John wrote his gospel so that everyone of his hearers, of his listeners, of his readers would have that experience. First they would believe and by believing they would gain life in Jesus’ name. So whatever reason you have for finding yourself here this morning, John’s letter is a letter written to you and for you that you might leave here spiritually alive. In our passage this morning, the gospel writer John, John the Apostle, introduces us to another John, John the Baptist. And you you know a little bit probably about John the Baptist. This oddly dressed guy with an unusual diet. He was living out in the desert region and baptizing people in the Jordan River preaching repentance and uh and then preaching the need for baptism. And the religious leaders in Jerusalem wondered who on earth this strange charismatic unofficial unauthorized preacher was. I mean, John, to them, John seemed to be a theological, a practical outlier. He was operating on the periphery of the Jewish religion. Wasn’t even in Jerusalem. He was way out in the wilderness. Jews in high places were also a little nervous about what the occupying Roman government might think of this as they might consider disorder or insurrection. So the religious leaders went out to the wilderness and official investigation to check John the Baptist out. They wanted to know who he was. John’s own dad had been a priest, part of the religious establishment, but John himself seemed to have drifted pretty far from his family tradition. So they go and ask him who does he think he is. Now the first thing John denies being is the Christ which is uh the Hebrew for messiah means God’s anointed one. And there was intense speculation in the culture as to the coming of a messiah a future messiah. No one knew who this anointed one would be what he would come to do. Some thought he would be a supernatural being sent from God. And others just thought he would be an earthly prince from the line of David. Some thought he’d come to bring peace and righteousness to earth. And others thought he’d come as a military leader to kick out the occupying Romans. All kinds of nationalistic hopes wrapped around this future Messiah. But John declared as clearly as he could, “No, I’m not the Messiah.” And next they asked them, “Well, who are you Elijah?” Which may seem like an odd question to ask, but these religious leaders knew that at the end of the Old Testament in Malachi 4:5, it says, “See, I will send you the prophet Elijah before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes.” Also in 2 Kings 18, the original Elijah, he wore a garment of hair. He had a leather belt around his ba his waist. So John the Baptist certainly looked the part. “Are you Elijah?” they asked. John quickly says, “No, no, I’m not Elijah.” So, they have one more guess. They asked John if he’s the prophet. And again, this comes from the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 18:15, where Moses declared that in the future, God would raise up another prophet like him among the people of Israel, and all the people ought to listen to him when God does that. But John succinctly says, “No, I’m not the prophet either.” They seem a little frustrated at that point. These religious leaders, they have to report something back to Jerusalem. So out of guesses, they just say, ‘Well, tell us then. Who are you? Give us an answer to take back to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself? In response to that question, John has two things that he says about himself in our passage. One is that he’s a voice. I am the voice of one calling in the wilderness or in the desert. Make straight the way for the Lord. He’s quoting the ancient prophet Isaiah from chapter 40. speaks of uh of the need to prepare the way and make straight the highway for the Lord. And second, when he’s asked by the Pharisees, why do you baptize then? If you’re not the Christ, you’re not Elijah, you’re not the prophet, what are you doing baptizing your fellow Jewish people? These are people, they’re already in good religious standing. They’re people who have uh no need, there’s no reason for them to go through any kind of purification like a baptism. At the time, Gentiles who wanted to be part of the Jewish religion, they were required to self-baptize as a way of purifying themselves before joining the Jewish tribe. But Jews had no baptism requirement. They were already identified as the people of God. They were considered ritually and religiously clean. But the implication of John’s baptism in baptizing all these Jewish people, so we’re all unclean from the most religious of us to the least religious of us. No one deserves salvation. No one merits salvation. No one deserves any consideration at all from a holy God. John’s baptism implied that the salvation of the Messiah was going to be by grace alone. And uh it was going to include people of all races and all backgrounds equally. So the question of why he baptizes his fellow countrymen, John gives us a second clue as to his identity. He says, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know. He’s the one who comes after me, the thongs of whose sandals I’m not worthy to untie. So, two things concerning John’s identity. One, he’s a voice calling out in advance of the coming one. And second, that he’s of a lower rank than the lowest servant of a household, and that would be the one who would be required to take off his master’s smelly dustcaked sandals and wash his feet. You know, there were rules in the day for uh the relationship between rabbis, teachers, and their followers, their disciples. Disciples would serve their rabbi in a in a number of ways, but they would never be asked or expected to take off their rabbis shoes and wash his feet. It’s too gross and it’s too demeaning. So, it’s a task reserved for the lowest of the low in the household. John says, “I’m not I’m unqualified for even that lowest role in the service of the one who’s coming after me.” Now, maybe in our world, we we hear a few psychological alarm bells go off when he says that. When he evaluates himself and concludes that he’s so unworthy and what’s it what’s his problem? Is he that psych psychologically fragile or unstable? He has this alarming lowest low self-esteem. we might see it as a pretty unhealthy response. Uh a pretty unhealthy way to view himself. And all of us, we we might be a little intimidated if we’re in the presence of a celebrity, a politician, an artist, a rock star, but none of us would consider ourselves unworthy of pulling off their socks and soaping up their feet. I mean, we have a lot more self-respect than that. John the Baptist self-image seems truly in need of reconstruction. uh if if he if it meant that he loathed himself and he hated himself and he despised himself, then he would need probably to see a counselor, that’d be a psychologically negative way to go through life. But if the recognition of his unworthiness was just a way of learning to forget about himself, to be freed from self-absorption, from having to think about himself all the time, then that would seem a pretty healthy form of Christian humility. There’s one passage that sheds a little more light on John’s identity when it moves into the following day and John sees Jesus coming to him and that point he cries out, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” If we were to do the math on this passage, we would say that John has a very subdued uh view of himself, a very elevated view of Jesus. And as a result, John has all the confidence and the bravery in the world to fulfill his mission. So let’s say that again. This is the math of this passage. John’s negative assessment of his own unworthiness added to his exponentially high view of Jesus results in all the confidence and bravery in the world for him to go out and fulfill his unique calling. I I don’t know who originally coined this phrase, but someone once said, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself. It’s just thinking about yourself less.” That’s worth pondering. I think John seemed to be able to pull that off. Became a mark of his life, became a mark of his career. Little further on in the gospel in chapter 3, John’s recorded as saying, “He, Jesus, must become greater. I must become less. He must increase. I must decrease. And the more that equation was lived out in John’s life, the more effective he became. Humility is not thinking less of oursel, it’s thinking about oursel a little less. How that worked out in John’s life, very interesting, recognizing his own unworthiness compared to Jesus. Always ready to exalt Christ over himself. It didn’t turn John into some wallflower who just faded into the background and who lacked courage and who lacked presence. his deep sense of unworthiness. It didn’t make him shy. It didn’t make him self-conscious. All right. This is a guy who when he saw Pharisees coming to check him out, religious leaders, hypocrites that he knew them to be, he was exceedingly bold. He shouted at them, “You brood of vipers, you bunch of snakes. Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance?” In the last chapter of John the Baptist’s life, he landed in jail for fearlessly criticizing Herod, the ruler of the area. It was because of Herod’s illicit relationship with his sister-in-law. John never backed off. He doesn’t display an inferiority complex. He doesn’t have a superiority complex. He didn’t roll around in self-pity. He didn’t hold himself above others. He just had a proper humble self-forgetting view of himself, a strong focus on Jesus, and it made him fearless. It made him bold. He declared to the religious leaders that he was just a voice. But if you’re a voice who is talking about the greatest person in the world, you don’t have to have a soft, mumbling, apologetic voice. You can be as loud and as confident as you can possibly be. The only thing that mattered to John was Jesus’ opinion of him. And Jesus actually turned out to be highly complimentary of John the Baptist. Despite John’s disclaimer that no, no, I’m not Elijah, that he was uh not the Elijah who was to prepare for the coming of the Messiah, Jesus didn’t hesitate to place that mantle on John the Baptist. Speaking of John the Baptist in Matthew 11, Jesus said to his listeners, “Who did you go out into the desert to see?” A prophet. Oh yes, I tell you, he was more than a prophet. Among those born of women, there’s not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist. And if you are willing to accept it, he is the Elijah to come. I mean, Jesus had a far higher view of John than John himself did. John John had this delightful self-forgetfulness that meant uh he actually got it wrong about how valuable his ministry was. He was mistaken about his own greatness. Jesus knew the the momentous historical significance of John’s ministry. John was so focused on Jesus that his legacy was the least of his concerns. And we’re all likely to become far more significant in God’s kingdom when our self assessment is that we’re no big deal. When we behold the lamb as John did, we have all the resources we need to be confident and bold witnesses for the Messiah. Again, we do the math. John’s self- forgetfulness, his focus on Jesus gave him the ability to be incredibly brave, a formidable witness concerning the Messiah. As Jesus approaches him, John cries out, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” And we don’t even know exactly what he was thinking when he when he said that. that lamb of God. Outside of this incident, that term really isn’t found in the New Testament. Although Jesus is again referred to as the lamb in in the book of Revelation, but for anyone of the time who knew their Old Testament scriptures, there’d be a few potent images that would have popped up. One would be Genesis 22 where Abraham had been commanded to sacrifice his son Isaac to God. And not knowing his pending fate, Isaac asked, “Where’s the lamb for the sacrifice?” And in the end, God did provide the sacrificial animal so that Isaac could be spared. Second significant episode would be the Passover lamb in Exodus, where when God’s people killed a lamb and spread the blood over their doorposts of their homes, they were spared a visit from the angel of death. A third lamb reference be Isaiah 53:7, where the future Messiah is described as unresisting, like a lamb led to the slaughter. That passage describes all of us like sheep who have gone astray. Says, “Each of us has turned to our own way, but the Lord has laid our sin, our iniquity on that lamb who would willingly without resistance allow himself to be led to the slaughter.” Whatever whatever John had in mind when he said that, “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” The general meaning is obvious. Has to do a sacrifice. The lamb John saw walking toward him would be our substitute. He’d be a voluntary substitute sacrificing himself for us out of love. The lamb came to take away the sin of the world. A sacrifice would be made provision for our sins to be removed from our record. you know that that will really that will really only strike us or hit us or astonish us if we have some idea of how brutal our sin must look to God. There’s an Australian missions leader named David Williams and he asked the question when your conscience speaks to you what voice do you hear? Is it an inner lawyer or an inner grandma? And he says the inner lawyer, he’s interested in right and wrong and good and evil and guilt and innocence. But the inner grandma, he says, is different. She’s not so much interested in guilt and in innocence. She’s interested in honor and shame. What have you done? What will people think of you? And what will you think of our family? How can you look them in the face again? Shame on you. You should be ashamed of yourself. I don’t know if that your grandma’s ever talked to you like that, but that’s the that’s the inner grandma in our lives. Guilt expressed by our inner lawyer kind of an objective verdict. A guilty verdict might be fully true even if uh we don’t feel any guilt at all. Shame is different. It’s a little more subjective. Takes over our sense of who we are. Our inner grandma says we ought to be ashamed of ourselves. We ought to feel our shame. So both guilt and shame, they’re appropriate consequences flowing from our sinfulness. And both our sin, our guilt and our shame are meant to send us scurrying to the safety and the forgiveness that’s available to us in the lamb of God. Our inner lawyer and our inner grandma, they’re there for a reason. When when my boys were young and in hockey, on occasion, we’d travel to weekend tournaments and the players and the coach, a number of us parents would stay at the same motel, would eat at the same restaurants, would go out to the games, would hang out together for the weekend. And one morning, we were all together at either a Denny’s or a Smitties, I can’t remember. And the the players had their own table. And uh we parents and the coach were congregated another table. Coach was a neighbor of mine. He lived just down the street. decent enough guy by all accounts. I mean, this was all volunteer time in in coaching hockey. And over breakfast that morning, he told us a story from a previous tournament that he had been at. In a similar restaurant, the boys on the team had finished their meal at their table. They wanted to go back to their motel rooms. So, as they left, they handed the coach their bill for the table for him to settle up, which was fine. That was the way it worked. Everyone paid their tournament fees in advance. But the coach told us then that when he went up to pay the bill, he slid the team’s bill into his pocket, paid only the tab for the adults, and then he left the restaurant. And he told that story with a grin, and he told it boastfully how he had cleverly managed to stiff that restaurant out of what I’m sure must have been several hundred worth of food and service, leaving the host and the cooks and the servers with an embarrassed loss. And as he told that story, there was no inner lawyer apparent in his conscience accusing him of the wrong of cheating that restaurant and robbing from the people. And nor apparently was there any inner grandma telling him that he ought to be ashamed of himself for what he had done. He seemed oblivious to anything but the joy of getting away with it. And he was he was happy to share his tale of conquest with the rest of us. Now, I’m sure that his lack of conscience in that incident has some parallels with our own. Some of our sin and shame floats above the surface of our consciousness. And whenever we’re aware of it, we need to do what John calls us to. Repent of our sin. I appreciate Ji Packer’s balanced view of what repentance means when he says,”Repent means turning from as much of you as you know of your sin to give as much as you know of yourself to as much as you know of your God.” And as our knowledge grows at these three points, so our practice of repentance has to be enlarged. In other words, repentance in our hearts, it’s an ever enlarging project of self-awareness. Which is why the godliest people you’ll ever meet will never take a holier than now uh view of us. They’ll be far more broken over their sin than any of us garden variety Christians. John the Baptist’s urging is for us to learn depths of repentance and then behold the lamb who takes away the sin of the world. And I’m sure a great deal of our guilt and shame sits below the surface of our awareness. It’s below our consciousness. And thankfully none of us have to deal with a full awareness of our sinfulness all at once. I think it’d be too much for us. In that poignant scene in Luke 23, Jesus’ executioners are hammering the spikes into his hands to pin him to the cross. He’d willingly go to suffer as the lamb of God for us. And in that moment, what’s Jesus saying? He’s saying, “Father, forgive them. They just don’t know what they’re doing.” In other words, their their idea, the consequences of their acts, it’s below the surface of their ability to uh to understand it. Even when our inner lawyer and our inner grandma are silent, we can be sure that our sin’s still pretty active beneath the surface of our lives. But the lamb has come to take it all away. And we can be assured of that. That as we place our faith and trust in Jesus alone for our salvation, he will take it all away. The stuff we know about and all the stuff that we don’t know about. John’s purpose in writing his gospel is so that we is that we believe and that by believing we find life in his name. So when John the Baptist saw Jesus subdued his thoughts about himself his thoughts of Christ roared with intensity it turned John into this self-forgetting bold and fearless leader a great witness for Christ. And Jesus said some one more thing when he was referring to John the Baptist. Jesus said that John the Baptist, yes, he was the greatest person in the world up until his time. But Jesus included something else about us in Matthew 11. He says, “Among those born of women, there’s not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist. Yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” What a statement. John the Baptist, he grasped the reality of Jesus better than anyone else in his time or anyone who’d come before him. But Jesus says that every single Christian, everyone who believes and is resting in the gospel today actually understands and operates in the kingdom of God to a greater degree than John the Baptist did. It’s incredible. Well, John the Baptist, he didn’t envision or understand the cross. He couldn’t foresee the resurrection. he couldn’t uh envision the the formation of the Christian church. What that means is that you and I can learn the same forgetting humility as John, but we can we we understand to a far greater degree than he did who Jesus really is and what he’s done for us. We can be even more confident and bold and courageous than he was. We have the whole picture. John only had kind of a rough draft of what was to come. But if we’re, if you and I are even the least in the kingdom of heaven, we can be just as clear, a clearer voice than John the Baptist was to our world in confessing the Messiah and in uh in presenting Jesus to our world. So, a few things that we can just pray about, I think, in response to John chapter 1. We can pray for self- forgetfulness that we wouldn’t be so self-absorbed and uh that God would give us an exponentially high view of Jesus. We can pray for the courage and boldness that arises from being unself-conscious, being Christfilled. And we can thank God for the immense revelation he’s given you and you and me. Even if we feel like we’re the least in the kingdom of heaven, God would say, “It’s it’s so much. It’s so much that we’ve gained. So, just take a couple of moments of silent prayer and uh and I’ll close us off in a few moments. This is just a time between you and God to pray a few of those things for yourself.