“Deck the halls with boughs of holly. Fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la. 'Tis the season to be jolly. Fa-la-la-la-la…” Hold on! Tis the season to be JOLLY? You might slightly disagree with that when you look at your December calendar or attempt to do some shopping. It seems more like, ‘tis the season to be FRANTIC! Christmas is one week closer than last weekend and the length of things to do just seems to be getting longer instead of shorter! Christmas cards to send, cookies to bake, houses to clean, Christmas presents still to purchase, car rides to endure, and the list goes on and on – all the different things that you still need to get done before Christmas! Now maybe you’re thinking, “Thanks a lot! I was hoping to forget about those things for a few moments at church this morning, and now I’m all stressed out.” First let me apologize, and secondly, what if I could help you to simplify your Christmas preparation? In fact, there is really only one thing that is necessary to truly be ready to celebrate Christ’s coming. What is it? What is that one thing? It’s the one thing that we heard about in our gospel lesson this morning, as we listened to a man named John the Baptist.
John the Baptist is a rather interesting person. He was certainly unique for a number of different ways. You might recall his birth which was certainly unique. You’ll hear more about that on Wednesday at our Advent service, but John was the result of a miracle. His parents Zechariah and Elizabeth were unable to have children, and Elizabeth was way past that time of life when women normally have children. Then an angel appears to her husband Zechariah and tells him that Elizabeth would have a child. Sure enough, 9 months later, John was born. But that was just the beginning of John the Baptist being unique.
John was the fulfillment of a very specific Old Testament prophecy written by the prophet Isaiah some 800 years before John was born and repeated by other prophets like Malachi who we heard this morning in our first lesson. You heard the reference to that prophecy this morning in Luke 3:4, “As it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet: ‘A voice of one calling in the wilderness, Prepare the way for the Lord…” (Luke 3: 4). John was “the voice” who literally lived out in the wilderness around the Jordan River. And what was John’s job supposed to be? He was to call out to people, “Prepare the way for the Lord.” The call of the prophets, “Christ is coming!” that had echoed throughout the Old Testament over centuries and centuries, was one that John the Baptist would also join in, but in a bit of a different way. What all the Old Testament prophets only saws through the eyes of FAITH, John the Baptist would see with his very own eyes. John would actually see Jesus and literally point to him, identifying Jesus of Nazareth as the long-awaited and now arrived promised Savior. His call, “Christ is coming” would soon be followed by, “There he is!”
What would this getting ready people to welcome the Christ all involve? Listen again, “A voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him. Every valley shall be filled in, and every mountain and hill made low. The crooked roads shall be come straight, the rough ways smooth. And all people will see God’s salvation’” (Luke 3:4-6/Isaiah 40:3-5). John was supposed to be that voice, the person calling out to other people “Get ready because Christ is coming!” How would those people prepare? Well, the Lord uses a picture of a major construction project to describe that preparation.
While I’ve never personally worked in road construction, I do consider myself somewhat well-experienced in road construction having regularly driven through both Chicago and Milwaukee for the past 14 years and spent many hours sitting in traffic, watching multi-year construction projects reach completion. The picture that these words from Isaiah paint is not merely sending through the streetsweeper to pick up some trash, or even the adding of a lane to relieve some traffic congestion. This is MAJOR road construction. Did you hear what needed to be done? The blasting away of boulders, the leveling of mountains, the filling in of monstrous canyons, rerouting roads to make them straight, removing any and every obstacle that might make travel difficult. This was to be a luxury highway that was fit for a king.
The Lord used this picture to describe the SPIRITUAL preparation that needed to take place for people to be ready for Christ’s coming. It was major, and it is the same major preparation that needs to take place today, for us to be ready to celebrate Christ’s coming. It is the major preparation that you heard John the Baptist calling for in Luke 3:3, “He [John the Baptist] went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (Luke 3:3). There is one word that might best summarize the preparation that John was calling for – it’s the word “repentance.”
Repentance begins with an inspection of your life, a surveying of your thoughts, your actions, your attitude to see if it perfectly lines up with what God requires of you to enter heaven. And what does that survey quickly reveal? It reveals how far short we have fallen of God’s glory. It reveals the mountains of selfishness and arrogance that we have piled up, being more concerned about ourselves than about others, needing to be recognized or the center of attention, building ourselves up instead of others. It reveals the valleys of doubt that have led us to ignore certain parts of God’s Word because they cause inconvenience or embarrassment. It reveals the crooked roads of lust that have led us to say or see things that we shouldn’t, the arrogance that leads us to look down on others, the anger that we harbor in our hearts for what someone said or did to us in the past. I think that the temptation is to conduct that spiritual survey and think, “Alright, it’s certainly not perfect, but it’s not so bad. It’s just a little mountain, a shallow valley, a scenic road, but nothing all that bad, all that serious.”
When I was growing up in Florida, there was a sinkhole that started as a small “pot hole” in the back of a luxury car dealership. Within hours it had grown into the size to that of a small lake, swallowing dozens of Mercedes Benz and few Ferraris, part of a city park and half of a public pool. I remember driving by the sight with my parents when it first happened and being just a little scared. A number of years later we returned to the same sight. The city had built a bridge over the sinkhole and if you didn’t know better, you would think that it was just a bridge over a harmless little lake or large pond, unaware of the destruction it had caused.
Dear friends, repentance leads us to see the seriousness of sin. Sin is not an inconvenience to “get around” or some obstacles that if we try hard enough we can bridge on our own or fill up with our good works. Sin is eternally dangerous as the Lord warns in these words, “But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear” (Isaiah 59:2). Sin intends to destroy our relationship with God, to place barriers that rob us of God’s blessing. Sin intends to create a chasm that separates us from God for eternity. Sin calls for major spiritual construction.
That was what John the Baptist’s message was all about. Repentance is meant to bring people to see the seriousness of their sin, so that they can see their need for and welcome the one-man construction crew of Christ Jesus. Only Jesus can complete this major spiritual construction project. Only Jesus’ powerful perfect life and sacrificial death can blast away the boulders that once barred our entrance into heaven. Only Jesus can fill in those valleys of doubt in the authority of God’s Word, as he humbly followed God’s will perfectly in our place. Only Jesus can straighten out those crooked paths of our wandering thoughts and eyes, by living a life that was always in line with God’s will for us. Jesus perfectly paves the way to heaven’s home, builds that bridge that crosses the chasm of sin and death. Jesus has built a “freeway” (in the truest sense of the word) to heaven, every sin fully paid, eternal life completely purchased, salvation fully won by Christ.
You see, it is only when you see your need for Christ that you appreciate what Christ has come to do for you. That’s what repentance does. It leads us to daily recognize our sin, its seriousness, and to turn to Christ, trusting that he has fully forgiven us of our every sin, that through faith in Christ, we are on the way home to heaven. And with that knowledge, we are then empowered to fight sin, to struggle against temptation and to live lives that reflect where we are headed by God’s grace – we’re on the freeway home to heaven.
There it is, the one thing that you really need to be ready for Christmas – repentance. Repentance helps us to look at what we are filling up our lives with and to simply ask, “Is this something that is helping me to appreciate the salvation Christ came to win for me, or is it something that needs to be pushed down the list, or maybe just taken off the list completely?” We are very good at convincing ourselves that we NEED to get done all these things in order for it to be a “successful” or jolly Christmas. In reality, there is only one thing that we truly need to do to be ready for Christmas, that is repentance. With repentance we will be ready to appreciate and celebrate the coming of Christ – the one-man construction crew that has arrived to perfectly prepare us for heaven. Amen.
