I’ll be preaching today mostly from the Gospel of Luke, starting in chapter 3, but also from Matthew chapter 3.

Since the start of 2018 I have been preaching a series on the Holy Spirit as He is revealed in the Bible. I have done so for multiple reasons, but above all because I want you to trust that He wants to be an intimate part of your lives. It is the mission of the Holy Spirit to reveal Messiah the Son of God to people and to form His character in our hearts. God’s purpose from the beginning of creation was to create a people for His praise throughout eternity, and the Holy Spirit is always the active Agent in this creative process. But His identity as a separate Person of the Triune God was hidden until the coming of Jesus the Messiah.

We have walked through the Holy Spirit’s appearing and acts in the history of the Jews. God wants you to enter vicariously into these stories and connect them to your lives. In a real sense, each and every one of you is a gospel – a good news story – of what God has done in your lives. The more you identify with God, and seek to live by faith in a Christlike way, the more aware you become of “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

That is the secret working of the Holy Spirit. He interweaves His personality with yours to conform you to God’s perfect image of humanity – that of His Son. Outwardly, you have lived a completely different life from Jesus. Inwardly, your life doesn’t match up to His in holiness, and it never could. The former President of Multnomah Bible College, Dr. Joel Aldrich, said, “If we had 10,000 years to perfect the holiness of Christ, we wouldn’t get out of the starting blocks.”

The beauty of the Good News is that everything God does in us to perfect Jesus’ character in us is a work of grace. He patiently teaches us to cooperate with Him, and we become better for doing it. Yes, our efforts do matter in what we become. But every day, in every step we take, it is “Immanuel” – God with us – who makes us better than we could ever be without Him. God gets the glory, and we get the benefits. Through our faith, the Holy Spirit conforms us to Christ’s character.

Secondly, by learning how the Holy Spirit has worked in the sacred history of the Bible, you will gain confidence to be a player in what God wants to do in our generation. Every work of God, small or great, is a work of the Holy Spirit. You have a part to play in the building of God’s kingdom on earth, which is the expression of His character in human society. As humble as this prison is, it is still part of God’s kingdom. I believe God can do great things in prison settings, because men don’t have nearly so many distractions from what matters most.

Many of us also long to see a last great move of God in the 21^st century that will augur the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. A great move of God requires a lot of active believers and participants. We need people who are unafraid to confront the challenges to our God and faith, but do so in a way that is winsome and wise. You never win an angry argument. Rather, Jesus taught His disciples, “By this all men will know that you are My disciples; if you have love for one another.”

Last month, I introduced John the Baptist, the forerunner of Messiah. John was, perhaps, a second cousin of Jesus – sharing the same great-grandparents. At the end of the first century BC, Judea was a small country with a great religious heritage. They were the only people in covenant with the living God. Yet they were under the political domination of the rising Roman Empire, the fourth and most terrible of the empires revealed to the prophet Daniel nearly six centuries earlier. So there was a sense of anticipation among the Jews that God would send a deliverer, the Messiah, to rescue them from foreign domination and crush the Roman oppressors. There are some parallels to the anticipation many Christians feel about the imminent return of Christ.

John’s birth was announced to his father Zacharias the priest, at a time when his wife Elizabeth was past the age of childbearing. God sent his mighty herald angel, Gabriel, to make this important announcement. That God sent Gabriel meant his birth was immensely significant. Let’s read again what Gabriel said from Luke’s gospel, ch.1:13-17:

Do not be afraid, Zacharias, for your petition has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will give him the name John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth. ¹⁵ For he will be great in the sight of the Lord; and he will drink no wine or liquor, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit while yet in his mother’s womb. And he will turn many of the sons of Israel back to the Lord their God. It is he who will go as a forerunner before Him in the spirit and power of Elijah, to turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children, and the disobedient to the attitude of the righteous, so as to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.

Gabriel’s succinct description of John’s calling, even before he was born, tells us that God foreknows our lives. Yes, He foreknew your failures; but He also sees you perfected in eternity, and the journey you will take before you reach heaven. The same Holy Spirit who filled John now lives in you, if you have committed your life to the Lord. You can be filled and stay filled with the Spirit, by faithfully walking with God and seeking His face in the ordinary moments of your day.

John, as I mentioned last month, was raised under a Nazirite vow. He would abstain completely from alcohol. His was a calling to radical holiness, as we shall see, who carried a message of radical repentance toward God. He was called to be a forerunner of Messiah, to prepare their hearts for His coming. When Gabriel said John would come in the spirit and power of Elijah, he was alluding to God’s final word from the last prophet of Israel in the Old Testament.

Malachi 4:5-6 closes this way: “Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, lest I come and smite the land with a curse.”

John’s father, Zechariah, confirmed John’s high calling after he was born, and his tongue was loosed by God. He also alluded to the same fourth chapter in Malachi to which Gabriel referred. Luke 1:76-78 says, “And you, child, will be called the prophet of the Most High; for you will go on before the Lord to prepare His ways; to give to His people the knowledge of salvation by the forgiveness of their sins, because of the tender mercy of our God, with which the Sunrise from on high will visit us.” It’s significant that Zacharias foretold his son would be called a prophet of the Most High; for Judea hadn’t had a recognized prophet in over four centuries – the greatest drought of prophethood in Israel’s history since the rise of Moses.

Here’s an interesting prophetic and historical parallel. Malachi’s prophecy likely occurred in the time between Governor Nehemiah’s return to Persia and his second journey to Jerusalem – that is between 433 and 424 BC. So there were roughly 430 years between the last prophetic writing and the births of the two final prophets under the Old Covenant, John the Baptist and Jesus the Messiah.

Exodus 12:41 says, “At the end of four hundred and thirty years… all the hosts of the LORD went out from the land of Egypt.” So Moses led Israel out of Egypt after 430 years of captivity into freedom. God announced freedom from captivity to sin through the coming of John and Jesus roughly 430 years after the final prophetic word in the Hebrew Bible. This is just one more parallel between the two most important leaders in the Bible – Moses and Jesus. Moses brought political freedom to Israel, but Jesus brought freedom from sin and death to all the peoples on earth.

Now please turn to the Gospel of Luke, chapter 3. Reading from v. 1:
Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was tetrarch of Galilee, and his brother Philip was tetrarch of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias was tetrarch of Abilene, ² in the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness.

Luke gives us the year in which John the Baptist began his prophetic ministry – the fifteenth year of Rome’s second emperor, Tiberius Caesar, which was 28 AD. Power was divided unequally between the Roman Procurator, Pontius Pilate, who had the Roman legions behind him, and subordinate rulers – notably Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great in Galilee. And finally, he mentioned the Jewish religious elite, led by Annas and his son-in-law Caiaphas, who held social power and influence because of their control of the Jerusalem Temple.

Luke says, “The word of God came to John, the son of Zacharias, in the wilderness.” Notice the contrast between the seats of political power in populous areas that Luke mentioned, and the place where divine, prophetic power was reintroduced to Israel – the wilderness. The wilderness represented separation from people, symbolic of the separation from what is common or profane that defined the ancient understanding of holiness.

It is likely that John lived among the Essene sect who had a community west of the Dead Sea in the Judean wilderness. He probably left Jerusalem after his elderly parents died to pursue his calling among some of the most devout Jews in Judea. The Essenes lived separated lives, focused on the worship of God and sought the spiritual reformation of Israel. Their devotion to scripture and holiness provided the ideal place of nurturing for John as a future prophet.

The Essene community of Qumran is famous for the finding of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the most important finding of ancient Hebrew scripture in the world. The Dead Sea Scrolls confirm beyond all doubt that the Old Testament that we have today is true to the writings that existed before Jesus was born. They utterly refute any allegation that early Christians tampered with the Hebrew Bible to insert prophecies pointing to the coming of Jesus.

I believe that Essene Jews became the core of John’s earliest followers, who in turn became disciples of Jesus when John was imprisoned by Herod. The Essenes were an outstanding pre-Christian type of a Spirit-led, biblically focused community of believers.

John’s call to the prophethood while he was in the wilderness clearly revealed that he would not be following his father Zacharias into the Aaronic priesthood. God separated John from Jewish society so that he could infuse him with the zeal needed to call for a radical repentance. Through John, God symbolically challenged the centers of temporal political power from a place barren of people and wealth: the desert wilderness.

I would challenge you to vicariously connect your season in prison as your own wilderness. Prison is a barren place economically and in personal liberty; but this is just the right place for you to find your calling as a child of God, as John did in the wilderness. Gabriel declared that John would be “great in the sight of the Lord.” So your life can also be great in God’s sight compared to who you were before. Take heart!

Reading on from v. 3: And he came into all the district around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins; ⁴ as it is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make ready the way of the Lord, Make His paths straight. ⁵ ‘Every ravine will be filled, And every mountain and hill will be brought low; The crooked will become straight, And the rough roads smooth; ⁶ And all flesh will see the salvation of God.’”

Notice that Luke connected John’s coming to the opening of Isaiah 40. Months ago, I told you that Isaiah 40-66, or Second Isaiah in a literary sense, was the New Testament in prophecy. That passage prophetically declared John’s coming as the voice crying in the wilderness to prepare the way for the Lord – that is, Messiah. John attacked everything high and mighty in secular society, cancelling all social status distinctions before God like filling ravines and levelling mountains. His message exposed what was crooked in order to make people’s lives straight.

John preached a baptism of repentance. Matthew’s Gospel records his core message was, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” These are the same words Jesus used when he first preached; and these words created a sense of expectancy for the coming of Messiah.

Using the water of the Jordan symbolically for the cleansing of sin, also had the symbolic power of reminding the Jews of where their journey as a people began. They entered the promised land by crossing the Jordan River under Joshua’s leadership. It was fitting then, that the Messiah John would later baptize in the Jordan was also named Yeshua in Hebrew, the same name as Joshua.

John’s baptism of repentance was for the forgiveness of sins, resulting in salvation. When Jesus appeared to be baptized by John, “all flesh” who were present literally saw “the salvation of God” that Isaiah prophesied. Jesus’ name, Yeshua, means “Salvation”, which perfectly described His mission, and John’s too, as Jesus’ forerunner.

Matthew 3:4-6 tells us: “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. ⁵ Then Jerusalem was going out to him, and all Judea and all the district around the Jordan; ⁶ and they were being baptized by him in the Jordan River, as they confessed their sins.” His appearance was reminiscent of Elijah the prophet, rough and simple, living an austere and chaste life. You can imagine how convicting his appearance and his message were to people who came from the towns and villages of Judea. Back to Luke 3:7-9:

⁷ So he began saying to the crowds who were going out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? ⁸ Therefore bear fruits in keeping with repentance, and do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham for our father,’ for I say to you that from these stones God is able to raise up children to Abraham. ⁹ Indeed the axe is already laid at the root of the trees; so every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”

John’s fiery preaching challenged the religious elitism Jews felt as the Chosen People. Yes, they were the descendants of Abraham, and thus entitled to the benefits of their covenant with God. But without bringing forth the fruits of repentance, John said, they were not immune from God’s wrath against sin.

God called the Jews to be His holy people; and He calls Christ’s disciples to be the same. Being born-again does not exempt us from God’s call to holiness. It enables us to live free from wickedness under the influence of the indwelling Holy Spirit. But just like the Jews in John’s day, when we take our standing as redeemed Christians for granted, we begin backsliding in our hearts and open the door for moral compromise and unbelief. Hearts hardened by worldliness, selfishness, and judgmentalism toward others can make comfortable Christians seem like a brood of vipers. Reading on from v. 10:

And the crowds were questioning him, saying, “Then what shall we do?” ¹¹ And he would answer and say to them, “The man who has two tunics is to share with him who has none; and he who has food is to do likewise.” ¹² And some tax collectors also came to be baptized, and they said to him, “Teacher, what shall we do?” ¹³ And he said to them, “Collect no more than what you have been ordered to.” ¹⁴ Some soldiers were questioning him, saying, “And what about us, what shall we do?” And he said to them, “Do not take money from anyone by force, or accuse anyone falsely, and be content with your wages.”

When John was questioned as to what repentant lives should be like, he immediately challenged people’s materialism and selfishness. Now John wasn’t preaching to people who were in any way prosperous by our standards. Most of them lived just above subsistence poverty. If they had a one-room house to dwell, and the means to grow or buy food, and some clothing, they were the middle-class of their times.

It is notable that Jesus, like John, preached more about money by far than He did about heaven and hell. Why? Because Jesus knew, as did John, that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” I challenge you to give ten percent of your income to the Lord as a habit of living. It will free your heart of selfish materialism and open the doors of heaven’s blessings on all that you do. Time has proven that those who are generous to the Lord’s work prosper more in all areas of life than those who aren’t generous to God’s work. Above all generosity helps you set your heart “on the things above” where the greatest riches in life are found. In heaven, you’ll be glad you invested in God’s kingdom. Reading on from v. 15:

Now while the people were in a state of expectation and all were wondering in their hearts about John, as to whether he was the Christ, ¹⁶ John answered and said to them all, “As for me, I baptize you with water; but One is coming who is mightier than I, and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals; He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. ¹⁷ His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into His barn; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

John made it clear to the people that, though he was a true prophet, he was not the Messiah. He could only symbolically baptize people with water. Messiah would immerse people with the Holy Spirit’s fiery zeal and conviction of sin. Compared to Messiah, John was unfit to until the thong of His sandals – that is, the lowest and most unclean part of the body, which was exposed to dirt and dung.

Now that’s an extraordinary self-deprecation. Recall that Gabriel said John would be great in the sight of the Lord, filled with the Holy Spirit before he was born, go in the spirit and power of Elijah, turn the hearts of the people back to the Lord, and prepare the way for God. Jesus later confirmed Gabriel’s assessment: “I say to you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John”. Yet John said he was utterly unworthy of the One coming after him, namely Jesus. This clearly affirmed that Messiah would be no mere human prophet: He must also be the holy Son of God.

I believe it was the coming of John declaring the kingdom of God that confirmed to Jesus that His time had come to leave the carpentry trade and assume the mantle of a prophet. Reading in Matthew 3:13-17:

¹³ Then Jesus arrived from Galilee at the Jordan coming to John, to be baptized by him. ¹⁴ But John tried to prevent Him, saying, “I have need to be baptized by You, and do You come to me?” ¹⁵ But Jesus answering said to him, “Permit it at this time; for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he permitted Him. ¹⁶ After being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him, ¹⁷ and behold, a voice out of the heavens said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.”

John immediately recognized Jesus as the Messiah. The Holy Spirit bond that caused him to leap in his mother’s wound when the newly pregnant Mary walked in the door, linked them together again. John protested that one less holy should baptize the Holy Son of God; but Jesus told him it was needed to fulfill all righteousness. Jesus’ baptism made his identification with us as people needing a baptism of repentance explicit. Jesus, after his resurrection, called all believers to receive water baptism. Therefore, He needed to be our exemplar of what disciples must do.

Jesus’ baptism also firmly linked His ministry with that of John’s. Water baptism was a new religious act under the Old Covenant that bridged the Old and the New that Jesus was about to initiate through His death and resurrection. We know from Romans 6 that water baptism symbolizes dying, burial and resurrection with Christ. So Jesus’ baptism was also pointing forward to His great redemptive act that paid for our salvation. That also fulfilled all righteousness.

That Jesus was baptized in the Jordan was also especially significant. Just as His namesake Joshua led Israel across the Jordan into the Promised Land, Jesus’ death and resurrection leads us across the Jordan River of death into the promised land of Heaven.

Jesus’ baptism introduced the Triune God formally to the human race. When Jesus arose from the Jordan, “the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him, ¹⁷ and behold, a voice out of the heavens said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.” Here we see God the Son receiving God the Holy Spirit in bodily form. God the Father spoke audibly and affirmed that Jesus is His beloved Son and pleasing to Him.

We might ask, “Why would God incarnate need to receive the Holy Spirit via the act of baptism?” Again, Jesus is our exemplar, who willingly laid aside the prerogatives of divinity so we could imitate Him as disciples. We all need water baptism and Spirit baptism. We receive the Holy Spirit in us upon salvation, who forms the nature of Christ in our spirits and seals us as Christ’s own. Secondly, we receive empowerment from the Holy Spirit needed to do Christ’s work. The supernatural gifts of the Spirit come only through Holy Spirit baptism.

I am one who believes that there is a baptism in the Holy Spirit for ministry empowerment, because I experienced something like an internal fire from Him on September 12, 1982. That was over four years after I had been saved, and has changed my life significantly. It has given me an extra measure of confidence in the power of God at work in my life. I can be an instrument of the supernatural in whatever way God chooses.

I am not one who believes, as does classical Pentecostalism, that Spirit baptism must come through speaking in tongues. But I do pray in tongues, because I see it in the Bible. The Apostle Paul commended it to the Corinthian Church; and we are commanded to “Pray at all times in the Spirit” (Eph.6:18).

Praying in tongues, therefore, is one more Spirit weapon in my arsenal for taking the kingdom of God with violence from the devil’s hands. It opens my spirit to the Holy Spirit, rather than articulating something that God already knows. We don’t inform God by praying in tongues; He transforms us.

Finally, Jesus’ baptism marked a handover of authority from John to Jesus, the last and greatest prophet under the Old Covenant. Just as Elijah passed the mantle of His cloak and spirit to his disciple Elisha, John did so in effect to Jesus. Luke says that “Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led around by the Spirit in the wilderness ² for forty days, being tempted by the devil.” Afterwards, He returned from the wilderness to Galilee to start His ministry.

In the meantime, John continued preaching and baptizing people down by the Jordan; but his ministry on earth soon ended. As Luke explained, “So with many other exhortations he preached the gospel to the people. ¹⁹ But when Herod the tetrarch was reprimanded by him because of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and because of all the wicked things which Herod had done, ²⁰ Herod also added this to them all: he locked John up in prison.”

John rebuked Herod the Tetrarch for stealing his brother Philip’s wife, effectively committing adultery, as well as killing those who challenged his corrupt rule. Exposing Herod’s treachery sealed John’s fate, but it served God’s will perfectly.

From the onset of the New Covenant era, persecution attended God’s spokesmen. There will always be enmity between our holy God and a selfish, autonomous world. Those who dare to expose the sins or corruption of those in power do so at the peril of their lives. Jesus spoke forthrightly about this. “From the time of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence. And the violent take it be force.”

Consider the martyrs who laid the foundation of our Christian faith today. John the Baptist, ten of Jesus’ apostles, Apostle Paul, James the Elder, and above all, the Lord Jesus Christ. Yet God has glorified Himself in their martyrdom. Christians have oft said, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.”

Lingering in prison and then beheading seems a melancholy way to end this brief but impassioned life, dedicated to being a forerunner of Messiah. But John had to be taken out of the way so that all His disciples would follow Jesus to seek the kingdom of God. And Jesus was the One to declare what this kingdom was like.

Jesus said that “he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than” John. But once he was martyred, John took his rightful place as one of the greatest saints of all time. I hope you can take courage from his example, too. John’s time of ministry on earth was brief – probably less than a year. But he initiated the greatest move of God in history. He was a witness to the bodily descent of the Holy Spirit upon Messiah the King, and set the proper stage for Jesus to make His Advent as a prophet of God.

Can you believe that God can take your life and make something beautiful out of it? Yes, you failed when you committed your felony. But your life is not defined by your past. It’s defined by the One who called you to Himself and offers you a place of honor forever within His kingdom in exchange for your life.

Jesus offers us His life in exchange for ours when we become His disciples. That’s the best deal ever offered to the human race by far. Jesus never promised the journey would be easy. John the Baptist’s life and death is proof of that, as were all the early martyrs. But Jesus is worth the journey! He’s fully committed to those who entrust their souls to Him; and he asks you simply to be faithful. Jesus promised us, “Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and all these things will be added to you.” I can assure you that God will prove Himself faithful to you when you make Jesus your Lord by giving yourself to Him. Let us pray.