July 29, 2022

Passage Read: Luke 3-4
Meditation Verse: 3:18

Thought

John preached the Gospel to the people. He preached repentance. He preached that those who came to him needed to produce fruit in keeping with repentance. He preached that repentance meant a change of behavior, including especially contentment. He preached that there was another coming after him who would be far greater than him, and they needed to make ready to receive Him. He would baptize them, as a sign that they were washing away their sin by trusting in God's provision for their cleansing and living out that newly cleansed likeness. And all went well with him, though he spoke against their sin, until he rebuked Herod for his sin.

Application

John and Jesus had hard words for their audiences. They called for repentance and changed lives, not for rituals that covered sin but for actual changed lives. They weren't gentle as we perceive Jesus to be today. They were direct with those expressing a willingness to repent, but they didn't let them off easy. They weren't afraid to drive people away. They wanted genuine repentance, genuine obedience to God, genuine love for the Lord. And they weren't afraid to drive people away to get it. Who wants to hear that they are a sinner doomed to destruction? Amazingly, they didn't even try to win hearts over first, their first and only words were words that confronted sin, that warned of the coming One and made clear that apart from Him and obedience to Him, there was no hope of salvation.