Passage Read: Luke 3-4
Meditation Verses: 3:7-10
Thought
John evidently preached of the wrath to come, because then he asks the crowd, "Who warned you to flee?" John did! He calls them a brood of vipers and warns them to repent if they want to be saved. He's doing everything wrong, as far as many in the Church today think. Surely there were many who were insulted and provoked to anger, Herod being the most powerful of them. But the crowd responds in humility, the kind God is seeking, the kind that saves. In the next chapter, Jesus points out to His hometown that many in Israel were not helped or healed in former days, but only foreigners, and the crowd reacts angrily. This is what we think will happen when we're not nice and gentle in our preaching, but the response of the crowd is not dependent on the message and its style of delivery, but on the hearts of the hearers and God's work in them.
Application
People need to hear the truth, brutal though it may be, and though it may provoke many to wrath. Those are not the ones God is seeking or saving. It is the ones who respond in humility and ask, "What then must we do?" whom God is calling to Himself. These are the ones we're seeking, these are the ones God is seeking. I don't need to hesitate to speak even hard truths, painful truths, even insulting truths, because the ones God has chosen will hear and be cut to the heart and respond in humility. It's the humble who are being saved, not the arrogant who are angered when their wickedness is pointed out. I need to take off the kid gloves and warn people of the wrath coming on them because of their sin and unrepentant hearts. The repentant will not be driven away by that, but rather revealed by it. Only the arrogant will be "driven away," yet some will linger to cause trouble.