The Gift of Peace Sermon Series: He Comes Bearing Gifts Pastor Korey Van Kampen Mt. Calvary Lutheran Church (WELS) Flagstaff, AZ December 9, 2018 - Grace and peace to you from God our Father, and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, amen. So the section of God's word that we'll be giving our attention to this morning is our gospel lesson. We heard it read a few moments ago. It's found in Luke, chapter three, verses one through six. We'll hear again just these couple of verses to get us back into that scene where it says, The word of God came to John son of Zachariah in the wilderness. And he went into all the country around the Jordan preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And this is God's word. So are you ready for Christmas yet? It's the month of December, right? Some of us get on it a little bit sooner than others. There are some preparations that we do for Christmas that I think most people find enjoyable. You know getting out the tree, putting the lights on it, getting the ornaments all hung on the tree and so on. Putting out other seasonal decorations in your home. Maybe some of you enjoy putting the lights up outside as long as it's not too cold, and as long as you don't go all Clark Griswold on it. Right, maybe you find that enjoyable. But there's another part of preparing for Christmas that can be stressful too, right? Preparing the purpose, preparing the perfect Christmas dinner. It can be stressful, right? You got to go to the store and you got to make sure you have all of the right ingredients. You got to make sure that you get all those right things into the oven at just the right time, so that it can all come out of the oven at just the right time, so that you can enjoy that meal. You got to get the table perfectly set, try and get the children to be well mannered and well behaved and so on! All that is enough to multiply the number of gray hairs on your head. And then you throw on top of it, getting your house ready for company, too. And you think of all that and then maybe you look at in the bulletin, the theme of the sermon and it says, peace, the gift of peace comes through preparation. And, I'll understand if you're a little bit skeptical about that. But there's a key difference in the kind of peace that we might or might not associate with those kind of preparations for Christmas, and the kind of peace that the bible talks about. You see the preparations and the peace that the bible speaks of are spiritual preparations that help us to receive a spiritual peace. And so then we might ask, "Well, why?" Why do we need to think about the spiritual why? Why does it need to be more than just buying gifts and getting ready for dinner, and so on? And then after answering that why then we might ask, well how do we go about preparing? How do we go about getting ready to receive that peace? Well that's what we'll be answering as we look through the section of Luke, chapter three, that's before us today. Now before I really start into this section, as we read it, you know a few minutes ago, you probably couldn't help but notice the way the section began. For you it was probably a lot of names and a lot of places that sounded totally unfamiliar. But Luke is doing something important there at the very beginning. He's purposely fixing the time frame of the events that he is going to describe. And he's fixing them several different ways. He's describing those events. First of all, according to national politics, he says in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar. Caesar was the Roman emperor. But then he fixes the date also according to local politics. He names all the people who are regional governors, or even local governors, and tetrarchs. A tetrarch was just a term for a local governor. And so he names Pilate, Herod, Philip and Lysanias and the places over which they governed. And
then he finally fixes it also, according to the Jewish religious events on the Jewish religious calendar. He says, and the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas. We might read through all those names and wonder, what in the world is Luke thinking? Why is he dropping all these names? Is he just trying to confuse us? And the answer's no. His purpose is actually quite simple. He wants us to know that when he's writing about all this stuff about first John the Baptist and then later on, Jesus, he wants us to know that he's writing history. It's almost like Luke knew the question that a lot of people would have is they looked back on these events, you know from the perspective of hundreds, or even thousands of years. That they would look back and they say, "You know these events are marvelous and fantastic! "How can I be certain, how can I have confidence "that this stuff is true? "That these event really happened?" Or, how can I know that all these things that Luke is writing about, aren't just a bunch of legends that were cobbled together over time? Well, let me ask. When you read a legend, does it ever begin with such a firmly fixed time frame? No, legends usually begin by saying a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, that's a pretty famous legend in our society. History however, begins with in the 15th year in the reign of Tiberius Caesar. Legends don't give a whole lot of detail out of fear of being proved wrong, proved that they never happened. History, on the other hand, invites detail and invites scrutiny, because history knows that scrutiny will prove it right. And so Luke wants all of his readers to know that he's history. That all the things that he's going to tell in this book, are things that actually happened, things that are historically verifiable. And he wants us to know that because our hope and our peace rests on those historically verifiable events. And so then, what actually happened? Well it all begins with Luke saying, "Well the word of the Lord came to John in the wilderness." You see John was given a special job, his job was to be the Lord's spokesman, to speak to the people a message from the Lord. And exactly what the purpose of that message was was given a description through Isaiah the prophet, some 700 years prior to John living. Now the Prophet Isaiah described a voice calling in the wilderness, "Prepare the way for the Lord." And so that was John's job. To prepare people, to prepare their hearts for Jesus to come on the scene. And so that preparation that John did, it was a spiritual preparation. Now just from this fact by itself, we can see the importance of preparation. You see human beings, we don't assign a job, a specific job to a specific person, unless that specific job is needed, it's necessary. And unless that specific job is important. Think about the healthcare industry. There are healthcare offices that have specific people in their office who's one job is to deal with the insurance company. Why do they have that one person and that's their one job? Maybe they have five people who that's their one job. Well why? It's because that work is necessary and important for their healthcare practice to continue. And so in the same way, John's mere presence in this role tells us that preparation is important. And how greatly that preparation needed to happen both in John's day, and how it still needs to happen in our day today. And so John carried out his job, he preached, he prepared, he preached all throughout the countryside. And he prepared people by preaching it says, a baptism of repentance. Now as you dig into that phrase, there's two key things to notice in the way that John prepared people for Jesus. The first one, is that he called people to be baptized. Now we might not find that too striking today, because Christians and Christian churches are familiar with the custom and practice of baptism. But in John's day it was, in many ways, something new. A baptism was simply a ceremonial washing. Well prior to this, there was no Jewish custom in which a Jewish person was baptized. However, the Jews did have a custom to baptist non-jewish converts to their faith. And so what's happening with John baptizing and calling people to be baptized, is actually quite astonishing. The
Jewish people of his day were publicly acknowledging that they were no better. That they were no spiritually more well off than any of the other nations around them, that they weren't in a better position to relate to God than any of the other nations that's surrounding them. And that they needed a cleansing, just as much as everyone else did. Which then leads to the second thing to notice that, that baptism that they went through was one of repentance. That is that baptism was connected to repentance. You see repentance is a word, I'll admit, it has a lot of modern baggage to it. I think it's the kind of stuff that, that maybe you hear the word and you kind of do a mental sigh in your head, ah here he goes again. But the word itself doesn't have that baggage. It has a simple concept. It means to communicate a complete spiritual and mental change of heart. A spiritual and mental U-turn. And so repentance then, to repent, means to turn away from something, and then at the same time to turn toward something else. And so when John was preaching, calling people to repent, well what was he calling them to turn away from? In essence that call to turn away, was a call to turn away from trying to live without God. Now there were two main ways that you could see the people in John's day trying to live without God. One of those ways was trying to live by their own rules, rather than by God's rules. It's the saying, you know, I get to decide for myself how I'm going to live. I get to decide for myself what is right and what is wrong, and I'm going to choose those things. An example of this in John's day was one of those local governors we mentioned at the outset, actually took his brother's wife as his own wife while his brother was still living. I don't think there's much that says, I get to make my own rules, than that. But there was the other way, too, to live without God. And this one might be a little more surprising. Some people who are trying to live without God, not by making their own rules, but rather by trying to be very good. See there was the religious group that was very influential in John's day. They were called the Pharisees. The Pharisees were strict traditionalists when it came to morals, strict traditionalists when it came to their religion. But they did so because they felt and they lived, they lived like all that they really needed was their own superior morality, and their own superior traditional religion. So they felt and lived as if that was all that they really needed. And that if they lived according to these rules, and if they followed all of these traditions down to the littlest letter, then God would have to bless them. And that God would owe them something. Now both of those ways, though they may seem polar opposite, they're really both ways to live without God. Because, they're both ways to put yourself at the center of your life and to put yourself as the one who is in control of your life. You see, to repent is to turn away from both. It's to turn away from sin, to turn away from, yeah I'm the one trying to make my own rules. But it's also to turn away from self salvation. Because both of them lead a person to think that we don't need Jesus to come as our savior. And you see it's here that we find our need for spiritual preparation as well. It doesn't really matter if you're a Christian or not, all people, Christians, non-christians, have our own ways that we think and speak, and live like we don't need Jesus. And that's what John's preaching has called to turn us away from. Perhaps the clearest example of this living like we need this Jesus, is a dark character quality that we all have, but that we often don't recognize in ourselves. You see I want you to think about the last time someone contradicted you, the last time someone corrected you, or the last time someone pointed out something that you didn't do quite right, whether it was at home, at work, or at school. How did you take it when that happened? Or think about the last time that someone asked you to volunteer for something. Or to give to support a semi-good to a good cause. What ran through your mind when you were asked that question? Or think about the last time somebody asked you to do, to follow a process differently than the
way that you were used to doing it. Did you take that like a pro? Or think about the last time you just had a plain misunderstanding with another person, what was the cause? You see the common thread that runs through all of these scenarios, is that so often, we're just plain unwilling. We're unwilling to listen to correction from another person, or to admit when we're wrong. We mentally roll our eyes when asked to volunteer or give, because we're unwilling to serve gladly, and unwilling to give generously. We grouse about doing something differently than the way we've always done it, because we're unwilling to follow someone else's directions if it doesn't immediately make sense to us. We get into misunderstandings with other people, because we're so often unwilling to see things from another point of view, or to walk in another person's shoes. And there's another highlight of this unwillingness that I want to ask you. What's going through your mind right now as I talk about unwillingness? Is there a chance that what's going through your mind is some kind of time or scenario for you to think to yourself, oh yeah, that's all nice, but that doesn't really apply to me? Because we're even unwilling to hear that we are unwilling. For this unwillingness that we all have, it's really a symptom of a deeper issue. And the deeper issue is the heart that wants to stay away from Jesus. You see the heart that wants to stay away from Jesus is unwilling to admit our flaws. Because if I admit my flaws, then I'm admitting something else. I'm admitting that I need help, that I need a savior. And that's a truth that can be hard for us to accept. But the unwilling heart also doesn't want to bend, because it also wants to keep the illusion of control over my life. And so you see this unwilling heart is really just the same modern outworking of the thing that was going on in Jesus' day. Trying to live without God, trying to live with yourself as the center, to put yourself as the one who's in charge. And that's why John's call to repent is also for us. He's calling us to turn away from our unwilling hearts that want to live without God. So then how does that turn happen? How does that change happen? I've heard it described in three parts. I want to say three parts, don't press it too much, because they all really just go together very quickly. Repentance happens when first of all we own the fact that we've been trying to live without God. And this happens when we simply admit it. Been trying to live without God, and it's shown in my life. It's shown by me wanting to make my own rules. It's shown by me trying to be very good, hoping and praying that God will bless me and it's hurt other people when I've done that, so it's to own it. Secondly that it's to grieve it. That is to be genuinely sorry for what's happened. And not just sorry in the sense that sometimes kids are sorry they got caught, or sorry that they got punished for something. No, it's just genuinely sorry that we did it to begin with. But then finally the third step. And this is the most important one. It's to take that owning and that grieving and then to run to Jesus with it. You see it's been said that the first step in being healed is admitting that your sick. And so repentance is the first step. It's admitting that you're sick. It's admitting that our sin has made us sick before God, and that we want him to heal us. And so then how does repentance function to prepare us? How does it carry that out? Well there's a description in a section of Isaiah that Luke quotes. Where he says, every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill made low, the crooked road shall become straight, the rough ways smooth. Hearing that description it sounds like some highway construction, right? Leveling out the valleys, pulling down the top, filling in the low, making it pretty straight. That's the idea, you see the shortest distance between two points, is a straight line. And so then repentance, what it does, is it helps to build a straight line from heaven to your heart. So that Jesus and the peace that he wants to bring you can come to your heart and can come to your life.
See friends, the gift of peace comes through preparation. We prepare for Christmas and we prepare spiritually, so that we can have the greater peace that Jesus was born into the world to bring us. And we prepare with repentance so that Jesus can bring us that ultimate healing that we need, which isn't necessarily an end to war and an end to disease, though that's part of it. The healing that Jesus needs to bring us and that He wants to bring us is a healing from sin. And there's two phrases in the section that bring that out quite stunningly. The first one comes right in connection. When John was preaching a baptism of repentance it says, it was a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sin. You see for all those who do that challenging work of repenting, that challenging work of just admitting, owning up to the times and ways that we tried to live without God. There comes from God, not a condemnation for that kind of living! But rather, forgiveness. You see what this tells us, you think of so many times when you catch one of your children doing something wrong. What's the big temptation on their part? And even our part, to do when we're caught? It's to kind of lie, cover it up, I didn't do it, it was somebody else. Well why do we do that? 'Cause we're afraid of the consequence that might come down, right? Well when we admit our sin, when we admit our flaws, and when we admit to God the fact that we've been trying to live without Him, what comes down from Him is not condemnation. Instead it's forgiveness. We admit our sin to God, not because we're groveling before Him in our guilt. But we admit our sin to God so that He can release us from that guilt. You see forgiveness in the bible is a beautiful word. It's routed in the idea of sending something away. And so then when God forgives your sin, He sends it all away. That is to say He sends away the record of that sin, He sends away the guilt of that sin. He sends away the shame of that sin. He sends away even His own memory of that sin! And it's all gone, because God forgives. And when God forgives it's like it never happened. Well how can God forgive? How is it possible? That's brought out in that last line quoted by, when Luke quotes from Isaiah saying, "And all mankind will see God's salvation." You see that God will bring about this forgiveness and this rescue from sin and death. And He'll do so in a way where all people will see it. In other words, all the events by which God brings about our forgiveness and salvation are going to happen in public. See God will forgive because of the great public events that occurred in the life of Jesus Christ. You see, Jesus publicly lived and He publicly taught. And He did all of it perfectly from start to finish. Jesus publicly died on a cross, outside of Jerusalem. And He publicly died under the guilt of all of the world's sin, including yours and mine. He publicly died there for all the times that we've been unwilling. And He publicly rose again to prove that that sin and death had been defeated, and that our salvation had been won. And that He promised that there is a day when He will come again publicly to take His people home with him forever. Home with Him forever into a world where there is no more sickness, or pain, or death, or trouble, or anything like that. You see God forgives because Jesus lived the perfect life as your substitute and mine. And He also died as your substitute and mine. And through this forgiveness that God gives, and through the salvation that He gives us, we also get the blessing of peace. So are you ready for Christmas? Do you have your decorations out yet? Meals planned, groceries bought, all that stuff? Maybe you do, maybe you don't, you still got time, right? It's only December 9th. But are you spiritually ready for Christmas? Because the gift of peace comes through preparation. You see we prepare for Jesus to come through repentance, clearing out the obstacles that He has to come to our hearts. And as we prepare, God brings us the peace of His forgiveness, and the peace of His salvation. All of it won for us by Jesus Christ. And so friends, may be prepare for Christmas, so that we receive the peace that Jesus brings us, amen.