The Beginning

[Here's the message from this past Sunday's worship services from Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. You'll also find live-stream video of both worship services. (I personally feel that the sermon at the second service went better than the one at the first.)]

Mark 1:1-8

Last Sunday, as we began the season of Advent, we talked about the End. Today, we talk about the Beginning.

Mark opens the gospel lesson for today by saying, “The beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah [or, the Christ, God’s Anointed One], the Son of God…” (Mark 1:1)

In these few words, Mark does several things.

First, he gives you the title of the book that the Holy Spirit has inspired him to write. I’m convinced that if Mark were here with us right now, he would be horrified to learn that we refer to his book as “the Gospel of Mark.” Mark is not the Gospel. He’s not the good news. Mark presents the good news of Jesus, even if it’s helpful to refer to the Gospel of Mark to distinguish it from the other three books that tell us about Jesus. But truly, this book is about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.

From Mark’s perspective, his whole narration of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection is “The Beginning of the good news [or Gospel] about Jesus the Christ…” Even at the end of Mark’s book, the Gospel, the saving good news that Jesus, the Son of God, second Person of the Trinity, has died to take God’s wrath for sin and sinners onto Himself, then rose from the dead to tear open eternity with God for all who repent and believe, is just the beginning of what Jesus’ Gospel will do.

This Gospel will keep going, bringing new beginnings to all who believe, until Jesus returns.

But in his opening verse–”The beginning of the good news about Jesus”--Mark also tells you that Jesus didn’t just spring out of nowhere unexpectedly. Jesus was promised long ago.

The beginning of the gospel goes all the way back to the Garden of Eden, God said that One would come Who, on behalf of us all, would crush evil underfoot to give us life. (Genesis 3:15)

And we see that promise repeatedly in the Old Testament. Job lived about the same time as Abraham, two-thousand years before the birth of Jesus, and kept trusting in God when he suffered unbearable horrors. He confessed his faith in God to his fickle friends and said, “I know that my redeemer lives, and that in the end he will stand on the earth. And after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God…” (Job 19:25-27)

The Gospel began then, when God, His heart broken over the refusal of the first humans to keep trusting in Him, wanting to be gods themselves, issued His promises–His good news or gospel promises–of restoration, forgiveness, and life through patriarchs, preachers, prophets, and ordinary believers.

We hear this promise to us again in this morning’s Old Testament lesson. God, through Isaiah, who lived 700 years before Jesus’ birth, delivers promises of the Savior to come, saying of Him, “He tends his flock like a shepherd: He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart…” (Isaiah 40:11)

Back in today’s gospel lesson, Mark quotes two Old Testament passages to describe the beginning of the unveiling of the Gospel about Jesus, the anointed King of kings, Who is also God the Son. He cites God’s promise from Malachi: “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way…” (Malachi 3:1) Then, from Isaiah: “a voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.’” (Isaiah 40:3)

So, not only do the prophets foretell the coming of the Messiah, but they also foretell the coming of the forerunner who would prepare for the revelation of the Messiah, the Savior.

And here we come to the crux of what Mark is telling us today. The Gospel of new life with God that never ends begins to come to the whole world, Gentiles as well as Jews, when this strange man who dresses like the Old Testament prophet Elijah–who wears “clothing made of camel’s hair…[and eats] locusts and wild honey” not the kind of person you’d likely invite to the Christmas party–the Gospel begins to come to us when John the Baptizer starts his ministry.

Mark says that John “appeared in the wilderness, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins…” (Mark 1:4)

Now, if you think I’ve duped you with a bunch of talk about good news and God’s love for you only to start talking about repentance and are thinking of checking out of whatever else I have to say, you may misunderstand what repentance is. So, hear me out, please.

Repentance does entail sorrow for our sin. But if you think it’s all about wearing a solemn face, putting on sackcloth and ashes, or crying tears for sins you enjoyed and will only regret if you have to, you need to know that repentance is more than grief over wrongdoing.

As a boy, I started taking trumpet lessons. My cousin Gary, who was about fifteen years older than me, had been a talented trumpet player, gave me his trumpet. I did well practicing. At first. But one weekend, I left the trumpet at school and when Mr. Barnard, the band director, asked me if I’d practiced on Saturday or Sunday, I lied, telling him I had. He then produced my trumpet. It happened that day that Gary was at our house and came to the school with my mom to pick me up. Mr. Barnard went with me to the car to tell my mom about my failure to practice and about my lie.

I was filled with sorrow, not so much because I got caught, but because I hadn’t wanted to disappoint my cousin. Repentance begins with sorrow over disappointing the One Who gave you life and, through His death and resurrection, gave you new life.

But the repentance to which God calls us through prophets like John the Baptist and through His Word today doesn’t end in sorrow. Mark tells us today that John’s preaching brought throngs of people into the wilderness to hear his call to repent. Then Mark tells us, “Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.” (Mark 1:5) They confessed their sins.

Martin Luther writes in The Small Catechism that “confession consists of two parts. One is that we confess our sins and the other is that we receive absolution, or forgiveness, from the confessor as from God Himself, in no way doubting, but firmly believing that our sins are thereby forgiven before God in heaven.”

I was called to a hospital ER one night when a man who had been attending the church I served was found by a friend, just as he was about to take his own life. For all kinds of reasons, he was riddled by guilt, fear, and self-loathing. When he saw me, he begged me to go away at first. He couldn’t believe that God could love or forgive him. But over time, this man who had heard the gospel many times, and would, like us all, need to hear it in the word spoken, and read and need to receive it in Holy Communion would begin to believe that the gospel was for him too. He could accept that he too was a child of God for whom Jesus shed his blood and rose to open up life with God, both now and in eternity, to him.

John the Baptizer didn’t come into the world to lay an eternal guilt trip on us, friends. The Old Testament Hebrew word for repent is shuv, meaning turn around. The New Testament Greek word for repent is metanoia, meaning to have one’s mind changed.

John the Baptist came to bring the Word from God that will first bring us to sorrow for sin and then turn us around, change our minds, enabling us to see that God is not our enemy, but our best Friend.

God hates our sin and all that it does to us. Sin brings death, bloodshed, contention, hatred, selfishness, greed: all the things the bedevil and kill us. We need God’s forgiveness for sin, given to us freely in Christ. But when, through His Word and the Sacraments, the God we know in Jesus works repentance in us, He turns us from sorrow to the joys of life, freedom, reconciliation, and a hope beyond the grave that spills its blessings and wonders on each day we live in this world.

God’s Gospel promise is for you today: “Return to me...and I will return to you…” (Zechariah 1:3)

So Jesus says: “The kingdom of God has come near [in Jesus Himself]. Repent and believe the good news!” (Mark 1:15)

Repentance isn’t something you and I have to do to please an angry God. It is a gift from God, given in His Word. Through His Word, He repents you, turning you away from separation from God and others. Repentance prepares you to receive another gift from God, the forgiveness of sins and everlasting life with God. As God turns us to Jesus Christ, we know, as God’s Word promises, “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus…” (Romans 8:1)

In Jesus Christ, your sin condition, the condition that causes you to think of yourself over God and others, and all the sins you’ve ever committed because of that condition, are totally and forever forgiven, forgotten, destroyed, done away with.

As we live in daily repentance and faith, the old self dies and the new self rises to live with God “in everlasting righteousness, innocence, and blessedness.”

And that, friends, for all of us, is “the beginning of the good news about Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God,” a gracious, loving beginning that will never end for anyone who daily takes shelter in Jesus, our only King, our only God, and our only Savior. Amen

How to Wait for Jesus

[This was shared during worship with the people and friends of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio, earlier today. This the First Sunday of Advent, which begins the new Church Year.]

Mark 13:24-37
Advent is a season for waiting. As we get ready for Christmas during Advent, we remind ourselves that as surely as God once came into the world as the baby Jesus, that same Jesus will one day, on what the Bible calls the Day of the Lord, return to this world.

Advent, of course, nothing but a human invention, a tradition that Christians are free to keep or ignore. There’s nothing sacred about Advent in itself.

But as a reminder to you and me to wait (and how to wait) for Jesus’ return, Advent is useful.

It reminds us that when Jesus returns, He will put everything finally and fully right, and usher all who have trusted Him into life in His new creation.

It’s when that happens that we will fully appreciate the meaning of God’s promise given through the prophet Isaiah centuries before Jesus’ birth: “They who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:31, English Standard Version).

Until that day, we “live by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7).

We trust that the God Who once took on human flesh (John 1:14), then died, rose, and ascended to heaven, will return.

All who confess Jesus as their God and Lord are waiting for that day of the Lord.

But, as Jesus makes clear in today’s gospel lesson, for the disciple of Jesus Christ, waiting is not a passive thing. Take a look at the lesson, please, Mark 13:24-37. Jesus has been talking about two events at the same time. One is the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD. The other is the Day of His return. He’s shifted mostly to talking about His return and the deterioration of life in this world that will precede it when He says in verse 26: “At that time people will see the Son of Man coming in clouds with great power and glory. And he will send his angels and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of the heavens.”

Both the living and the dead will then be brought together to meet their King and receive His welcome into His kingdom.

Because of this promise from the crucified and risen Jesus, we confess: “...if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him” (Romans 6:8).

Next in our gospel lesson, Jesus talks to us specifically about waiting. Verse 28: “Now learn this lesson from the fig tree: As soon as its twigs get tender and its leaves come out, you know that summer is near.”

The fig is one of the few trees in the Middle East, where Jesus lived in the first century, that loses its leaves in the fall. When its leaves begin to reappear in late spring, people know that warm weather is on its way. It’s a sign of things to come.

Verse 29: “Even so [Jesus goes on], when you see these things happening, you know that it is near, right at the door. Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened. Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”

The these things that Jesus speaks of here are all the calamities that will happen in the world before His return, things like wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes, and famines. In other words, life will continue to go pretty much as it has in this world from the moment that Adam and Eve fell into sin.

And Jesus tells us that these things--all the sin and sadness that permeates our fallen universe--will not be the last words over the lives of those who trust in Christ. 

His Word--the Word of and about the Word made flesh, Jesus--will never pass away, will give all who have persevered in trusting in Him, a new and everlasting beginning.

So, we must not allow ourselves to be discouraged by these things--whether they’re injustice or corruption, disasters or holocausts, personal tragedies or illness, gun violence or racism, sexual harassment or selfishness.

Jesus has conquered them all and even in the midst of the things of this world, we can know God’s peace.

We can hope.

Life in this world is short; eternity lasts forever.

If we focus our hope on this world, we will, at most, gain only what will fall from our grasp when we draw our last earthly breaths. “What good is it for someone to gain the whole world,” Jesus once asked, “yet forfeit their soul?” (Mark 8:36) But when we trust in Christ above all, our grasp is on eternity with God, which can never be taken from anyone who believes!

As we trust in Christ, persevering in living life for Him and to His glory, the hope of eternity will splash into our daily lives here, empowering us to keep on following Jesus and living useful lives when the world loses its way.

We will live more fearlessly, with greater willingness to fail, free to love and care for others, knowing that whatever we may lose in this life, is nothing compared with all that God has in store for us in eternity.

“If only for this life we have hope in Christ,” the apostle Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15:9, “we are of all people most to be pitied.”

Our faith in Christ empowers us, obliges us even, to always hope, to live in hope! Not to hope in this world or in the things or the people of this world, but hope in Jesus Christ. 

When we hope in Christ and live in that hope, we know the truth to which 2 Timothy 1:7, points us: “For the Spirit God gave us does not make us timid, but gives us power, love and self-discipline.” We can live our lives at home, with our church family, and in the world at large with God’s “power love, and discipline.” We can live in the power of knowing thta if God has called us to do something, the Holy Spirit will empower us to do it. Period. End of subject.

And in telling us to see the signs of the inevitability of His return when He will bring our hope in Him to its fullness, Jesus is not telling us to waste our time in trying to game out the exact moment of His return.

Nor is He telling us to go along with our lives as though we’d never encountered Jesus, people indistinguishable from the unbelievers, agnostics, or atheists who surround us.

Verse 32: “But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Be on guard! Be alert! You do not know when that time will come. It’s like a man going away: He leaves his house and puts his servants in charge, each with their assigned task, and tells the one at the door to keep watch.”

Listen: This is how a Christian disciple waits for the return of Jesus. They fulfill their calling as disciples first, as members of Christ’s Body, the Church and second, as people who live in the world with families, spouses, friends; as people who are students or workers or retirees. 

Every follower of Jesus Christ, every disciple, has a vocation, no matter what their work or daily activities.

We’re to be and make disciples.

We’re to repent and believe in Jesus, to hear His Word and take it to heart, to love God and love neighbor, to love our fellow disciples with the same passion Christ has for us, to pray, and to make other disciples.

Each of us will have our own “assigned tasks” within that vocation. I can’t be as effective a witness for Christ among your friends, co-workers, neighbors, or classmates as you can be, because I’m not you and I'm not there with your friends, co-workers, neighbors, or classmates like you are. You may not be called to be Christ’s witness at the grocery deli counter in the same way I seem to be. But each of us who bear the name of Christ is called by Christ to wait and watch for Him. 

We faithfully wait and watch for Jesus’ return when we go about what it is God has called us to be and do, with faith in Christ. 

The chorus of one of my favorite songs by the late John Ylvisaker, Jesus Was Sent, says,

Jesus was sent that our eyes may be open,
So we might witness the day of the Lord.
He will make sense of our loving and hoping;
He will break fences and open the door. 

We faithfully wait and watch for Jesus’ return when we let Him break all the fences and doors we hide behind to hoard our lives and to feed the delusion we all have that our lives are our own and don’t actually belong to the God Who made us and died for us and rose for us.

We wait for Jesus rightly when we trust in Jesus and keep on trusting in Jesus all the time.

God help us to do just that. Amen

[I'm the pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio.]

The Unwanted Guest?

[This was prepared for sharing with the people and guests of Living Water Lutheran Church in Springboro, Ohio, for this morning's worship services.]

Matthew 3:1-12
If you were to make a list of all the Biblical people of faith you wouldn’t want to invite over to the house for an evening of holiday revelry, John the Baptist might be at the top. On the face of it, John seems like such a downer! 

But I think, we need to revise our estimation of John the Baptist a bit.

Like you and me, John was a believer in Jesus. Even in his mother’s womb, Luke’s Gospel tells us, the Holy Spirit prompted John to recognize Mary, who had come to visit John’s parents in the Judean hill country, as the mother of the Lord Jesus. And when, after Jesus had spent many years in Nazareth then presented Himself for John’s baptism, John demurred. “I need to be baptized by You, and do you come to me?” In the fourth gospel, we're told that John the Baptist, pointed Jesus out and said, "Behold, the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sin of the world."

But sometimes, John's faith vied with his doubts. As we’ll  be reminded in next Sunday’s Gospel lesson, John was far from perfect. There, we'll be reminded that though he believed in Jesus, Jesus didn't seem to be quite the King that John had expected. He would send people to ask Jesus, "Are You the One. Or is there going to be someone else?" Like you and me sometimes maybe, he doubted the Savior in Whom he believed.

But John kept believing in Jesus, however imperfectly.

There's a comfort to be derived in that. God only uses imperfect people to be His hands and feet in the world.

Despite his imperfections though, John was God’s choice for a ministry that had two basic elements:

• to call people to repentance;
• to announce the coming of the kingdom of heaven through the Christ, the Messiah, God’s anointed King.

John’s message is only a downer to those who have no desire to repent or be part of God’s Kingdom. For others, those willing to follow Jesus and to give up on calling the shots in the universe, John’s message brings, “comfort and joy”! (Even when that message makes us squirm.)

Please turn to the Gospel lesson for today, Matthew 3:1-12 (page 676 in the pew Bibles). Matthew begins our lesson with words like those often used by Old Testament prophets to describe moments of decisive action by God: “In those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the Desert of Judea...”

The prophets often used phrases like "in those days." They signaled a moment when God had or, the prophets said, He would act.

The New Testament has two main words it uses for time. There's chronos, chronological time. Then there's kairos, God's time.

God acts on His own timetable. It's because we want God to bow to our chronological timetables that we're inclined to cry to heaven, "How long, Lord? How long do I have to wait?"

God acts at precisely the right moments for His purposes and for our good. At the kairos moment, God prompted John, "Now John. Now is the time for you to start preaching the message I give to you."

And God tells John to do this important ministry in the strangest of venues. In the wilderness by the banks of the Lower Jordan River. If John had gone to a business or church growth consultant, the wilderness is not the place they would have told him to set up shop. That wilderness area is composed partly of desert, but mostly of rocky terrain that contains sparse pastureland that can't stand much grazing. It's a good for nothing place where nobody lives unless they have to. Few would have lived there. Few would have gone there.

Yet, as we'll see, many flocked to hear John preach. The takeaway is simple: If God's hand is in a ministry, God will connect people to it. If God's hand isn't in a ministry, a crowd might be attracted, but it's doubtful that anyone will get connected to God.

Verse two: [John said:] “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near." John is bleak, isn’t he? Or is he?

Turn, please to Matthew 4:17 (page 677). “From that time on Jesus began to preach, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.’"

John the Baptist was the last of the prophets who pointed, as a future event, to the kingdom of heaven that Jesus died and rose to bring to those who follow Him. We have a stereotype of prophets and of the Old Testament as being surly, demanding, vindictive, while we see Jesus and the New Testament as jolly, passive pushovers.

Yet, here we see that John preached the precise message as Jesus.

That message has two parts. It’s really the message of Advent, the message of Christian faith.

First, repent. We mentioned last Sunday that the word usually translated as repent in our English translations is metanoia, literally meaning I change my mind.

But to repent means a lot more than changing one’s mind. It's not like saying, "Blue used to be my favorite color. Now it's red."

In fact, in repentance, we own the fact that we are incapable of changing our own minds.

We may want to see things God’s way, but we can’t.

We may want to stop sinning, but we’re too into it to conquer it in our own power.

In repentance, we ask God to give us a new mind, new eyes, and a new way of living.

We ask that God will impose a new direction on our lives, His direction.

To shift us from following what our sinful impulses tell us to do--to do what I want to do whoever might get hurt; to follow my thoughts, emotions, or wills irrespective of what God says a “still more excellent way.” And, instead, we ask God to help us follow where He leads.

The Bible teaches us that it isn’t even we who author our desire to be in sync with God. That too, is a gift, tendered to us through the Holy Spirit.

In repentance, we yield to the desire for forgiveness and to the One Who gave that desire to us!

But what’s clear from John’s words--and from Jesus’ words--is that repentance is not a one-time proposition. The word for repent here is uttered in the present tense: Metanoieite. And in Greek that means John was saying: “Keep repenting!” “Keep turning back to God!”

You see, God understands us. He really does, better than we understand ourselves!

Repentance is more than sorrow for sin.

It’s also the willingness to keep coming back to God for guidance and forgiveness and grace.

Some people offer what they call repentance and say, “From here on in, I will be a good person. I will do good deeds. I will avoid sin.”

But true repentance says, “I can’t be a good person or do good deeds or avoid sin on my own, Lord. Kill my sinful self again today and help me to walk with you.” 

That is not a downer message from John the Baptist.

It’s a message that urges us to keep following the God we know in Jesus Christ, even when we mess up.

Repent every day, live a life of repentance, of turning back to God, because God wants to live beside us now and in perfection in eternity. That should be an uplifting message!

The second part of John’s message was, “the kingdom of heaven is near.”

However crazy or indecipherable our lives can be, we can be sure that God is never far from from us.

That was true even before God took on human flesh in Jesus Christ and died and rose to set all who believe in Him free from sin and death.

It’s even more true now.

The risen Jesus promises to always be with us!

Verse 3: “This is he who was spoken of through the prophet Isaiah: ‘A voice of one calling in the desert, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.”’"

The words are from Isaiah 40:3. These were originally words to God’s people Israel when they were exiled. A voice would proclaim that the time was near when God would come and lead His people back home.

Matthew sees that John is like Isaiah’s voice. He came to prepare for God Himself--Jesus--to come into this world and lead us from the wilderness of sin and death into the kingdom of heaven.

In his proclamation that people repent and believe that God’s kingdom was close, John was preparing people to meet Jesus.

It’s how we prepare to meet Jesus too.

We turn from sin, asking God’s help to live as He wills, and we trust that in Jesus, God is with us always!

Verse 4: “John's clothes were made of camel's hair, and he had a leather belt around his waist. His food was locusts and wild honey.” They wouldn’t like John’s attire on those TV fashion shows.

In Malachi 4, in the Old Testament, God promised that before the day of judgment, He would send the prophet Elijah and he would turn people’s hearts back toward the ways of God. Later in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus makes clear that, at the least, John the Baptist played that prophetic role because Jesus’ ministry, as we saw last week, is the prerequisite for the judgment and the final fulfillment of His kingdom.

In 2 Kings 1:8, we’re told that Elijah was as much of a fashionista as John: “He had a garment of hair and had a leather belt around his waist.”

When John started preaching in his attire, when he only ate food that could be gathered, just as had been true of the ancient Israelites during their wilderness journey before crossing the Jordan into God’s promised land, people gave John their attention.

Verses 5 and 6: “People went out to him from Jerusalem and all Judea and the whole region of the Jordan. Confessing their sins, they were baptized by him in the Jordan River.” We prepare the way for Christ to enter our lives with power and grace when we clear away the obstructions. When we clear away our sin by confessing them to God.

Verses 7-10: “But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to where he was baptizing, he said to them: 'You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not think you can say to yourselves, "We have Abraham as our father." I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham. The ax is already at the root of the trees, and every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire."”

We know the Pharisees and Saducees. Good religious folks. Pillars of the faith community. But also smug. Certain that because they were genetic descendants of Abraham, they were on solid ground. There’s no indication that they came to be baptized. Only to check things out. John calls them for being just good church members.

But God doesn’t want church members; God wants disciples!

God wants disciples who make other disciples.

He wants people who, like John the Baptist, follow the Lord, however imperfectly; not people who think that once they’re in the club, they might volunteer for this or that, but never attempt aligning themselves with Christ’s call to follow Him!

In Verses 11 and 12, John says: “‘I baptize you with water for repentance. But after me will come one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not fit to carry. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire.’"

Before John, there were baptisms in Judea. They were self-administered. New converts to Judaism washed the sin of being Gentiles away before embracing the purity of the Jewish people. Some Jewish sects asked people to baptize themselves as a sign of renewed commitment to God. John was the first person ever to administer a baptism to other people.

But as John makes clear, his baptism was very different from the one that Jesus would administer, the one that Christians undergo at baptismal fonts like ours.

John’s baptism was only symbolic, the washing of water symbolizing the washing that true repentance brings to our lives.

But the Baptism that Jesus commands, the Sacrament, brings life from the Holy Spirit and the fire of God, burning away impurity and lighting our way through this life to eternity. That is good news. “All who believe and are baptized shall be saved,” Jesus says. John points us to eternal salvation in Christ!

Finally, John, talks about Jesus as judge of all humanity.

But in truth, what we learn from John the Baptist is that, in an ultimate sense, Jesus judges no human being. We are the ones who decide the judgment of eternity over our lives.

We pass sentence on ourselves by the choices we make each day.

The choice we are called to make is not to be perfect or good or religious.

The choice we’re called to make is to live each day in repentance, acknowledging our sins and imperfections, our need of daily reconstruction by Christ, our need of the crucified and risen Christ Himself.

When, by faith, we let Christ and His forgiveness into our lives, we’re walking toward God and His promises for time and eternity and we experience the truth that the Kingdom of heaven is truly near!

We might think that John would be an uncomfortable Christmastime guest in our homes.

But for all his rough edges, all of his incomplete knowledge, and the difficulty of his message, if we truly listen to him, we can hear a man who pointed us to trust in Jesus.

We can hear the Gospel about Jesus, which is good news of great joy for all people. I like to think that a guy like John would have a place at my table any time. Amen!