John the Baptist, described as the greatest man born of women, was divinely commissioned to prepare the way for the Messiah. His mission, foretold in Isaiah, Malachi, and Luke, involved a clear, challenging, and transformative message that humbled the proud and exalted the lowly. He was characterized by true greatness in God's sight, temperance, and power through the Holy Spirit, fulfilling the role of Elijah to turn hearts back to God and prepare a people for the Lord. The ultimate secret of his impactful ministry was his understanding that 'He must increase and I must decrease,' a principle essential for a fruitful Christian life.
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We want to consider the life of John the Baptist, who, according to the Lord Jesus, was the greatest man that ever lived on earth. The most outstanding person that has walked in this scene. None greater born of women than John the Baptist. Biography... has always interested many people, and it's always interested me, and I can remember as a boy going along to a young people's class, and once every eight weeks we had a biography.
One member of the group would bring a praisy of a book that he'd read recently on the life of a great Christian. and he would tell us of the experiences of that Christian and his life story and the various lessons that we could learn from that life. Biography is not only interesting and arresting, but it's very good for preachers. And if you aspire to be a sermon preacher, then you'll find biography a very useful source of illustration. But some of the greatest biographies recorded are found in the Word of God, many in the Old Testament and a few in the New Testament.
We are fortunate in having quite a comprehensive story of the life of John the Baptist. Tonight we are going to think of the first subject that is written down on this little sheet that you have, his mission foretold. And the three outstanding portions of Scripture that illustrate our point here are Isaiah forty, Malachi chapter three and four, and Luke chapter one. In the first case it is the prophecy of Malachi, then the prophecy of Isaiah, and thirdly the prophecy of Gabriel, the angel of God's presence.
In Malachi, we read three things about John the Baptist. Three things that would be symbolic of the life of this great man. We're told, first of all, that he was divinely commissioned in the words, I will send. God has sent various men into the world for special purposes. It is true to say that all men are divinely commissioned. All of us have a particular task to do and a particular duty to perform.
You have a task that God has placed in your hands and you are responsible before God to see that that is carried out. If you fail to do that task that God has given you, then not only will you fail him, but possibly the task will be left undone, or at best somebody else will be caught upon to do it. But there are some men who stand head and shoulders above their fellow men, men who are epoch-makers sent by God at some particular stage in the history of this world for a particular reason.
We think of men like Moses, and Elijah and Isaiah. All these men were outstanding in the Old Testament record because they were divinely commissioned for their era. And according to Malachi, John the Baptist was one such person. He was singled out by God to do a special job. He had a message for his generation that no one else could deliver. And this strange man from the wilderness, who the people flocked to hear, was sent from God.
And it was this sense of vocation that urged him on always to preach the good news of the coming Messiah. Even when the Pharisees stood before him, the representatives of the religion of his day, he just burned to tell them of the coming Christ. When the soldiers came to him and when the poor people came, he had one message for them, Behold, the Lamb of God. John was especially commissioned to announce Christ. Secondly, we notice that he was God's messenger. It is interesting that this book in which we have read this evening, Malachi, is the Hebrew word for my messenger.
This last book in the Old Testament is the story of God's messenger who had come to earth to tell of God's message incarnate. And as John the Baptist came to earth, he was regarded by men as a fanatic, but God called him my servant. This same term is applied to the Lord Jesus. We read in Malachi even of God's messenger who would suddenly come to his temple. That refers to Christ, not to John the Baptist. It is interesting to remember that in many of the Old Testament scriptures this was the name given to Christ.
he was spoken of as the angel of Jehovah. The word angel is the same word, the messenger of the covenant, the messenger of the Lord. We read of the theophanies in the Old Testament, God appearing to men. For example, he appeared to Abraham. He appeared to the parents of Samson. He appeared to Gideon. And he appeared on other occasions. And the name that he had on those occasions was my messenger. And now John the Baptist is called the messenger of God to introduce God's Messiah.
Thirdly, we're told that he was sent to prepare the way of the Lord. So to speak, John had been sent to clear away the moral and spiritual debris that was blocking the highway of the king. Nothing that would impede the progress of the coming Christ could be allowed. And all was to be swept away by the fiery, challenging preaching of John the Baptist. Prepare in the desert a highway for our God. Here he comes along preaching to rich and poor to religious and unbeliever, always telling them that he was just the one who was the voice crying in the wilderness, prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
It was his task to blaze away for the Messiah. But there's more told of John the Baptist in Isaiah than in Malachi. And this is where we want to concentrate our attention for a while this evening. It's important to notice just where this prophecy comes in the book of Isaiah. As you know, Isaiah has sixty-six chapters. And every one of those chapters was written by the same man. There are some people who suggest that from chapter forty onwards you have a different man writing. But if you study the word of God for itself and refuse the advice of these critics, you will soon come to the conclusion that although there is a difference of emphasis, there is a single author behind the whole thing.
Of course, the difference in tone of the second part of Isaiah from the first is because Isaiah has a new kind of subject to introduce. Up to chapter thirty-nine, he'd been speaking about the sin of Israel and about the coming judgment of God upon sin and how these people could turn from their sin. But now from chapter forty onwards, he becomes the prophet evangelist and he speaks of the coming Christ. And this part of his prophecy is climaxed in chapter fifty-three, where he speaks in graphic terms of the suffering of the Lord Jesus as God's Messiah.
In Isaiah forty, we're told these three things that John's witness was to be clear, it was to be challenging, and it was to be cataclysmic. That sounds a long word, but it begins with C, and it happens to fit in. It was to be clear, a voice crying in the wilderness. Literally, the word means, a voice that crawled out, that echoed the message around that men might hear it. John didn't come with fancy turns of phrases.
He didn't have a polished vocabulary. He didn't come with pious statements and with some philosophy that might tickle the ears of men. But he came with a clear, crisp, straight message from God. There was no beating about the bush, as we say. He didn't go all the way around the thing before telling people what he wanted to say. But he told them plainly and clearly The Word of God. There was no mistaking his message. As the people came out from Jerusalem to Jordan, to this man, they listened and went away knowing that he was a man sent from God.
Well, this was just as the prophet has said it should be. A preacher with a clear and forthright down-to-earth message that would reach into the very souls of men. There were plenty of preachers in John's day, as in our day, who will play for the gallery. They will say things in a wrapped up sort of fashion so that people aren't offended and so that their consciences aren't quickened. But John the Baptist wasn't like that. He didn't preach for the gallery. He preached the word of God to men's hearts and aroused them from their sins. His message was crystal clear and even children could understand.
Not only was it clear, but it was challenging. Goes on to say, make straight in the desert a highway for our God. As John saw humanity, it was a spiritually arid and barren and stony wilderness. It was a dry place and needed the refreshing of God's power and presence. Many in their sin and natural state were corrupt, without God, and in dire need of a revelation from God. John says, now let's get things straightened out.
Instead of this crookedness and corruption and sin and violence, let's make straight in the desert a highway for our God. In John's day, as in our day, there was plenty of vice and sin and corruption. And there was need for this kind of preaching that demanded a verdict. The people who listened to this strange, fiery orator from the hills, they couldn't go away cold and unmoved and indifferent. They either went away offended or obedient. His preaching demanded a verdict.
You couldn't just stand and gait and go away. But when you listen to this preacher, you felt as though he was getting right into your heart and challenging you. And you had to do something about it. It's a pity we don't have more of that kind of preaching today. It's very nice knowing a lot of things in our heads. It's all very well learning the Bible and being able to recite it. But the thing is, God wants this message interpreted into our Christian living. The Lord Jesus said to his disciples in John chapter thirteen, after he had washed their feet, If ye knew these things, happy are ye, if ye do them.
And we need to be challenged again in our days. Not only the people who are outside and who don't know Christ, who are living in sin and away from God, but we as Christians need to be challenged again. We need a message that will bring us to our knees and make us ask ourselves just where we're going and why we're going there. That was the kind of preaching that Isaiah said would be characteristic of John the Baptist. It would be challenging. He would speak about men's sin and turn them to God, bring them to repentance. But then, to go further, it said, it was to be cataclysmic.
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be brought low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places paved. Now this is set against the background of an eastern picture, for when an oriental potentate wished to make a journey, he would send ahead of him a special servant who had to prepare the way for the coming king. He had to fill up all the potholes in the road. He had to level off all those bumps and hills that might be in the way.
and he had to prepare a highway for the coming king and put signposts all along the road so that as the king came along in his chariot not only would the way be plain but it would be clearly marked so that there would be no mistaking the prepared way. Now John the Baptist mission says Isaiah is to be like that. He'll come and he'll fill up those holes in the road, and he'll level off the mountains, and he'll make a clean, strict, clear-cut highway for the Lord. Of course, these words are to be taken spiritually. It didn't mean that John was coming along with a bulldozer and going to beat up the roads in Palestine.
But it meant... that those who were elevated in their own opinion and proud and exalted and conceited would be humbled in the dust and the poor and those who were downtrodden would be raised to some sort of standard of life. The haughty would be humbled and the obeyed would be raised. This then would be the result of the preaching of John the Baptist. It shows that he wasn't coming with some ready wit and with some fresh form of speech that any orator might have. But it shows us that he came empowered by God the Holy Spirit.
He was a man who was sent from God to the people of his generation. And we're told, Then shall the glory of the Lord... be revealed. As soon as the highway was prepared, as soon as the road had been clearly indicated, the Lord would come and the glory of the Lord would be revealed. It is sad to look at Israel in the closing chapters of the Old Testament because written all across it is this word, Ichabod, for glory has departed.
No longer was Israel the glorious possessor of the blessing of God's presence. The Lord had been excluded from their thinking, and away in captivity they had forgotten the Lord. They had lamented their lot, but they had failed to come back from their assist. And the glory of the Lord, the Shabbat, won a glory that used to be the center of their camp. was now no longer to be saved. They had their ceremonies, they had their ritual, they had their temples. But the Lord wasn't impressed with that. And in Amos five and Jeremiah seven, you hear God saying that he isn't impressed with their sacrifices.
What he wanted most was the obedience of their heart. And he wanted them to be walking in his way the glory had departed. But now with the coming of John the Baptist, the stage is set for the return of God's glory to earth. And says John the Evangelist in his first chapter, we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. And the word that is used there... translated glory is the equivalent of the word that used to be used in the Old Testament to describe the glory of the Shekinah, the presence of God.
What a privilege John the Baptist had. He made the highway for the Lord and then set back to see the glory of the Lord revealed. These then were the words that were spoken. by the prophet Isaiah concerning the advent of John the Baptist. Then as we move on to Luke chapter one, verses thirteen to seventeen, we have the prophecy of the angel Gabriel. And here again we're told some interesting things about the character and the deeds of this man John the Baptist.
Gabriel, you will remember, appeared to both the father and mother of John the Baptist, and he described to them in detail the sort of person John would be. He told them of his power and he told them of his deeds. We notice that he says in verse fifteen, He shall be great in the sight of the Lord, and shall drink neither wine nor strong drink. He shall be filled with the Holy Ghost. Here we have a description of John's character.
We're told first of all of his true greatness. He shall be great in the sight of the Lord. A lot of people in the world are keen to be great in the sight of men. And most of the great men today are not great at all. They are not great in the fight of the Lord. That's true greatness. John the Baptist, as far as men were concerned, was just a fanatic and a fool from Judea. He wasn't great. Oh, they thought of men like Caesar and Herod and Caiaphas and all these other people, as we shall see in one of our other talks.
They thought of them as the great people, but John the Baptist, why he was only a peasant from the hills. But he was really the greatest of them all. He was great in the sight of the Lord. We may not be very great in men's eyes. We may be despised and few. People may consider us rubbish trade. Perhaps they say all kinds of things about you because you come along to this place and worship the Lord. But remember, true greatness doesn't consist in man's opinion. It consists in God's opinion.
And John the Baptist was great in the sight of the Lord. But then we're told of his temperance. And shall drink neither wine nor strong drink. He was a temperate man. He had learned to control his appetites and desires. Everything was subservient to this one factor. He was the messenger of the Lord, and nothing would be allowed to hinder him from fulfilling the mission to which God had sent him. Instead of being a man given to luxury and ease and plenty, he was an abseemious man who learned to curb his appetite. And things that weren't...
For his good, although perhaps legitimate, he set them aside. When we hear about temperance today, we usually associate it with abstaining from strong drink, or at least cutting down on strong drink. But we forget that temperance in the Bible means far more than that. It means self-control. It means that we have learned, by God's grace, to control ourselves. And self is our worst enemy. We'll never have a worse enemy in life than self. You know the story of Teddy's button? Teddy had that button and he used to polish it every day and show it to his friends.
It was a button from the tunic of his dead father who'd been a soldier. His father had given his life and Teddy had this button and he prized it. One day he said to a minister, he said, look at this button. It adopts my father's tunic, and when I grow up, I'm going to be a real, live soldier like daddy. And I want a real, live enemy to fight, too. And the Christian man looked at him, and he said, Well, Teddy, you come with me, and I'll show you an enemy. And he stood him in front of a big mirror, and he said, There you are, there's the worst enemy you'll ever have to fight.
You know how true that is. And so do I. Our greatest enemy is self. And here consisted the secret of John's power, one of the secrets. He learned to control himself. Instead of being controlled by self, he had self under control. He was a man of temperance. Thirdly, he was a man of power. He shall be filled with the Holy Ghost. in writing to the Ephesians, Paul gives this word of exhortation, Be filled with the Spirit.
Now, the Bible does not teach that the coming of the Holy Spirit into the believer's heart is an experience subsequent to conversion, but it teaches that the moment you believe the Holy Spirit seals you a child of God. In Ephesians chapter one you can read these words, having believed ye were sealed with the Holy Spirit of promise. Romans eight and nine. If any man have not the Spirit of Christ he is none of his. John chapter three we are told except the man be born of water and of the Spirit cannot enter the kingdom.
you cannot be saved apart from the operation of God the Holy Spirit. And if you're a Christian tonight, you have the Holy Spirit in your heart. You don't have to wait for some strange and supernatural awe-inspiring experience to convince you of His coming. You don't have to roll on the floor and utter strange noises. If you're saved, the Spirit is in your heart. But of course, You may not be enjoying what Paul speaks about to be filled with the Spirit. And it doesn't mean that you have to ask God to send more of His Spirit into your heart.
But as a humble penitent, you have to ask the Lord to help you make more room for Him. May our Holy Spirit have more of me. That's the secret. And that's why John was so powerful. He had learned... to make his own desires second to the desires of the Lord, the Holy Spirit who indwells him. Do we allow God the Holy Spirit to govern our lives? Or are we like so many Christians just living on the fringe of this wonderful experience of allowing Christ and God the Holy Spirit to be in control?
It isn't a second blessing. It's a blessing that you can have every day, because it is a continuous tense, be being filled with the Spirit. It doesn't happen once, it happens every day. A renewed experience of the grace of God, and this was the power of John the Baptist. His wasn't the power of an ordinary man who was given to some clever speaking. His was divine power. When he opened his mouth, people sat up and listened. They were listening to God. So then Gabriel, in this prophecy, describes John's character.
He will be truly great. He will be a man of temperance and self-control. And he will be a man of power. Then he describes his deeds. And in verses sixteen and seventeen we have that description, he says verse sixteen, and many of the children of Israel shall he turn to the Lord their God. In other words, he was going to be a soul winner. He was going to turn the people, his fellow countrymen, away from their idolatry and infidelity back to the God of their fathers.
He was going to win men for God. What a glorious prophecy. What a wonderful man he was to be. Then we're told in verse seventeen that he was to be in the line of the prophet. He was the greatest of the prophet. And apparently his ministry and his method were to be those of Elijah. Going back to Malachi again, you have that confirmed. I will send Elijah. And when the disciples questioned the Lord Jesus concerning that prophecy, he told them that Elijah had already come.
He'd come in the person of John the Baptist. Here was the spirit of Elijah, if you like, reincarnate. You read the description of these two men. The description of the of Elijah in two Kings, verse chapter one and verse eight, and the description of John the Baptist in Mark one and verse six. And you'll see that there are two characters very similar in their ways and in their dress and in their diet and in every other way. Two men who lined up as messengers from God. So John the Baptist was to be a prophet with prophetic power. Then we're told that his message would have practical results.
We read, To turn the hearts of the fathers to the children and the disobedience to the wisdom of the just. In other words, John's message would bring a betterment of family relationships. The fathers and the children would be in a better relationship. The children would be obedient and the fathers would command respect. They would behave in such a fashion, but even the problems of the home would be resolved as they listened to this man from the wilderness, a man from God. And fools would learn wisdom.
Finally, we're told here that he will prepare a people for the Lord. And here we're brought right back to the place where we began. John the Baptist was essentially God's messenger. He was the herald who sounded the trumpet. He was the man who went ahead and said, Christ is coming. We'll see on following evenings just how he did it, how successful his mission was, and how he fulfilled to the liquor. These prophecies concerning his person and his character.
I remember being in London back in the days of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. And the night before the coronation, I had to sleep in the park outside Buckingham Palace. I slept in some queer places in my life, but I think that was one of the queerest. I slept under a tree, and it was raining, and I had an umbrella that only covered a part of me, and all around the tree, like the spokes of a wheel, there were people sleeping. And the two men next to me were quite loud sleepers and were really doing their justice to getting some sleep that night. And of course they prevented the rest of us from sleeping. And about four o'clock in the morning there was a general disturbance and everybody got up.
We took our places in the Mall which is the main boulevard leading down to Buckingham Palace. There we waited on our feet. and I didn't have anything to eat or drink. That really grieved me for seven hours waiting for the coming of the Queen. Well, at eleven o'clock, with the precision of the British procession, along came the coronation group. First of all, there came the various representatives of the Commonwealth, the soldiers from this land and the other lands, and then there came the heralds of the Queen, and they founded a clear clarion note that told us that the next person we could expect to see was the Queen.
And that's just what John the Baptist did. He came into this world nineteen centuries ago, not with a trumpet fashioned by men, but with a word from the Lord. And he sounded the trumpet, and this was the call, Prepare the Way of the Lord. make straight in the desert a highway for our God. The secret of John the Baptist's great mission in life is listed at the top of this page. He must increase and I must decrease.
And that's the secret of a happy Christian life today. Christ preeminence self is faith. May the Lord bless his word. Let us pray.