I think it's an important question for us as Christians, a question we should be routinely asking ourselves that I thought a lot about this week. And the question is this. What is my Christian faith for? Or what purpose does my faith serve? Why do I do things like pray before a meal or go to church on Sundays or spend time in fellowship with other Christians? Or even this time of year, Lent comes around. Why are certain Christians abstaining from meat on Fridays?
Why are certain Christians abstaining from this? Why are they going to Ash Wednesday? All these questions, it all comes back to asking why. Why are we doing it? What is the purpose of all of it? And frankly, I think about questions like that a lot. I'd ask you, do you think about questions like that? And I'd contest that you should. And here's my reason why. Because if you can't answer those questions, for your sake,
And what I mean is if you can't pinpoint your reason why, then as time goes on, you'll resort to someone else's reason why. You know, it's the old adage, if you don't stand for anything, you fall for everything. And believe me when I tell you there's plenty of things in the Christian realm, the realm of Christian thought, of Christianity, there's plenty of things to fall for. You know, teachers of the prosperity gospel would tell you that the whole reason Christianity exists is for the sole purpose of reaping the rewards God wants to give us,
of just kind of piling in all the blessings that God has and has promised to us. God wants you rich. God wants you happy. God wants your business to succeed. God wants your farm to succeed. God wants everything you have to succeed. And that's what they say. They say God wants you to have all of it. And if you don't have it, that's a sign you don't have God. And so therefore, they'd say, the purpose of your faith is to do good things to others because God can and will pay it back to you.
Or maybe a more kind of philosophical Christian thought that's very popular and maybe not quite emphasized a lot nowadays. It's called postmodernism. Again, more Christian philosophy. Postmodernism says that, and you'll know what this is when I say it, that Christianity is subjective. Christianity is kind of a fluid experience for everybody. You know, in the 50s and 60s, we think of the kind of firm stance fundamental Christians. You know, you've got to go to church three times a week. You've got to do this. You've got to do that.
You've got to read this much of your Bible and be doing this. You know, we think of that firmness. And nowadays, we move beyond that to postmodern thought that just says, you know what? Christianity's whatever. You know, if you want to worship Jesus that way, do it. If you want to sing that way, do it. You know, it's a... It's open to interpretation. But it's open to all. We don't need a Bible. We don't need teaching about sin. We don't need to talk about repentance. All we need, and you'll know this, because this is what they say, is an open mind to other truth. An open mind.
And they would say, you know what? Islam, sure. Hinduism, sure. Confucianism, Mormonism, Scientology, all of it, it all goes to the same place. Why does it matter? It's all good. You just got to be open. You just got to be accepting. Now this is where you might say, well, at least I'm smart enough to not think that way, Pastor. I'm smart enough to know that that's not true because that just seems excessive. That just seems like a bit much. But there's a problem with that way of thinking.
And it's this. Knowing what you don't believe, isn't the same as knowing what you believe. Knowing what you surely wouldn't subscribe to or call yourself a Christian, or call true isn't the same as being sure of what is true or knowing the why of your faith. For example, I can tell you with complete confidence, that grape nuts are neither grapes nor nuts.
But if I come to you claiming I know all this stuff about grape nuts, but then I say, you know what, I can tell you what it's not. But if you ask me what grape nuts were, I don't have the faintest clue of what grape nuts are. I know you get them in the cereal aisle, that's really about it. But that's true. I mean, I can tell you what they aren't. But it doesn't mean I know a lick about what they are. And in the same way, if my Christianity boils down to, you know, at least I don't believe that. At least I don't think of that that way.
But if someone was to come to you and say, well, then what do you believe? What are you standing for? What are the whys of your faith? And you just kind of shrug your shoulders. then you're no better off than the first person. You know, the Bible over and over again, condemns this kind of approach to the Christian faith. You know, there's a word that they use. They call it spiritual foolishness, spiritual sluggishness, spiritual dullness. But the word that the Bible most often uses is the word moros,
which we translate to moron. It means you're spiritually dumb, is what it calls people that think this way. The Apostle John, as we studied in 1 John, said it is a true Christian, is someone who knows with utter certainty the things that they believe. We studied that in 1 John 5.13 right at the end of our study. Jude, when writing his epistle, begins it by saying it is more important that you know what you believe and why you believe it than you understand the basics of our salvation in Christ.
That's what he says. He says, I thought about writing to you about our common salvation, but instead I felt it was more important that you know what you believe. to write to you about why you believe what you believe. And that's just, you know, we think about the big thing of Christianity, it's salvation, it's the cross. But Jude says, know what you need to know first, then we'll talk about salvation. And even probably one of my favorite Old Testament verses, God the Father speaking through the prophet Hosea says,
when talking about Israel and why they were just such a mess, he says, my people have been destroyed, they've been cut off, they've been doomed because they refuse to learn about me. They refuse to know the why, they refuse to have knowledge of their God. And that's what it is, God puts a high premium on knowledge. God puts a high premium on knowledge of what is right, knowledge of what is true, knowledge of what makes up true faith. He doesn't say, my people have been cut off because they refuse to accept all other religions.
He says, my people have been cut off because they refuse. And it is to that exact problem and to really those exact people that God is sending the man whom we have been studying for the last couple of weeks. It is to this people of Israel that God has been sending us, our man of the hour, John the Baptist. And with John the Baptist kind of at the forefront of our mind, I'm going to reread for you Luke 1, and I'm going to give you verses 13 leading up to our passage today to kind of rebuild the context for what we're talking about.
But the angel said to him, Do not be afraid, Zacharias, for your petition has been heard, and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will give him the name John. You will have joy and gladness, and many will rejoice at his birth. For he will be great in the sight of the Lord, and he will drink no wine or liquor, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit while yet in his mother's womb. Verse 16, And he will turn many of the sons of Israel back to the Lord their God. It is he who will go as a forerunner before him in the spirit and power of Elijah.
to turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children and the disobedient to the attitude of the righteous so as to make ready a people prepared for the Lord. I said there was a problem that God's people were facing and the last verse here indicates their problem. They were people that weren't prepared. They were people that didn't know their why. They were people that couldn't explain why their faith, why their religion, why their whys had to make sense.
Ultimately, they were a people unprepared. Meaning they were people that if you ask them, what is the purpose of your faith? They would say, I don't know. There are people that if you ask them, what is your religion for? They would say, I'm not sure. As I said before, they were spiritually morons, and God was sending them jobs. And so to explain this reality with probably much more delicate words than I'm using, the angel is going to explain to us the mission to which God is being sent.
And he explains it in these verses. He says he's here to turn Israel back to God. He's here to turn the hearts of the fathers back to their children. He's here to turn the disobedient back to the righteous. He's here to turn the unprepared back to preparedness. And when I read that, even just as a Christian, even not knowing the full context of this, the bells kind of start to go off in my mind. Even as a half-smart individual, when I read those things, if you're disobedient, you can become righteous.
You can become unprepared to become prepared. Your hearts go back to your kids. The people go back to God. And I say that's what I want for myself. I think, well, I want to be turned back to God. I want to be right with God. I don't want God to look at me and say I'm unprepared. I want God to look at me and say I am prepared. I want those things. And so what? I tell you all that because if we can understand John's mission, as the angel's giving us here, as we've been studying the past three weeks, if we can understand the mission, then we can understand how to get these things for ourselves.
We can understand how to be the spiritually prepared. We can understand how to be the spiritually smart, as the Bible would put it. We can be the spiritually equipped. And so to do that today, we're going to take just these two verses. I'm going to, as we usually do, just kind of break them up into a few points. And even with our, I put it somewhere, with my outline that Heather prints for us, you can see the last couple of weeks we covered a few points. And this week, as we talk about John, we're going to cover the very last point of kind of our four-week study.
And we're going to talk about how John's calling or John's mission applies to us. And here's how we're going to talk about it today. We're going to talk about the purpose of his mission, the power of his mission, and the product of his mission, as the passage tells us. So let me begin us with... Let me begin us with... You remember a couple weeks ago we talked about John's position before the Lord, and we said with such a great position before God, and with such a devotion before God that he wouldn't even touch alcohol or wine, and with the Holy Spirit energizing and directing John's life,
even from when he was in the womb, with all that in mind, verse 16 shows up and says, With all of that, John will be the one to turn Israel back to their God. John will turn many of the sons of Israel back to their God. The NIV says he'll bring them back to God. Other translations use the word restore them to God. The point is that John will be instrumental in the restoration of the country of Israel, of the people of Israel,
so that they can return to their God. Now our modern kind of Christian minds don't pick up on it, because we look at everything from the New Testament backwards, but this, verse 16, is a direct... in specific reference to the Old Testament. Any Jewish man, any Jewish man or woman, kind of trained in the Old Testament, which for them, they only have the Old Testament. They don't accept the New Testament. But for any Jewish person trained in the Old Testament, they would know, especially a priest like Zacharias,
the moment they hear verse 16, the moment kind of verse 16 crosses their ears, they would think of one specific passage in the Bible. They would hear certain words like, turn, sons of Israel, back, and then the Lord their God. It's really all the parts of the verse. And they would say, oh yes, I know that. That's Malachi 4. I understand the lingo. I know the language the angel is using. This is a reference to Malachi 4. Now this is, I'm going to take this there, and I think I have it here.
Malachi is the very last book of the Old Testament. You know, for all intents and purposes, this is the last time God spoke, spoke to Old Testament Israel before the... there were 400 years of radio silence. This is the last chapter of the last book, and it only has six verses, and we're going to look at them all. And so for all intents and purposes, this is the last recording of God up until our time in Luke 1. And so with that in mind, knowing that God hasn't spoken to his people.
for 400 years, starting with this verse, let me read for you some of Malachi 4. For behold, the day is coming, burning like a furnace, and all the arrogant and every evildoer will be chaff, and the day that is coming will set them ablaze, says the Lord of hosts. So it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who fear my name, the son of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings, and you will go forth and skip about.
like calves from the stall. You will tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet on the day which I am preparing, says the Lord of hosts. So judgment. God begins the very last message he gives Israel with saying, You better watch out, because judgment is coming. Remember the law of Moses, my servant, even the statues and ordinances which I commanded him and Horeb for all Israel. Behold, verse 5 and 6 of note,
Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord. So again, there's that judgment, the great and terrible day. Verse 6, He will restore the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, so that I, being God, will not come and smite the land with a curse. So glancing back at Luke 1, we'd say, Yeah, that sounds pretty darn familiar. We'd say, well, yeah, God's going to return people, or the people are going to return back to God and his law. Malachi 4 said that.
He would come in the presence and power of Elijah. Verse 17, Malachi 4 said that. He's going to restore the hearts. All the things that God said was going to happen. Malachi 4, Luke 1. End of the Old Testament. Literally the very first recorded prophetic instance of the New Testament. Almost verbatim. Now think about this for a second. I want to draw the line a little bit more.
So 400 B.C. or so, in the time of Malachi 4, about 400 B.C., God's saying, All right, Israel, here's what's going to happen. My judgment is coming. We talked about that. Verses 1-3, all these bad things. The day is coming, burning like a furnace. Every evildoer will be like chaff. They'll be blown away. The day is coming in which I will set them ablaze. Judgment is coming. I want to give you time, though. In His mercy, God always gives time. But there's time to repent. Your hearts are so deceived that I'm going to give you time. But in order for you to repent, I'm going to have to send you somebody to tell you to repent.
Verse 5, I'm going to send you Elijah the prophet. Now, historically at this time, Israel, 400 B.C., the time of Malachi, Israel is really feeling the heat. Because about 400 B.C., Israel is not Israel as a nation. Israel is a captor of the country of Persia. And what happens after Persia? 400 B.C., it's Persia. I think 322 B.C., Alexander the Great comes in. Thus, Persia becomes the Greek. Now, the Greeks are the ones ruling Israel. And then 60-ish B.C., Israel goes from Persia.
To the Greeks, 60 B.C. becomes Rome. And so, they've been feeling God's judgment for these 400 years. God's been, they've been oppressed. They've been captured. They've been kind of crammed down and crushed by the oppressors of the nations around them. And so, they're beginning to feel it. And so, at this time, they start crying out, Lord, where is this verse 5, Elijah, you promised? Lord, where is this prophet that's going to announce the good news? You know, everything just seems like bad news. Persia. is crushing us. The Greeks are crushing us. Rome is crushing us. I don't see any restoration. I.
don't see any healing. It just feels like you're smiting the land with the curse of verse 6. There is no hope. And in that crying out, an angel shows up, Luke 117, and says, Zacharias, it is your son John, who is that Elijah. The time is now. The prophecy is fulfilled. The 400 years have gone by, and now this Elijah, whom I promised who will come before the great and terrible day of the.
Lord, has now arrived on the scene, and he is your son, John. 400 years, and God picks up right where he left off. We can't appreciate that, because our nation is about to turn 250, is that right, next year? 250. So throw another 150 years on there, another 60%. of our nation's total cumulative survival time, and Israel waited that long for God to say, I am going to send 400 years.
Here he is. Didn't skip a beat. Didn't let off. Didn't forget a lick of the promise and just said, here is your promised Elijah. I promised Elijah you're getting him. I promised restoration. Here's the forerunner who will bring that restoration. I promised, and now I'm delivering. Delivering. God's mission and God's purposes will now be accomplished through John's mission and the purposes through which God has for John. And so if we talked about John's mission and we talked about the purpose of his mission,
then that brings us kind of to our second point, and I'll just draw a few connections to the power, which we get in verse 17. It is he who will go as a forerunner before him in the spirit and in the power of Elijah. And most of us here probably know who the prophet Elijah is. Elijah is, if you've been in Sunday school, if you've been in church long enough, it's the went up on Mount Baal, did all these things, prayed a prayer, and then God sent down some fire, embarrassed all the Baal worshipers. Elijah was the one. He was on the mountain, and then there was an earthquake, and then there was a huge fire, and there was this huge gust of wind,
and Elijah said, God, where are you? And then God came to him in the whisper of the wind. Elijah was the one that announced the great drought in Israel. He prayed, and Israel didn't get rain for like three and a half years or something. He was a prophet of God that was powerful. And if we know the story, like I said before, of the Mount Caramel story, we know this prayer of Elijah. We actually probably read this not too long ago in our Wednesday night Bible study. At the time of the sacrifice, the prophet Elijah stepped forward and prayed, Lord, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel,
let it be known today that you are God in Israel, and that I am your servant and have done all of these things at your command. Verse 37, Answer me, Lord, answer me, so that these, These people will know you, Lord, that you are God and that you are turning their hearts back to God. So Elijah preached and performed all these miracles by God's power. And even his best miracle, he says, has one goal in mind. End of verse 37, to turn the hearts of the people back to their God.
And so if I were to ask you, what's the spirit of Elijah? You'd say, well, he has all this power by God. What's the power of Elijah? Well, he has all this power by God. Then what was his mission? His mission was to turn people back to God. And what did our angel just say the purpose of John was? That he is going to come to the people by the spirit of God. He's going to come to the people by the power of God and the power of Elijah, which his power was God. John had one mission. Elijah had one mission. To turn the hearts of the people back to their God.
To turn the fathers back to their kids. To turn the people of Israel back to their professed God. It's all just Old Testament swinging into the New Testament. It's all, God promised this through Elijah, here's your Elijah. God promised restoration, here's your restoration. It is just the story picking up. And so often we look at the, we take our Bibles out, I'll take this monster out, and we flip to where, let's see, the beginning of Matthew, which Matthew and Malachi are side by side, and we find this nice little chunk here where this is our Old Testament,
this is our New Testament, and we have no stinking clue what they have to do with each other. We look at it and we say, well, that was, God was kind of mean in all that old part, but Jesus is really nice, so let's look at the new part, because it's a lot more forgiving. But the point is that God doesn't skip a beat. God says, look at all this, look at how bad Israel was, because of their sin, because of their evil, because of what they did wrong, but I'm sending restoration. And Christ begins that story. But even before Christ,
we've been discussing, There is a forerunner named John. And as I said, John's going to preach the same message as Elijah. He's going to have the same power as Elijah. He's going to have the same purpose in mind. And Jesus confirms it. We all know Matthew 11. Jesus is talking to his disciples. They're talking about John the Baptist specifically. And Jesus says, if you are willing to accept it, John is the Elijah whom you were expecting. You know, we can read Malachi 4 and 1 Kings and Luke and say, oh yeah, they're obviously the same person.
But Jesus, knowing we tend to be spiritually moronic, clarifies it for us and says, he is that Elijah. He is the one whom you wanted. Both did what God called and fulfilled them to do. To have a certain result in mind. A certain product of their ministry in mind. And that's what we'll close with. Is talking about the product. that John came to bring. Verse 17, very end, he came to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.
And as I said before, that's what we want to be, right? When we hear that, we should think, well, I want to be prepared. When God looks at my life, my Christianity, my purpose, my faith, my whatever, I should want to say, yes, if God looks at me, I want to be prepared, because I don't want to be caught off guard. Jesus told a parable about what it meant to be caught off guard. God would show up, you'd say, oh my goodness, Jesus, you were serious that whole time? And he's saying, be prepared. And so we want to be prepared people. As Christians, it should be our desire that whenever God comes calling, we are ready to respond. Just as John was called to a life of service, a life of devotion,
as we talked about last week, a life void of the effects of alcohol and other influences, we as Christians also should be ready to respond to our service to God. So the question then is, how can we achieve this readiness? If we want to be ready, ready Christians, prepared Christians, called Christians, What do we need to do? It's very similar to the question, how can I know God's will for my life? I was a college kid not too long ago, and that is every question every college kid or every person moving through a major life transition asks is,
all right, God, what are you doing with this? What's your will for my life? What do you want to do with me? It's a question we all ask ourselves. We get to a point in life where we say, God, I don't know, but I know that you know. And so what do you want to do with me? What do you want to take control of in my life? You know, God, I want you. I want you to be the defining ethic, the defining power, the defining purpose of my life. And the angel gives us the solution. The angel tells us what it is. It's the same solution for the people of Israel.
The angel just says, well, you need turned around. Verse 16 says their problem was that they weren't turned the right way. So John was going to go and... Turn them around. And at many points of our life, that's what we need. We need somebody to grab us by the shoulders and turn us around. Because we get so headlong and just headset on just, hey, I'm going to go do this and this is my life and I'm going to live my way and I'm going to follow these things and keep my sins and do this and do that.
and just do it all myself that we get so focused on ourselves, that it just takes somebody putting their hands on our shoulders and turning us around and saying, hey, God's that way. I think that's what God wants to do. That's what God wanted John to do. He was going to go back. He was going to turn the people of Israel around and say, look at what you should be doing. Their hearts needed transformed. It says that in verse 17. They needed their hearts turned back. So not only would it be a change of direction, a change of pace, it would be a change of focus.
It would be a change of heart. One of the commentaries I read this week on Luke called it a heart transplant. That the people need a heart transplant. You know, for us as Christians, we would know it. And actually, I think we discussed it in our confirmation class last week. And probably we'll talk about it in the coming weeks. It's the Christian doctrine of regeneration. You know, it's a reality in which God takes somebody's heart and turns it around.
God takes somebody's heart that is made hard by sin and makes it a softened heart that can be affected by His Word. It is a powerful change in which God gives us a soft, pliable, and open heart by the power and the work of the Holy Spirit. God's saying John's going to be the one who will bring the Spirit and the power of the Holy Spirit to transform these people's hearts and to give them a heart transplant. Jesus talked about it in John 3. He said, Nicodemus, you must be born again.
Same thing. Paul talks about it in 2 Corinthians 5. I quote it probably every third weekend. 2 Corinthians 5. 517. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation. You go from being the old sinner to a newly created believer. It's simply the process of God's divine sovereignty in which he takes a sinner's heart and heals it to where it has a new direction fully devoted to God. Notice the angel doesn't say, in verse 17, he doesn't say, It is John who will go as a forerunner.
before him and the spirit and power of Elijah to encourage sinners to start going to church. It doesn't say, It is John who will go as a forerunner to make sure God's people are doing religious things and giving to religious organizations. God's mission for John and John's mission to the Israelite was to know that their greatest spiritual issue was their sinful, dead, broken, hard hearts.
And the application of that is, That is our greatest issue as well. That is mankind's greatest issue. It's not what we're doing. It's not what we're not doing. It's not that we're good people in bad circumstances. It's that we have sinful, broken, hard, rock to stony hearts. And God's saying, I want to transform that. God's saying, I want people to be prepared for me. But they can't be prepared unless they address their greatest issue.
And it's that their hearts need transplanted. And again, I said it's God's message to us as well. We cannot enter into a relationship with him unless our hearts have been transformed. We cannot live a life that is pleasing to him. We cannot live a life devoted to him. We cannot live a life prepared for him unless we address priority numero uno, a broken, non-contrite, just stony, anti-God heart that is in us by default.
To think about it, To think of how many religious people or to think of how many Christians have forfeited this relationship or have forfeited eternal life because they were too proud to address their stony, hard heart. They would not be prepared for the Lord. They would not submit to the power of the Holy Spirit. They would not set aside their ego, their pride, their religion for the sake of having their heart completely transformed by the sovereign power of God. And I don't want to dig too much into kind of the response to that or mankind's response to that because that's the whole message of the gospel.
That's the message Jesus came was to say something's wrong with your heart. And we're going to talk about it as we get further into Jesus and John's ministry. But again, I finish by just talking about this. This is God's message to us. You know, God's message to us as a congregation. God's message to us as a community. You know, if we're sitting in this room, if we're listening to the sermon, if we're telling something. We need to understand that the priority, the main point of this teaching, of this word of God, is that we need a heart transplant.
That we either need the heart transplant, or if we have received this blessing from God, we know others that need this heart transplant. That we need it to be prepared. And I want to say a little bit about that, that each of us in here should be able to identify a season in our life in which the Spirit of God, in the same way verse 17 talks about, moved into us and transformed our heart. That He took what was once an unredeemed sinner and has now made us a redeemed believer.
I'm sure for many of you, maybe it was in an instant. Maybe you can look back and pinpoint one instant in your life when you said, I remember exactly when God did that work. But for others, maybe it's a lifetime, or it's decades of God moving you through life to realize that, yes, Yes, he has been working and moving in me. But we should all be able to say, if we are in Christ, that there is a season in which God did this transformation. There is a definite, defined season in which he did this work.
that he was going to do through John, that he was going to do through Jesus, and that he was going to do all the way up until Christ returns again. And he did it in our life. Jesus said we can't enter the kingdom of heaven except by being born again. And so what that tells me, every time I read through John 3, every time I start the Gospel of John, I read John 3, Jesus says you must be born again, I ask myself, have I been born again? Have I had that new heart? It's not a turn of phrase. It's not the day you sign the inside of your Bible. It's not the day you prayed a certain prayer.
It's this revolution of heart that God promises in Ezekiel 36, Jeremiah 31, John 3, Luke 1, Malachi 4, all of it. We don't create the moment. We don't instantiate. the moment we don't strong arm God and say, God, I'm a Christian now. Create me my new heart now because I really would like it. It's a moment in which God and His sovereign grace, grants us a heart transplant. And all we can do is cry out for it.
All we can do is ask Him for it. All we can do, ask, seek, knock. Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. I think Pastor Dick might have quoted this last week. Ephesians 2, 8-9 For it is by grace you have been saved. Through faith. It doesn't say, for by you asking God to create in you a new heart, He saved you. No, it is, for by grace God chose to give you a new heart. And this is not from yourselves.
It is a gift of God. Verse 9 Not by works, so that nobody can boast about it. It is a gift of God. Therefore, only God can give it. Verse 10, And so all we can do is ask. So have we had that moment? Can we identify that moment? Have we had the moment we've cried out to the Lord and said, Lord, I'm a sinner. Lord, my heart is wicked. Lord, my soul is broken. Lord, I need a Savior. And has He in His infinite mercy given that new heart to you?
And so last, before I pray, let me read you from Hebrews 12. With all that in mind, with everything we just talked about John, with everything we just talked about Christians needing a new heart, or as we receive the new heart and then we truly become a Christian, with all that conversation in mind, the encouragement I want to pull from Hebrews 12 is this, that when we consider our faith, when we consider our Christian faith and just all the people in the Old Testament like John and all of the Old Testament patriarchs,
when we consider all them, Hebrews 12 says, Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, He says, Because of everything I just told, I just told you. Let us throw off everything that hinders us and the sin which so easily entangles and let us run for perseverance the race marked out for us. Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith. And so what this message tells me, what this reality about a new heart tells me is that if we truly have this new heart, the first thing we're going to do.
is throw off everything, throw off sin, throw off all of it and we're going to seek to run this race God has for us. We will seek to do the things that God has for us. If you have the new heart, that will be your purpose. But if you don't have that desire for that race, if you don't have that desire to participate in what God is doing, if you don't have the desire to fix your eyes on Jesus Christ, the author and perfecter and the pioneer of our faith, then do we have the new heart? Because that's what I read when I get that.
So my prayer for us, is that that would be the case. That when we see John, come on. We see His mission as God's mission for ourselves. And so let me say a word of prayer. Lord, this is the first, I don't know how I'd call it, command that we've received in this Gospel of Luke. God said He was sending John the Baptist to preach a message that had never been preached before, that it wasn't that God wants us to do sacrifices, it wasn't that God wants us to give this much,
it isn't that God wants all of these external things to be true of us. What God wants is a new heart for each of us. That's not something religion can give. That's not something that confession can give, or Lent can give, or abstaining from meat, or anything can give. It only comes about as an Ephesians 2, 8-9, gift of God by His grace. If we're in Christ, we understand that it is in that grace we've received eternal life.
If we're not in Christ, we're not in Christ. Maybe we don't understand that reality. Maybe we don't have that reality. Or maybe we just don't understand exactly what that means. So, Lord, I ask that you would grant us all the grace to understand what it means to have a new heart. Lord, I ask that you grant us grace to understand where our heart is, to be honest with our heart. Because at the end of the day, what rides on it is what Christ said. John 3, you must be born again to see the kingdom of God. Lord, we all want to see the kingdom of God. So I just pray that these truths would be evident in our lives.
I pray that these words would sink into our hearts. I pray that the Holy Spirit, as it worked through John, would work through every single one of us in this room. So that as we go out to our community, as we go to tell the story of Jesus as we sang before, we can sing it from a transformed perspective. Not from a religious perspective, but from a new heart perspective that truly desires him. And so we thank you for this time. Lord, we thank you for the clarity with which your word speaks and the power it has to change our lives. And we pray. Pray these things in your wonderful name.
