The Test of True Repentance, Complete Edition

The Test of True Repentance, Complete Edition

By John MacArthur

True Repentance: God's Highway to the Heart, Part 1

Let's open our Bibles to the third chapter of Luke. The first six verses of the third chapter describe for us the setting of the ministry of John. You remember John, of course, is the forerunner to Messiah. He's going to announce the Messiah has come. He's going to prepare the people for Messiah's arrival. And we got all of the background, all of the setting in verses 1 to 6. We come to verse 7 and we actually hear John preach. This is now John, he's entering into his ministry.

Thirty years since his birth have passed. Messiah will appear on the scene about six months after John begins his ministry. This is the time for the real work of redemption to begin which involves, of course, the Lord Jesus Christ who becomes the theme of the gospels. And so we begin with John as he launches the ministry, long awaited in the history of Israel and even long awaited in this thirty years that has gone by since the one who was born to be the Messiah's forerunner can now begin his ministry.

And so, John speaks in verse 7. "He therefore began saying to the multitudes who were going out to be baptized by him, 'You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Therefore bring forth fruits in keeping with repentance and do not begin to say to yourselves, We have Abraham for our father. For I say to you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. And also, the ax is already laid at the root of the trees, every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.' And the multitudes were questioning him saying, 'Then what shall we do?' And he would answer and say to them, 'Let the man who has two tunics share with him who has none, and let him who has food do likewise.' And some tax gatherers also came to be baptized and they said to him, 'Teacher, what shall we do?' And he said to them, 'Collect no more than what you have been ordered to.' And some soldiers were questioning him saying, 'And what about us, what shall we do?' And he said to them, 'Do not take money from anyone by force or accuse anyone falsely and be content with your wages.'

"Now while the people were in a state of expectation and all were wondering in their hearts about John, as to whether he might be the Christ, John answered and said to them all, 'As for me, I baptize you with water, but one is coming who is mightier than I and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire and His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor and to gather the wheat into His barn. But He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.' So, with many other exhortations also, he preached the gospel to the people."

Now here is a sample of John's preaching. This would be typical of John's preaching day after day after day. The encounter with the multitude, the encounter with the tax gatherers, the encounter with the soldiers is not intended to be a one-time encounter but is routine, it's what John went through regularly. We know that because of the verbs. The form of the verbs indicate to us this was a continuous pattern. So here we have a sample of John's kind of preaching. And as verse 8 indicates, this is how he preached the gospel. He did preach the gospel. And what is the gospel? It's the good news. What is the good news? God will forgive your sins. That's what John was preaching.

John is a model for us. He is a standard for how to preach. In some ways he's even a more easily understood standard than Jesus Himself because it's hard for us to emulate the preaching of Jesus since He is God in human flesh...but John is a man like us. We learn from John how to confront unbelievers with the message of the gospel...so he becomes the model, the standard for all who proclaim the good news of forgiveness to sinners. He is the example for us to follow, the pattern for us to trace, the leader for us to emulate. He called sinners to forgiveness. He told them good news, God will forgive your sins if you repent and receive Jesus Christ as Messiah and Savior...that's what he told them. He was a preacher of repentance and a preacher of faith in the Lord Messiah, Jesus Christ. And so he sets a standard for all of us and we can learn how to proclaim the gospel, how to communicate the gospel to unbelievers by looking at the pattern of John.

And one of the things that hit you immediately just in reading that is the lack of any kind of effort to win them over with smooth talk. In fact, he is harsh, very harsh, saying things like, "You brood of vipers." Or saying things like, "The ax is already laid at the root of the trees, every tree therefore that doesn't bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." This is a very strong, apparently on the surface, strong approach. But this again is the reproach of a man of God set apart to proclaim the gospel. I don't think that John was without love or without affection for the people, but he was clear as to the message. And that is the issue, clarity, straight-forwardness in giving the message marks John.

Verse 18 tells us that there were many exhortations with which John preached the gospel to the people. He was preaching for months and months out in the wilderness. What you have then in verses 7 to 17 is just an example or a sample of what John preached all day, every day, week after week, month after month. And as I said, it gives us a pattern for our own preaching.

Now, if you remember that John was a preacher of repentance, that John said...as we learn in Matthew..."Repent, for the Kingdom is at hand," you will also then want to know that repentance is at the heart of his message, it is at the heart of any gospel message. You cannot truly preach the gospel of forgiveness, you cannot preach the gospel of grace unless you call sinners to repent. So repentance refines the substance of his message.

Now the question that I want to pose, as we look at this passage, is...what is the character of true repentance?...because it is given to us here in wonderfully clear terms. John, in fact, from verse 4 through 11, if we include verses 4 to 6, the prophecy of Isaiah that related to John, from verse 4 through 17, verse 4 through 17, we really do have a definition of true repentance, the kind of repentance that saves the sinner. But at the same time, because it is such a clear definition of true repentance, it is also an exposure of false repentance, or shallow repentance, or non-saving repentance. And this is of great interest to any preacher and any Christian because people have always been and still are prone to shallow repentance, they are prone to a false repentance. The message, the modern message of cheap grace, as it's often called, just believe in Jesus, that's all you need to do, the modern message that's often called "easy believism" in fact invites such shallowness and is at one 180 degrees from the message of John the Baptist. There was nothing about John's message that was easy. There was nothing about John's message that was warm and fuzzy. It was harsh, it was strong, it was confrontational, it was devastating because John understood how prone the sinner is to a shallow, superficial repentance that does not save.

This has been, as you well know, a grave concern of mine for many, many years. I'm convinced that churches are literally filled with people who have had a shallow non-saving repentance and they are categorized in Scripture as the many who say, "Lord, Lord...Matthew 7...to whom the Lord says, 'Depart from Me, I never knew you.'" They are the kind of soil that receives the Word initially and with maybe some emotion but because the soil is never plowed up, its hard soil, because its never plowed up its weedy soil, and either the rock or the weeds choke out the Word, the gospel and there never is any life and there never is any fruit. Shallow repenting is common. It was common in Israel. It was common in the Old Testament era. It was common in the New Testament era. It's common today and it's exacerbated by those who preach a cheap message, by those who strip the gospel of its confrontation, strip the gospel of its Law and of wrath and judgment and sin.

John knew that. And John knew familiarity among the Jewish people could make themselves think religious with just a superficial repentance. And so he endeavors to draw out the essence of a real repentance in his preaching.

Now people came out to see John. In fact, the scriptures tell us that all Jerusalem and all Judea came out. And there is a reason for that. I'm sure people knew about John. I'm sure the story had circulated through the 30-year period that an old priest by the name of Zacharias and Elizabeth were able to conceive a son miraculously and that Gabriel the angel told Zacharias it would happen and that the son would be the forerunner of the Messiah and that that son was alive and he was out in the wilderness and he was a prophet of God. I'm sure that circulated outside the family of Zacharias and Elizabeth and circulated around the related relatives, Mary and Joseph and their family, because they all knew the story. The story must have spread. The fact that Gabriel showed up, the fact that a miraculous birth had occurred, the fact that the Messiah's forerunner had been born must have been to some extent around so that people knew about it. And once John began to preach and announce the coming of Messiah, the people came out, they were curious, they were ready for the Messiah. They wanted the Messiah. They were compelled by their curiosity. They were compelled by the fact that this could be it, this could be true. I mean, how else can you explain Gabriel showing up? And how else can you explain an old priestly couple having a miraculous child? Maybe this is it. So the people desired to come and find out if indeed he was the forerunner of Messiah and if indeed the Messiah had come.

They were ready. They wanted to participate in the long-awaited blessings promised to Abraham and David. They were really weary of the oppression of the Romans. They were weary of never having independent authority and sovereignty and rule. They were weary of the way things were. They were excited with Messianic hope. And, I think, if it's...if you really look into the heart of the people, they believed they belonged to God, they believed they were in the Kingdom. After all, they were the children of Abraham, after all they were the people to whom had been given the Covenants and the adoption, as Paul says in Romans 9, and they had received the Word of God and the prophets and everything else. They were the chosen people. And so, I'm convinced that when they came to John they were really asking John how do I stay in the Kingdom, not how do I get in. I think they believed they were in, they just wanted to be sure they could stay in the Kingdom. They wanted to be sure that they could get the best of whatever the Kingdom was going to bring by being on good terms with the Messiah. John announced to them that they didn't need to find out how to stay in the Kingdom, they needed to find out how to get in the Kingdom because they were on the outside and they were no better off than Gentiles and therefore they needed to acknowledge that and receive a baptism that really was a baptism for proselyte Gentiles who were becoming part of Judaism. He was saying to them...You aren't in, you're out and you need to get in by repentance and faith in the Messiah and demonstrate that you recognize you're outside by going through what amounts to a proselyte baptism, which would put you on the same ground as a Gentile.

The people were so compelled by this that they did it. They came, they heard John and they got baptized which was a great admission on their part. To some degree they were saying...We're outside, okay we're outside, we've got to get inside and so we'll go through this even if it is an acknowledgement that humbles us, having to admit that we aren't in the Kingdom, we're on the outside, no better off than a Gentile proselyte wanting to become associated with Judaism.

As we learned, John starts preaching...All Jerusalem, all Judea come out, they're ready to get prepared for the Messiah. And if need be, they will be baptized with this baptism, though it is a humiliating affirmation. They begin to be baptized by John and they make some kind of confession of sin, some kind of confession of repentance. But as time goes on it becomes apparent that even with the strong preaching of John, even with the clear message of John, the repentance was, for the most part, shallow and false. We really don't have a difficult time in proving that because as the story of Jesus unfolds it becomes apparent that most people do not acknowledge Him as Messiah. In fact, they finally come to the place where even though they have celebrated Him as Messiah on Palm Sunday, they cry for His blood on Friday at the crucifixion. And when you get to the book of Acts and the believers in Jerusalem are gathered in the Upper Room, there's only 120 of them and that's after the full ministry of John and Jesus is completed.

So, there was a lot of superficiality going on. And John was preaching a strong message and still there was superficial faith. How much more superficiality is there when a very weak message is preached? John understands the reality of shallow faith. John understands the reality of shallow repentance, false repentance. And this sample of his preaching demonstrates that concern and it demonstrates the message that needs to be preached. And all across this country in churches all across this land a shallow message is being preached, a shallow gospel, a shallow call to repentance that is giving people the tragic and damning illusion that they are saved when they are not.

So how can we recognize real repentance? How can we recognize it as best as possible? How can we see the real thing and separate it from false and shallow repentance?

Let's look at this passage. In it John gives us six elements of a true repentance, six elements of a true repentance. And again, this is a very notable portion of Scripture, not because it is a theological treatise on repentance, but because it is an example of the true preaching for repentance exhibited by this man of God. And John gives us six elements of a true, genuine, saving repentance. This section, by the way, is just loaded with theology...just loaded with it. John moves from harmartiology, which is the study of sin, through eschatology, to soteriology to Christology and to pneumatology, the study of the Holy Spirit...huge theological themes existed in his preaching. He was, of all things, a theological preacher.

He talks about sin. He talks about the end of the age and the coming wrath. He talks about salvation. He talks about within the framework of salvation, conversion, transformation, regeneration. He talks about Christ. He talks about the Holy Spirit. It is a sweeping treatment of theology. He was truly a theological preacher.

Let's look at the six elements then of true repentance. We'll try to get through four of them this morning.

Number one, and we'll talk about true repenters, okay? True repenters reflect on personal sin...true repenters reflect on personal sin. For this I have to take you back to verse 4. Now you remember that there's a quotation there from Isaiah chapter 40 verses 3 to 5. It's a quotation that describes John. John comes and he comes in fulfillment of prophecy. John, according to verse 4, is the voice of one crying. He is the voice. And what is he crying? Well, he's out there in the wilderness and he's crying, "Make ready the way of the Lord, make His paths straight." All right, he's the forerunner of the Messiah, he's saying get ready, do the necessary preparation, Messiah is coming.

What he's talking about here is heart preparation. Before there can be any national reception of the Messiah, there has to be individual reception of the Messiah. So he says in verse 5, taking the language of Isaiah 40, "Every ravine shall be filled up, every mountain and hill shall be brought low. The crooked shall become straight. The rough roads smooth. Then you'll see the salvation of God." If you want to experience the salvation of God individually and then collectively, as individual's believe, you must then make the path ready. And spiritually the pathway is through the wilderness of the heart. And I told you last time we talked about that, let's look at verse 5 and see how the imagery fits that. "Every ravine shall be filled up," that's analogous to the low things, the base things, the dark things of the heart. They have to be brought up, as it were to light. And then every mountain and hill is brought low...the high things of the heart, self-exaltation, self-will, self-fulfillment, all the pride has to be brought down. And then he talks about the crooked being made straight, the skolios, like scoliosis, curvature, anything perversed, twisted, deceitful, devious, lying, manipulating. All those matters straightened out. And then the rough road smooth, any kind of hindrance, any kind of obstacle, anything that clutters a clear and smooth path, anything that obstructs the Lord's entrance into the heart...could be self-love, apathy, indifference, lust, unbelief, etc., etc.

John then would come and he would be the voice, he would be saying...You need to do a real search of your heart. You need to reflect on your personal sin. You need to see the depth and the dark and the low and the gross and base elements of your life. You need to see the height and the high things and the proud things of your heart and the perverse and crooked thing and every other hindrance in your life for what it is...obstacles that prevent the King from coming into your heart. True repentance requires a complete and full admission of one's sinfulness...depth and height and length and breadth. That's essential to real repentance. Sin must be recognized and reflected upon in one's own life.

Secondly, and now we'll get to our text in verse 7, true repenters do reflect on personal sin, but they also recognize divine wrath...they also recognize divine wrath. Verse 7 is very interesting. "He therefore began saying to the multitudes," because he wanted them to prepare their hearts, because he wanted them to deal with their sin, because he wanted them to do an honest inventory, as I just pointed out, "Therefore he tells them who were going out to be baptized by him, 'You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?'"

Now why does he do that? He wants them to do an honest heart-searching of their sin. He wants them to reflect on their personal iniquity. He wants them to see their sin at its depth, its heights, its length and breadth. He wants them to do that honesty and so naturally he warns them about divine wrath.

What he's saying to them is...You better deal with your sin because it has such immense and eternal consequences. True repentance comes out of the fear of divine wrath. This motivates it. People coming to John and seeking the baptism that he gave, having to confess the fact that they weren't in the Kingdom but outside, no better than a Gentile, and needed to come inside by repentance, they were willing to repent because they wanted to flee the wrath to come. You can be sure that John was a preacher of wrath, a preacher of judgment. Down in verse 9 he says, "The ax has already been laid at the root of the tree." When you're going to chop the tree down the first thing you do is take the ax over there and set it down while you get ready to pick it up and cut the tree. He says the ax is already there and God is about to swing it.

Now the Jews were very aware of this. They were very much aware that the Old Testament closed with the book of Malachi, actually the last of the Old Testament prophets before John. And then Malachi closes off the story prophetically, Malachi 3, the next to the last chapter in your Old Testament, "Behold, I'm going to send My messenger, that's the Messiah, and he'll...that's John the Baptist, I should say...and he will clear the way before Me...that's the Messiah." So the Lord is going to come, He's going to send His messenger, John, and the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to His temple and the messenger of the Covenant in whom you delight, behold he is coming...says the Lord of host. Okay, the Messiah is coming and before Him is coming His messenger. And then verse 2, "But who can endure the day of His coming and who can stand when He appears for He is like a refiner's fire and He is like fullers, or the washer person, laundry person's soap...he's like a smelter, verse 3, and a purifier of silver." This is judgment. Verse 5, "I will draw near to you for judgment." And then in verse 1 of chapter 4, the last chapter in the Old Testament, "The day is coming, burning like a furnace, all the arrogant, every evil doer will be chaff. The day is coming, we'll set them ablaze, says the Lord of host, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch." There the ax will be laid at the root as stated by John the Baptist. Down further, the next to the last verse in the Old Testament talks about the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord.

The Jewish people knew this. They knew that when Messiah came it would not only be for the fulfillment of Abrahamic promise and Davidic promise, but that it would also be for judgment. That is clearly outlined for them and I can't begin to take you through all of the passages that do that, but just a few sample passages. For example, Isaiah chapter 2 verse 10, "Enter the rock and hide from the dust from the terror of the Lord, from the splendor of His majesty, for the Lord of host...verse 12...will have a day of reckoning against everyone who is proud and lofty, against everyone who is lifted up that he may be abased." And then down in verse 19, "And men will go into caves or the rocks and the holes of the ground before the terror of the Lord, before the splendor of His majesty when He arises to make the earth tremble," and that, by the way, is a similar scene to what you see later on in the book of Revelation when people cry for the rocks and the mountains to fall on them and hide them from the face of the Lord. Verse 21 repeats the very same thing, the terror of the Lord is coming, the splendor of His majesty and the consequent trembling of the earth as He comes in furious judgment.

Amos chapter 5, very strong prophecy along the same line. Let me read you Zephaniah 1:14, "Near is the great day of the Lord, near coming very quickly, listen, the day of the Lord, a day of wrath is that day, a day of trouble, distress, a day of destruction and desolation, a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness." He goes on to describe it down to verse 18 on..."The day of the Lord's wrath all the earth will be devoured in the fire of His jealousy. He will make a complete end, indeed a terrifying one, of all the inhabitants of the earth."

Now those are just a few of many, many passages in the Old Testament, particularly in the prophets, that speak of judgment when Messiah comes, when God comes. All the prophets preached judgment. John preached judgment. Any true preacher preaches judgment. And when you give a witness for Christ to another individual, you have to talk about the wrath to come. The wrath to come is speaking of final, eternal judgment. Jesus made that a theme of His preaching. He preached more on hell than He did on heaven. He preached more on hell than anybody ever preached on hell. Why? Because He didn't like sinners, because He wanted to damn sinners? No, because He wanted to warn sinners. And one of the things that you must preach when you preach for a true repentance is the seriousness, the eternality and the suffering of eternal hell.

John preached the wrath to come. Obviously the indication here in Luke chapter 3 is that these people were coming to him to flee the wrath to come which meant that he was pointing out to them those passages in the Old Testament that indicate when Messiah comes wrath will come with Him. And it is essential in true repentance to understand the wrath to come, to recognize that reality. There is a hell and it is forever and it is a forever alienation from God and a forever conscious punishment, conscious torment. That's what makes forgiveness urgent. That's what makes forgiveness good news. And that is a strong motivation and any faithful preacher preaches the wrath to come.

You hear people say, "Well, this world is all the hell you'll ever know." No, it's not...not it's not. The Bible is very clear on eternal punishment in very graphic terms. We'll...we'll see some of that as we go through the gospel of Luke, particularly when Jesus speaks of it.

So, John uses very graphic terms and he speaks very harsh words because he is so profoundly concerned about the wrath to come. And the Jews understood it. Why else would these Jews come flocking out there? They knew when Messiah came that there would be blessing but they also knew there would be fiery judgment, that was very clear from Malachi. There would be a terrible day of burning. There would be terrible wrath. They knew that. They wanted to make sure they got the blessings and not the wrath.

But notice how straightforward John is. He says to them, "You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" You sons of poisonous snakes...boy, that is not a seeker-friendly approach. What is he saying here? This is not how to win friends and influence people. This is not how to schmooze people into the Kingdom here. What in the world is he saying?

First of all, I think he's calling them children of Satan. Jesus did that in John 8:44, He said to the Jewish leaders, "You're of your father, the devil," didn't He? He says, "You're of your father, the devil." Jesus said to the Pharisees, Jewish leaders, Matthew 12:34, Matthew 23 I think it's verse 33, both places, "You brood of vipers," same phrase exactly. Jesus said it twice to the Jewish leaders...you sons of snakes. I think he's really identifying them with their father. The devil appeared in the Garden in Genesis 3 in what form? A serpent. And according to the scriptures he is a serpent, as clearly indicated in Revelation chapter 12. So he is...he's really telling them...you belong to Satan, you snakes. What he's saying to them is...You are running from the fire but not interested in any change of your nature. You're still snakes, you're just scrambling in front of the fire. Shallow repenters are offsprings of that snake, Satan.

By the way, Matthew 3:7 when Matthew writes about the preaching of John, says when John said this...at least on the occasion of Matthew writing...he said it to Pharisees and Sadducees. Luke says he said it to everybody. So particularly to the Pharisees and Sadducees who were the most vicious, poisonous and deadly...deadliest of all the snakes, of all the children of Satan because they wore the name of God, as it were, on the outside but were satanic on the inside, thus their hypocrisy was more devastating. He says you're the worst of it, the rest of you also belong to the same nature, same satanic nature. Beyond just the Pharisees and the Sadducees, all those people had the very nature of Satan, they were the children of Satan. And he's pointing out their superficiality, he says, your repentance is superficial because your true nature is vicious, your true nature is of the serpent, your true nature is poisonous, your true nature is hostile, your true nature is deadly...particularly those Pharisees and Sadducees...paraded themselves as if they represented God and they were just biting the people and filling them with poison.

And by the way, this was a pattern for John, he therefore began saying to the multitudes "who were going." The imperfect tense and the present tense verbs mean this is something that went on a lot, this is not one-time dialogue, sometimes it was the Pharisees and Sadducees, sometimes it was the crowd, and sometimes it was both...this is a recurring pattern in John's preaching. This is a constant pattern. He is saying to them...it doesn't do you any good to scramble around like snakes in front of a brush fire if you don't change your nature. Who told you you could escape the wrath by just coming down here and getting baptized?

They have fires because the land is very dry and brush fires like they are in California, are very dangerous and deadly, and what happened obviously in a brush fire is the snakes who live in that area when the fire come begin to scramble to stay ahead of the fire and that's what John sees. Here comes all the Pharisees and the scribes scrambling down the mountain side and backside of Jerusalem into the Judean wilderness, scrambling, as it were, ahead of the fires of Messiah, scrambling to escape the wrath of God by whatever they need to do to escape the wrath of God. But never interested in any change of their wretched nature. So he warns them. There's more to repentance than scrambling to avoid the fires of divine wrath. That you must do, that you must understand but there's more to it than that.

And that takes us to the third point. True repenters reflect on personal sin, they recognize divine wrath, but also they reject religious ritual. They...the Jews were so used to a ritual approach to religion, they were so used to believing that you could somehow make yourself right with God by your formal prayers, by your alms-giving, by whatever religious ceremony you went through on the Sabbath, or whatever sacrifice you offered. They were believers in the fact that you could actually make yourself right with God through these various rituals. As I'll point out tonight, one of the interesting things about Judaism is it rejects total depravity. Jewish commentators think the sin of Adam affected only Adam and that's why they believe we can make ourselves righteous because no fallenness really passes to us from Adam. And so they believe that they could be good before God and that by religious ritual achieve God's pleasure and favor. So they came down to go through another ritual. So John is saying to them...Huh, who told you to come down here and try to escape the wrath of God by being baptized? Do you think that's enough? Verse 8 he says, "You better bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance. Isn't going to do you any good just to be baptized. That's not what God is looking for. Do you think you can scramble like scrambling snakes in front of a fire and all you want to do is head for the water? And you get down here and you slither into the Jordan River and it's all well and good?"

Now there's no right, there's no ceremony, there's no ritual, there's no baptism that can save anybody. There's no salvation in baptism then and there's none in it now. In fact, when Jesus preached His great sermon, we call it the Sermon on the Mount, and I told the students at the Master's College in chapel the other day, I don't know why they call it the Sermon on the Mount, that doesn't tell us anything. I like to call it, "The sermon on salvation." What is the Sermon on the Mount? It doesn't tell you the subject. I mean, how would you like it if I put out a tape that said, "The sermon from the pulpit." That doesn't tell you anything. What's it about? It's a sermon on salvation, Matthew 5 to 7. In that sermon which is a great, great sermon on salvation, Jesus destroyed all their hope in ritual. He attacked their prayers and said it's nothing but vain repetition. He attacked their alms giving and said it's nothing but parading your self-righteous pride. He attacked their sacrifices. He attacked their Sabbath observances. He attacked their oaths. He attacked their vows. He attacked their misinterpretation of the Law of God. He attacked everything they were ceremonially and ritualistically hanging on to. And in a sense He said to them, "All of that stuff is what Paul said in Philippians 3, it's manure apart from repentance."

The churches are full of people going through the motions. People who were baptized as babies, people who were baptized as young people, people baptized as adults, people who go to the church and go through whatever ordinances their churches call for them to go through, whether it's confirmation or whether they go and the priest tells them to say so many Hail Marys and they go through their beads and they go through whatever patterns of penancing they go through, etc., etc., etc., light so many candles, or whatever, pray so many prayers, in the end it has absolutely nothing to do with anything. You cannot flee the wrath to come by scrambling and diving in the water. Verse 8 says you have to bring forth fruit that demonstrate repentance.

And here...there was Paul, you know, Philippians 3, said, "Ah, you know, I...I'm from Israel, the tribe of Benjamin, the Hebrew of the Hebrews...that means he was kosher, traditional, kept the law, zealous for the law, blameless before the law, ceremonially down to the gnat's eyebrow, just like any good Pharisee." And he said, "I took a look at it when I saw Christ and it was all dung."

John is not telling them they don't need to escape. He's telling them they need to escape. But not like scrambling snakes just headed for the water, that won't do it. A snake in the water is just a snake in the water. What they needed was a change of nature. It's impossible for any sinner to escape judgment by any or all external rituals. True repentance then honestly reflects on personal sin...the depth and height and length and breadth of it. Honestly recognizes divine wrath and totally rejects all religious ritual as a means of forgiveness. Now baptism is an outward sign of something in the heart, but John knew well it could be an outward sign of nothing in the heart as it was in many cases in his ministry...sad to say.

And then number four, repenters not only reflect on personal sin, recognize divine wrath and reject religious ritual, but they renounce ancestry...they renounce ancestry, family ancestry. Look at verse 8 again. "Do not...he says...do not, I warn you, do not begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham for our father.'" Now what was this? We don't have anything to fear from the wrath to come, we are the children of Abraham. And after all, salvation is genetic, it just gets passed down, we're Jewish, we have Abraham for our father. They were basing their eternal hope on their genes. They were Abraham's offspring. They were the people of the promised blessing. They were the people to whom God had made great unilateral, irrevocable, unconditional, eternal promises both to Abraham and to David. They were the people who were promised the land and blessing and a kingdom. They had been promised redemption, according to Galatians 3, that was in the Abrahamic Covenant. They were also promised a Redeemer in the Abrahamic Covenant with the seed who was not many seeds but THE seed, Messiah. They were counting on that descent.

In John chapter 8 they enter into a discussion with Jesus, the Jewish leaders again, and those who are religious leaders, the theologians, and they say to Jesus, "We are Abraham's offspring." And Jesus says to them, "I know you're Abraham's offspring...verse 37...yet you seek to kill Me because My word has no place in you." In verse 39, "If you're Abraham's children, do the deeds of Abraham." You are the children of Abraham, but look, Abraham didn't kill God. He didn't try to kill God. That's what you're trying to do. You're doing the deeds of your father, he says, and your father is the devil.

Not all Israel is Israel. And he is not a Jew that is one outwardly but one inwardly, Romans 2. That's no defense against God's judgment. That is no defense against God's judgment. The pro...they knew that, they knew the prophets. Ezekiel 18, they knew what Ezekiel 18 says that everybody is going to be basically judged on his own life. Verse 21, "If the wicked man turns from his sins which he has committed and observes My statutes, practices justice, righteousness, he shall surely live and shall not die. All his transgressions which he has committed will not be remembered against him because of his righteousness which he has practiced, he will live. Do I have any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God? Rather than that he should turn from his ways and live." God says...Look, it's up to you. Ezekiel says you have to choose to live or die. He will live if he obeys.

Same thing down in verse 30, "Repent, turn away from your transgressions so that iniquity may not become a stumbling block to you. Cast away your transgressions which you've committed," and so forth. Why do you want to die?...he says. "Why do you want to die, O house of Israel?" Being in the house of Israel doesn't protect you from eternal death. Repentance, faith in God does.

Later on in Luke's gospel, chapter 13. Jesus makes an interesting statement. Luke 13:16, just a brief statement, "And this woman," this is more of this dialogue Jesus has with the people who don't understand, he's teaching here in this synagogue on a Sabbath, trying to help them to understand individual faith. Verse 16, He says, "This woman, a daughter of Abraham as she is." Yeah, she's a daughter of Abraham, "But Satan has bound her for 18 long years." Wow, she is a daughter of Abraham and Satan bound her. Later in verse 28, "There's going to be weeping and gnashing of teeth when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God and yourselves being cast out." You may be Jewish, and He's very clear about this, but you may be shut out of the Kingdom. That doesn't protect you. The fact that you may have been raised in a Christian family doesn't make you a Christian. The fact that you may have been baptized as an infant doesn't secure your salvation. By the way, you remember the rich man that died and went to hell? He says, "Father Abraham, have mercy on me," he was Jewish. What's he doing there? Boy, Jesus made it pretty clear. Heritage doesn't save you.

Zaccheus was a Jew, chapter 19 of Luke. He needed salvation. Jesus went to his house, he was saved.

So, John says then in very sarcastic words, again at the end of verse 8, "Don't you begin to say to yourselves, 'We have Abraham for our father, for I say to you that God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.'" That's no big deal. God can make children of Abraham out of the rocks. You think you're special? God can make as many children of Abraham as He wants out of the dirt.

That is a very demeaning statement. You understand the tone of John, don't you, is very harsh. You snakes...you nobodies that God can make out of a bunch of dirt. In fact, if you go back to Isaiah 51 verses 1 and 2, God says, "Remember the rock from which you were hewn," almost as if to say, you know, you were...God just sort of cut you out of a rock to begin with and God can make more of you if He chooses out of the rocks lying around here on the ground. That's nothing special.

You have to come to the place if you want to truly repent where you don't base your relationship to God on anything ancestral. It doesn't matter what your father believes, your mother believes...their salvation doesn't pass to you. I don't think there are people who understand that. There's a whole world of Greek orthodox people, a whole world of Russian orthodox people who believe that salvation is generationally passed down. There are people in the Reform Movement, people in the sacerdotal, sacramental church, Roman Catholicism, who believe somehow that rites which they engaged in as infants passed salvation down from the parents to them. Actually at infant baptism the parents' faith is counted for the salvation of the infant.

Abraham's true children, according to the Scripture, are those who follow the faith of Abraham. It's not genetic. You're Abraham's child if you follow the faith of Abraham. I wish we had time to look at Romans 2, Romans 4, Romans 9, Galatians 3 to see that. What you did get from Abraham, by the way, is sin nature and judgment.

So, what is true repentance? Boy, it demands a straight shot. True repentance calls for honest reflection on personal sin. It calls for a recognition of divine wrath. It calls for a rejection of any religious ritual as a means of salvation and the renouncing of any ancestral hope. And even all of that won't save you cause there's two more. True repenters also, number five and we'll just mention these, do them next week, must be spiritually transformed. There must be the revelation of a spiritual transformation. And the sixth one, they must, this is, of course, the heart of it all, receive the true Messiah. We'll see all of that in the rest of the text.

There's no more important thing than giving a clear message of the gospel and that means a clear understanding of repentance. John is a wonderful model. You say, "Yeah, but he was so harsh." Yeah, but the issue is so serious...so serious. You can do it with love, you should do it with tenderness, there should be a tear in the voice and a tear in the eye, but at the same time you cannot hold back. People have to come to grips with personal sin, the depth and height and length and breadth of it. They have to recognize the reality of divine wrath to motivate them to seek forgiveness and escape. But they must reject any external religious ritual and renounce any ancestral kind of genetic hope or any kind of ceremonial hope passed down from their parents. We'll see the last two next time. Let's pray.

Father, we do know that in the end true repentance must include regeneration, Your work of transformation based upon true faith in the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. Lord, it's so..so empowering for us to have the understanding You give us in Your Word cause then when we go into our own hearts to assess our own situation, we have the knowledge we need to know that our own salvation is real, as well as then to take it to others and be confident that what we're telling them is truth. Thank You for empowering us with Your Word, with the truth. Our hearts really grieve for so many people in the churches whose repentance is a shallow superficial repentance, who may not even be scrambling to escape wrath since they perhaps never even hear about it, who may not be at all dealing with an honest review of the length and breadth and height and depth of their sinfulness, who perhaps don't even understand what it is to reject completely any ritual or any ancestry, only to embrace the Savior. Our Father, how we pray that the true gospel, the true news of forgiveness, the true message that motivates it would be preached far and wide across this world to Your glory and that we might be part of doing that, we pray in the Savior's name. Amen.

True Repentance: God's Highway to the Heart, Part 2

We are in a rich and glorious study of Luke's gospel. And we're finding in Luke's gospel the foundations of the Christian faith as well as the bridge from the Old Testament to the New Testament. We're in chapter 3 and I would invite you, if you would, to open your Bible to Luke chapter 3.

Jesus in Matthew chapter 11 and verse 11 said that of those that are born of women, that involves all in the human race, the greatest man who ever lived was named John...the greatest man who ever lived up until his time was John...greater than Abraham and Moses and David and Solomon and Isaiah and Jeremiah and Daniel and Ezekiel and anybody and everybody else. There was much about John the Baptist to emulate. He was filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother's womb which meant that his life functioned under divine direction and power. He was a man who lived a simple and frugal and almost self-denying life. He spent his entire ministry pointing toward Jesus Christ. All of those are admirable qualities. And if one were to pick a hero, somebody to pattern their life after, John the Baptist would be the best choice of those people who preceded Jesus Christ.

And I think not only in those personal areas, but in the fact that John is a notable model for the preacher. Today in our contemporary church environment there are all kinds of preaching models. I won't bore you with all the options, they're almost endless. Young men are going off to seminary and being trained into all kinds of different styles of preaching...models of preaching.

But I would like to offer to you and to the church in this generation John the Baptist as the model for preaching. I'm not talking about his wardrobe, I don't think God expects us to wear camel skin. I'm not talking about his diet, I don't think we need to eat locusts and wild honey. And I'm not talking about his location, I don't think we have to go out in the desert and expect everybody to come to us. But I am talking about his message because what marked John was that he was a preacher of repentance and he was a preacher of Jesus Christ.

Really, those were the two features in his ministry. He called on people to turn from their sin and embrace the Messiah. And that, of course, is the essence of all true gospel preaching. We live in a time today when there is a minimalistic presentation of Jesus Christ, at best, in many preaching environments. And there's an utter absence of the issue of repentance. In fact, just in the last couple of weeks a newsletter from a prominent ministry defended the fact that the gospel could be preached without any mention of repentance at all.

When I wrote the book a number of years ago, The Gospel According to Jesusand the sequel to that book called Faith Worksabout to be released in another few weeks called The Gospel According to the Apostles, I wrote those two books to confront the fact that there was a growing movement in the church to deny the role of repentance in salvation. Just an unthinkable thing to occur.

John was a preacher of repentance. Matthew tells us in his third chapter that John came and said, "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." And Jesus came and said, "Repent." Luke records for us in the fifth chapter that Jesus said He didn't come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. Repentance is the issue. In the thirteenth chapter of Luke and the third verse and the fifth verse, Jesus said if you don't repent you'll perish.

Repentance so often ignored today, so often overlooked and minimalized is at the very heart of any biblical gospel ministry. And John was a preacher of salvation. He was preaching that people could have the forgiveness of sin and New Covenant salvation, as we've already learned. And the essence of that preaching is two-fold...you preach repentance from sin and faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. That's precisely what Acts 20 says the Apostles preached. That is gospel preaching.

We could certainly desire to call the preachers of our modern world back to that biblical preaching where they preach true repentance and a true understanding of the Lord Jesus Christ. Well John did. That's what marked his preaching. He becomes for us then a wonderful model for gospel preaching, New Covenant preaching, preaching to sinners telling them they can be forgiven if they repent and if they embrace the true Christ, the true Messiah.

That is God's promise not just for Israel. John was directed to preach to Israel but that is God's promise to all sinners of all times. Salvation, forgiveness of sin, eternal life is given to those who repent of sin and acknowledge Jesus Christ as the only Savior.

Now the prophet John's ministry was not unlike the ministry of prophets before him. All the prophets before him talked about sin and they talked about righteousness and they talked about forgiveness. And they saw God as a Savior and a forgiver and for those who didn't receive His salvation and forgiveness, God then is a judge and an executioner. John just stands at the pinnacle of that with the most concise and defined message and because he was living at the time the Messiah came he can point most directly of all the prophets to the Messiah.

When John began his preaching in the wilderness, about six months before Jesus appeared to begin his public ministry, when John began his preaching out in the wilderness of Judea, the hope for the Messiah was very high. The Jews were weary, to put it mildly, of Roman oppression and prior to that Greek oppression. Of course, way back the oppression of the Medo-Persians and even the captivity of the Babylonians. They were ready for their own king and they were ready for the fulfillment of everything that had been promised to Abraham and David and they hadn't seen that fulfillment. They were ready for the Savior to come, the Redeemer, the One who would bring New Covenant salvation, New Covenant forgiveness and usher them in to the fulfillment of all Abrahamic and Davidic promise. They were looking for a monarch who would come and conquer nations, and they got a Lamb who came to conquer sin first. John was a model for this.

He did talk about the Kingdom, but he also talked about repentance. He did talk about the King, but he also talked about the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world because before they could ever have the Kingdom and the fulfillment of Abrahamic and Davidic promise, they had to come through New Covenant salvation by way of repentance and faith in the Savior and the Redeemer, the Messiah. Luke wants us to understand John's message because it is a message for all the ages. And so he gives us a sample of John's preaching, starting in verse 7 and down to verse 17. That's the text we're looking at, Luke 3:7 to 17.

And as we go through this passage, we really do see the essence of gospel preaching. This, for me, is the model of how we are to preach. John is a great example. We are greatly indebted to Luke for giving us such a clear sample of John's great preaching, and in so doing providing for us the powerful and clear pattern for everybody who proclaims the good news of forgiveness.

Now as we go through this section, as I mentioned to you last week, we see the nature of true repentance. Because the main note that John sounded was the note of repentance, because he came calling people to repent, he was very clear as to what that involved. And that, as I told you last week, is absolutely critical today because there is such a tendency today to downplay repentance, to shrink repentance down to some minimal level, we face a tremendous amount of false repentance, a tremendous amount of shallow repentance, a tremendous amount of non-saving, superficial repentance.

Now there was nothing superficial about John's message. John preached what you would call hard truth, confrontive truth, even harsh truth because he understood the urgency of repentance and salvation. John was very confrontive. He was very direct. He paid no attention to his culture, in fact he lived his 30 years apart from the culture the whole time in the wilderness. He was not subject to the nuances of the political culture of the Romans, nor was he subject to the nuances of the religious culture of the Jews. He lived apart from all of that. He was culturally ignorant, I guess we could say, and more so, culturally indifferent. He was not interested in what the society thought or what they wanted to hear, he was only interested in the message that came from God to them. And so, John's message is very direct, very straightforward, very unembellished hard truth.

Even so...even so, most of the people apparently who came out and responded to John's preaching and repented and were baptized and there were a lot of them because the Bible says all Judea and Jerusalem were going out to him, most of the people that were coming to him and they involved the multitudes in general. They involved the Pharisees and the Sadducees, the religious leaders. They involved the tax collectors, the outcasts of society. They involved the soldiers which would be Jewish soldiers most likely, those who were attached to Herod Antipas up at Perea and other Jewish soldiers who functioned as policemen in Jerusalem. All of these various elements of society all going out to be baptized to get ready for Messiah, making some kind of act of repentance, some kind of confession and yet when you get to the end of it all and Jesus has lived and died and gone back to heaven, there are only 120 disciples gathered in an upper room. We can only conclude then that if there were only 120 who were really devoted to Jesus Christ, that most of this was superficial. And amazingly that in the face of hard preaching, that in the face of very direct preaching.

Now if even direct preaching by this man, this great gifted preacher, the greatest of all prophets up to his time, if even that kind of preaching resulted in some large extent of superficiality, what in the world can we expect today with the kind of preaching most people hear? We need to go back and look at John. Matthew says John came preaching repentance, and he did. And Jesus came preaching repentance, and the apostles throughout the book of Acts were preaching repentance. And I need to remind you how serious it is to preach a message without a call to true repentance because apart from true repentance there is no salvation. It's not enough to say to someone...You need to accept Jesus as your personal Savior. I know what people mean when they say that and it's well intentioned, I don't question that. But such words, frankly, are really inadequate to instruct a sinner in the way of salvation. You need to accept Jesus as your personal Savior as if you were sitting in the seat of sovereignty and you were going to give Jesus the privilege of being accepted by you.

You hear people say, "Well, you need to make a decision for Christ," as if the salvation decision was yours and not His. See, those kinds of statements subtly change the focus of the gospel, and they change it subtly away from repentance. What the sinner needs to do is not accept Jesus Christ or make a decision for Christ, but to repent and cry out and ask Jesus Christ to accept him in spite of his sin. He asks Christ if He would make a decision to forgive him. It's not your decision for Christ, it's His decision for you that matters.

I was sitting in my office a few years ago. About five o'clock in the afternoon I received a phone call from the Riverside Hospital down here in North Hollywood. And the person in the hospital said, "Pastor MacArthur, there's a request from a dying patient for you to come down to the hospital." And I said sure, I'll come right away. And I jumped in the car and drove down there. I walked into a room and I looked in the bed and there was a young man, I found out his name was David Chastain(?). He was dying of AIDS. He was in the throes of death and it was not a pretty sight. There also were, I think, three other homosexuals in the room. One was a former lover. Another was a representative of the Gay and Lesbian task force that come to the side of people in that situation. And the other was some male nurse, as best I could assess. But they were all there in the room. I walked in and I knew immediately, of course, the context of all of this.

Well, as soon as I walked in and announced who I was, the three left quickly and I was left standing at the bedside with David. And I said, "I'm John MacArthur."

He said, "Yes I know, thank you so much for coming." He said, "I needed you to come because I'm frightened." He said, "I'm dying and I'm going to be dead very soon and I'm going to go to hell forever. And I don't want to go to hell." And then he began to weep. And he said, "I just want to know if there's any hope for me."

I said, "Well, God is a Savior and He saves all who call upon him if you seek Him with all your heart. And if you repent honestly and genuinely, He'll not turn you away. But," I said, "it's up to you to ask Him." I didn't ask him to accept Christ, I told him to ask Jesus if He would accept him. I said, "Do you know the gospel?"

He said, "Yes, I know it very well. I was raised in it. My parents are Christians. I was raised in a Christian family. I attended Christian school. I went two years to a Bible college. And then I abandoned it all and for the last...I think he said about 20 years, maybe 15 or 20 years...I've been living at the basest level of a homosexual life style, the grossest and basest level." And he said, "I've had endless guilt. I know it's sin. I know it's wrong. I know it offended God. I know I deserve to go to hell, but I want God to forgive me. And I know about the death of Christ and I know about His resurrection." He went over that.

He said, "What do I do?"

I said, "Well, I think what you should do is ask Him to save you." It's like the thief, you know, what did he say? Lord...what? He didn't say, "Lord, I accept you." He said, "Lord...what?...remember me." It's like the publican beating on his chest saying, not Lord I accept you, I make a decision for you, but, "Lord...he says...be merciful to me, a sinner."

So I said...I reminded him of the publican who prayed that in Luke 18. I said, "Why don't you just ask God to be merciful to you?"

So, he grabbed a hold of my hand and held my hand and he began to cry out to the Lord. It was a long...long time. He confessed his sin. He said, "I know it's sin, I've always known it's sin. I know it violates Your law and I know I don't deserve Your forgiveness." And he was kind of weeping and praying and squeezing my hand with the strength that he had. And he just pled with God to save him and forgive him and apply the death of Christ to him. And then when he was done, I prayed the same thing and prayed. And, you know, Jesus said, "Him that comes to Me I'll never...what?...cast away." So there was a real calm after I suppose ten minutes or maybe more, maybe 15 minutes of this intense praying. And there was a real calm. There was just a peace that you could see in his heart. And I assured him that if his repentance was real and his faith was true, God would save him and that God would be glorified in showing His mercy and never would withhold it from true repentance. And just a calm came over him

And just a little interesting thing...he looked at the calendar, there was a calendar on the wall opposite his bed and he just kept looking at it. I said, "What are you looking at?" He said, "I'm looking at the date because I want to remember the day of my new beginning." I remember that line. And he lived about a week and I ran a shuttle down there with some books and he read just intensely as much as he could in those last days. He said, one time, he said, "I...I just really feel like I want to get to know the Lord before I meet Him to make up for lost years." And he was a witness to those people in that environment until his death.

You see, that's what...that's what presenting the gospel is all about and it's not about you accepting Christ, it's about you asking Christ to accept you, right? That's the issue. It's at His discretion. We don't call sinners to repent enough today. We're not asking Him to take moral action. We have this superficial thing about accepting Jesus. There's...there's moral action here. There's a real moral issue. There's a grappling with a condition that is endemic, systemic, profound called sin. It isn't that Jesus is standing hat in hand waiting for sinners to render a verdict on Him. That isn't it. It's that He is ready to render a verdict on sinners. They are at the disposal of His sovereignty. But He promises for those who truly repent that He will provide forgiveness. So the gospel is a call to repentance and faith in Jesus Christ, and that is the essence of what John preached. And that is the essence of what all true preachers preach. And those who don't preach that don't preach truly. We preach repentance. That's what I said. In Luke 13:3 and 5 Jesus said, "If you don't repent, you'll perish." We preach repentance. That is our message.

At the very end of Luke's gospel in the great commission, Jesus says, "Repentance for forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all nations." That's what we do. We preach that God forgives sinners who repent and believe in the name of Jesus Christ. That's the gospel...that's the gospel.

Here we are again in our day today fighting...fighting for the preservation of the doctrine of repentance in the gospel. I'm glad that book is coming out again on The Gospel According to the Apostlescause it has a whole section demanding the preaching of repentance.

John was aware of shallow conversion. He was aware of that. He was aware that the Jewish people were very good at superficial religion and so the tone of his preaching was urgent and the tone of his preaching was even harsh as he spoke hard truth calling sinners to true penitence.

Now with that as a background, let's look at the text now and we're going to see that there are six elements in John's preaching...six elements that define for us true repentance. This is important cause people will say, "Well I believe in repentance," and then redefine it in some way that it's not consistent with true repentance.

So what is repentance? Well John gives us six characteristics of a true repenter so we can see it in the demonstration that is given here as Luke records the preaching of John. And by the way, from verse 7 to 17, actually including verse 18, you have a sample of John's preaching. But now remember, he preached for months and he preached every day all day as the crowds kept coming and kept coming and kept coming. And the verbs in this passage, a number of the verbs are imperfect which is continuous action and present tense which also is continuous action so that this is kind of the cycle of John's preaching and the cycle of his interaction with the cycle of people who kept coming day after day. So this is really a sampler of the consistent kind of preaching John did day after day and gives us a great model for preaching for true repentance and salvation.

Now a true repenter is to be known by six characteristics. Number one, I already covered the first four, we're just going to review...number one, true repenters reflect on personal sin...they reflect on personal sin. Remember, we looked back at verse 5 at that wonderful passage from Isaiah 40, part of which says, "Every ravine shall be filled up, every mountain and hill shall be brought low, the crooked shall become straight, the rough road smooth." And we said if you're going to make a highway to the heart, a highway on which God can come into the heart, you have to do some preparation, heart preparation. And the ravine is the low and the base and the hidden of the secret shameful things of the heart that have to be brought up to the light. And we talk about the mountains and the hills being the lofty things, the things of pride and self-righteousness and they have to be brought low. And then we talked about the skolios, the crooked, the bent things that need to be straightened out, the things of deception and dishonesty. And then the rough roads have to be made smooth. All the other bumps, all the...all the other iniquities that litter our lives, they all have to be dealt with, they have to be examined. There's a real honest internal introspective reflection on personal sin. That's true of a true repenter. They do an inventory on their sin and they are overwhelmed by it and they want forgiveness.

Secondly, true repenters reflect on personal sin, secondly, reviewing, true repenters recognize divine wrath...they recognize divine wrath. It's absolutely critical to preach the doctrine of hell. It's critical to preach the doctrine of eternal judgment as John did because why else would someone want their sins forgiven if there was no hell? If there was no judgment? And so, John, end of verse 7, preached about the wrath to come...he preached about the wrath to come. That is an expression well known to the Jews, it refers to God's final wrath, God's final vengeance, the judgment that Messiah would bring on the ungodly.

And it's in light of the wrath to come, it's in light of eternal hell, eternal judgment, eternal punishment that forgiveness becomes urgent. And that's what calls for the harsh words, or the hard truth, the straightforward truth to shake people out of shallow attitudes and shallow repentance.

In fact, to show you how hard John was on his audience, he says in verse 7, "When the multitudes were coming," the multitudes, and, of course, Matthew tells us in front there were the Pharisees and the Sadducees, and Jesus says right to the Pharisees and Sadducees, as well as the multitude around them, "You brood of vipers." In other words, you're coming but there isn't any change in your nature, you're still the sons of Satan, you're still of your father, the devil, the original serpent. You're still sons of snakes. You haven't had any change in your wicked nature..."Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?" Remember I told you what he means by that is you're like snakes scrambling in front of a brush fire, scrambling toward the water. Here you come scrambling down the back hills of Jerusalem, back side of Judea, you're scrambling as if you were snakes trying to escape from the wrath and you're scrambling down there to get in the water of this baptism thinking that by that you can escape the wrath to come...who told you that? There's no change in your nature, you're just crazed like snakes scrambling toward water chased by a brush fire. You recognize the fire of judgment but you haven't recognized that you are snakes. And so he unveils that fact to them.

Yes, they did recognize the wrath to come, that's necessary. Yes, there had to be an honest reflection on personal sin. Some of them were apparently doing that or they wouldn't have submitted to John's baptism because John's baptism was the baptism that was usually reserved for Gentiles who were proselyting into Israel, becoming Jews by...by a baptismal ceremony, that is they were proselytes to Judaism. And what Jew would want to admit that he was no better than a Gentile? So some of them were doing some reflection on personal sin, saying...Okay, I'm not in the covenant, okay I'm not in the family of God, okay I'm no better than a Gentile, I'll go ahead with that baptism...and yes, I see the wrath to come. So they had come this far.

There's a third characteristic that John points out to them. True repenters reject religious ritual. "Who warned you to flee?" Remember, I told you what he's saying there is...Did you think that by this rite of baptism you would escape the wrath to come? You're like snakes who think if they can get to the water they'll escape the fire...but there's still no change in your nature. It doesn't do you any good to come down here and go through the water, that is not enough. You have to reject religious ritual. Baptism doesn't save. We went into that last time. You cannot avoid God's wrath by any religious ceremony, including baptism.

So true repentance is a matter of recognizing your personal sin, recognizing divine wrath, rejecting ritual as a means of salvation, any ritual. And then fourthly, John also says you have to renounce family ancestry. You cannot trust in your ancestry. In verse 8, in the middle of the verse, they would say...and he knew it so he says..."Don't start saying to yourselves, 'We have Abraham for our father.'" Don't say...we're going to get out of this wrath, we're going to escape because after all, Abraham is our father and God gave the covenant to Abraham back in Genesis 12 and 15 and 18 and reiterated it to Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and we are in that line and we are born out of the loins of Abraham, we are the people of the covenant. And because we're Abraham's children we're going to be God's people and we're going to receive all the Abrahamic promises of blessing and the land and prosperity and all of that.

He says you can't count on that, you can't count on your family, you can't count on your ancestry. You can't count on your heritage. And in a very sarcastic way he says...God can make children of Abraham out of these rocks, that's nothing special. And that's a statement to demean their Abrahamic ancestry. It isn't that it didn't mean anything, but they really inherited from Abraham was sin. It's really what he passed on to them. They did inherit covenant promise which means opportunity for spiritual blessing, it doesn't mean spiritual blessing, it means opportunity for spiritual blessing if they believed and obeyed God. So they did inherit from Abraham privileges but those privileges were never going to be theirs, apart from faith and obedience. In fact, because of their privileges their rejection was far more serious and their punishment far greater. So basically John says to them your Abrahamic ancestry doesn't mean anything, God can make sons of Abraham out of rocks. It's not a Jew, Paul said in Romans 2:28, who is one outwardly, it's a Jew who is one inwardly.

So a true repenter, and this is anybody, these people and anybody, a true repenter reflects on personal sin. There's a real honest assessment and inventory of sin. Also recognizes divine wrath. You have an eschatology and a theology that indicates God is judge and there is the end of the age when God is going to bring that judgment and there's going to be a real hell and a real eternal punishment. At the same time true repenters reject ritual as a means of salvation and they reject ancestry as a protection from judgment.

There's a fifth component and that's the one I want to have you look at in the few minutes we have left. True repenters reveal spiritual transformation. True repenters reveal spiritual transformation. In other words, look at verse 8 and we'll get back to the text here, we've just been reviewing up to now, let's pick it up in verse 8. "Therefore," okay, you want to escape from the wrath to come, you scrambling snakes headed for the water, "Therefore bring forth fruits in keeping with repentance."

In other words, John says if the repentance is real it will show up in your conduct...it will show up in your behavior. It will show up in your attitudes. It will show up in your actions. Let's see the fruit...let's see the fruit.

When the Apostle Paul was giving his testimony to Agrippa, the king, in the twenty-sixth chapter of Acts, he said to Agrippa, "Consequently, King Agrippa...verse 19...I didn't prove disobedient to the heavenly vision, I kept declaring both to those of Damascus first, also at Jerusalem, throughout the region of Judea, even to the Gentiles that they should repent and turn to God performing deeds appropriate to repentance."

Is your repentance real? Then let's see it manifest in your life. If this repentance is real, listen to this, it is the work of God. If it's real repentance, it's the kind of repentance that Paul wrote to Timothy about that God is granting, that God is working and it means it's consistent with regeneration. Repentance doesn't occur in a vacuum, it occurs in the environment of regeneration so that the Spirit of God is regenerating and the repentance then is reflective of that new life and it shows up in new attitudes and new conduct.

And this is not...this is not unfamiliar to the Jewish people. They knew that whenever there was a call to repentance, there was a call to a new approach to life. In...for example, Isaiah 1, where this statement of depravity, your whole head is sick, the whole heart is faint, from the sole of the foot to the head there's nothing sound in it. You're depraved from top to bottom, Isaiah says in verses 5 and 6. Then in verse 16 he says, "Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean. Remove the evil of your deeds from My sight. Cease to do evil. Learn to do good. Seek justice. Reprove the ruthless. Defend the orphans and plead for the widow."

In other words, you want to repent? Then let's see the work of God in that repentance in your life. Though your sins are scarlet, they'll be white as snow; though they were red like crimson, they'll be like wool. If God is changing you and God is cleansing you, then we're going to see it in the way you treat orphans, the way you treat widows and the way you treat God's Law.

The familiar call to repentance in 2 Chronicles chapter 7 verse 14, "My people who are called by My name humble themselves and they pray and they seek My face and they turn from their wicked ways. Then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin." It's when there's a turning. It's when there's a rejection of sin and there's a pursuit of righteousness that there is evidence of the real working of God.

One other passage along this line, just quickly. Ezekiel 33:19, "When the wicked turns from his wickedness and practices justice and righteousness, he will live."

When God is doing the work, when God the Father is drawing and when God is doing the work of conversion, transformation, new birth, regeneration, the repentance is going to show up in changed life. So true repenters reveal spiritual transformation.

Now with that you could also compare Ezekiel 36 where the work of God is going on in New Covenant fashion, where the New Covenant is at work in the life of a person. It says in verse 25, "I will sprinkle clean water on you, you'll be clean, I'll cleanse you from all your filthiness, from all your idols. I'll give you a new heart, put a new spirit within you, move the heart of stone from your flesh, give you a heart of flesh. I'll put My Spirit within you...listen to this...and cause you to walk in My statutes and you will be careful to observe My ordinances."

That's right. When God is doing the work, there's a spiritual transformation...there's a spiritual transformation. And now go down to verse 9 and here's another warning. "Also, the ax, by the way, is laid at the root of the trees. Every tree therefore that doesn't bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." So John says, and I just want to remind you that God is ready to do the judgment. He's already walked out to the orchard, He's already surveyed the trees and He's laid the ax down against one of the trees, He's ready to do the judgment. And if He looks at your tree and there aren't any elements of fruit on the tree, then the ax is going to be laid at the root of the tree and the tree then, having been chopped down, is going to be thrown into the fire and the fire is eternal judgment. The same eternal judgment, the same fire that Malachi warned them about in the last book of the Old Testament when he said He's like a refiner's fire, He's going to come in fiery judgment, the Messiah is. So they knew that with the Messiah's coming was blessing but also was fiery, fiery judgment because the prophets had made it abundantly clear that that was so.

And so, John just reminds them...Look, either you repent a real true repentance manifested in fruit...and fruit, by the way, I won't take time to develop this, is attitudes and actions that are righteous...attitudes and actions that are righteous, that manifest the love of God and obedience to His Word. And he's simply saying...If I don't see that, then I don't see the fruit of true repentance. It's not enough for you to scramble down here and get through the water and think that your Abrahamic ancestry and your ritual and your remorse about your sin is enough, there has to be indication of a hatred of sin and a love of righteousness that shows up in a changed behavior, which indicates regeneration. And if it's not there, if the fruits not there, the ax is going to be struck at the root of the tree. This is not collective Israel because it says "every tree that doesn't bear good fruit," it's talking about individuals here, any sinner and every sinner is in view. And if there's not the right fruit, that sinner is going to be destroyed, if there's not the evidence of spiritual transformation, regeneration.

And, of course, if enough individuals reject, then you have a national situation. And that's what happened. There were many individuals whose repentance was shallow and the ax was laid at the root of the tree, believe me, in those individuals lives. In 70 A.D. the Romans came in there and murdered, literally massacred a million, one-hundred thousand Jews and the ax fell in judgment and those people were cast into eternal hell. There were so many of them that it constituted a nation literally going into temporary exile, as it were, out of existence temporarily. And, of course, we're living in a day when we're watching God bringing them back...bringing them back, reconstituting them a nation in 1948 and getting them ready for the great salvation yet to come in the millennial Kingdom that will fulfill His promises to David. And at that time they will believe, they will look on Him whom they've pierced, they will mourn for Him and then a fountain of cleansing will be opened and they will be spiritually transformed and they will become the witness nation that God always wanted them to be and their witness all through the Tribulation and their witness all through the Kingdom so that on the robe of every Jew will be hanging ten Gentiles saying..."Take me to see the King of Kings." But at the time that John was preaching, they rejected. The time of Jesus preaching, they rejected. So many individuals rejected that it constituted a national rejection. But every tree that doesn't bear good fruit will be cut down.

And by the way, the Messiah will not only judge Israel this way, but He'll judge all men this way. Zephaniah 1, "The great day of the Lord is near, very near, coming very quickly, it's a day of wrath, a day of trouble, distress, destruction desolation, darkness, gloom, clouds, thick darkness." And at the end it says, "He will make a complete end on the day of the Lord's wrath, all the earth will be devoured. He will make a complete end, a terrifying one of all the inhabitants of the earth." It isn't just Jewish people that will feel the wrath of God, anyone who rejects the Messiah will be subject to that final terrifying judgment. He says in chapter 3 of Zephaniah verse 8, "He will pour out His indignation and burning anger on the whole earth."

So, John preaches a very strong message of judgment on individuals. That's the message. But if enough individuals reject, it becomes a national issue, as in the case of Israel. And if enough individuals reject, it becomes a world issue, as in the case of today as the world is largely made up of sinners who refuse to repent.

The evidence of repentance then is righteous deeds. That's why Romans 2:5 to 8 says God is going to judge finally on our deeds because the deeds aren't the way we earn our salvation, they're the demonstration that we have been saved by grace. You have been saved unto good works, Ephesians 2:10 says.

So the crowd is getting the seriousness of the message, right? And apparently they've worked their way through the list, that they have done some reflecting on their own sin...so much that they're willing to submit themselves to a baptism that confesses their no better than Gentiles, and that was very hard for proud Jews to swallow. And they went so far as to recognize divine wrath and to scramble to escape it because it was all over the prophets of the Old Testament. They also had to reject the ritual as a saving ritual and they had to reject their ancestry from Abraham as any kind of protection from judgment. In fact, it only exacerbated the judgment if they rejected their Messiah because they had received more revelation, they were more accountable to be more greatly punished.

And here they're told they have to have a life that demonstrates this true repentance. That creates some questions, go to verse 10, this is just a brief dialogue. "And the multitudes were questioning him saying, 'Then what shall we do?'" So the crowd said...You want the fruits of repentance, we don't want the ax to fall, we don't want to be thrown into hell, so what do we do? What does God want to see?

"And he would answer and say," the form of those words there in the original indicates that this was a constant thing with him. It's not that he once answered and said...it's he would answer anytime this came up and it came up all the time because he preached like this all the time. And he would answer and say to them..."Let the man who has two tunics," tunic, the word there refers to an undergarment and you only wore one of those so if you had two you had a spare one. It was the undergarment you wore over your skin and then you wore your outer garment on top of that. "So if somebody has two of those then share with the person who doesn't have any and whoever has food, do the same."

Now this doesn't see...well this is a pretty menial kind of thing, it's pretty trivial. Is this the kind of fruit of righteousness? Sure because the first great commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. But the second great commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. Now that's straightforward. The Jews knew that very well. They knew Leviticus 19:18 because Leviticus 19:18 says you shall love your neighbor as yourself, that was reiterated all through the Old Testament. You can see it in many, many places. They knew they were to love their neighbors. They knew they were to sacrifice for their neighbors. They would show their love for God by how they loved their neighbors. They would show a transformed heart by...by being unselfish and generous with their neighbors. And that follows all the way through the whole New Testament where we're told we fulfill the whole law of God when we love God and love our neighbors. So he's saying just what Jesus said when He said to His disciples in John 13, "All men will know that you're My disciples if you have...what?...love for one another." How do you show that love? You wash each other's feet. You share a garment with each other. You provide food for each other. In fact, in 1 John 3 he says if you see your brother has need and you don't meet it, how does the love of God dwell in you? And if the love of God doesn't dwell in you, then we might assume that you're not God's children.

So, this is more profound than it appears, perhaps, on the surface because there was a general selfishness, there always is, in unregenerate minds. There would be the evidence of regeneration in selflessness and in the consuming love of one another where you look not on your own things but on the things of others, as Paul said in Philippians 2. So if you have two chiton, two of those linen undergarments and somebody has none, then you give him yours. And if you have more food than you need, then you give that other person what food you have. They understood that. They understood the environment of loving your neighbor as yourself. Clearly they understood it. Isaiah 58:7 and 8; Ezekiel 18:7 to 9; Micah 6:8; and elsewhere called them to this kind of demonstration of sacrificial love.

I mean, even James writes that pure religion and undefiled is to take care of widows and orphans, right? That for some people doesn't seem like a very lofty view of religion but that's it at the heart. Such works are the expression of a true heart repentance and a real conversion and a real work of regeneration. They are not the means of salvation, as the rabbis wrongly teach, but they are the effect of that salvation.

And then another group came and Luke uses them to illustrate the point in verse 12, some tax gatherers. Now you need to know a little about them. They were the most hated people in the country because they were Jews who were collecting taxes for Romans. Usually wealthy Romans would buy a tax franchise for a certain area of Palestine. They would hire traitor Jews, really, who would then go collect taxes from their countrymen and they were exorbitant, there was tremendous abuse, there was extortion. All the worst possible things as well as representing a Gentile idolatrous government and taking for them money from God's people Israel, that was the traitor of all traitors. That's why the worst that could be said about somebody was you would treat him like a tax collector, a total outcast.

So here come the tax collectors. Now they want to know what to do. They've got a lot on their plate, they must have felt some guilt so they said, "What do we do? What...this is pretty open, you know," they were vilified by the people. They were scorned by the people. They were hated by the people. They were the abusers of the people. The publicans, the chief collectors, as I said, were Romans but under them were these Jews who got rich at the expense of their countrymen and made a life of robbing people. Virtually they were considered virtually unclean and regarded as alienated from God. They were associated with drunkards and prostitutes. They went around collecting poll taxes, land taxes, sales taxes, anything they could come up with. John must have made them feel guilty and if they wanted to repent and get ready for Messiah, what were these Jews going to do?

He says in verse 13, he said to them, "Collect no more than what you've been ordered to." Now the law had been written and apparently the law was a reasonable law developed by the Roman senate and then put upon the people, but it never was adhered to. These tax collectors extorted...the story of Zaccheus will come into play in chapter 19 when we get there, in another millennium. But until that time you can read it for yourself. He just says to them...don't take anymore than the law requires. That's a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree move for the tax collectors. Just take what you're supposed to take, that's all, don't take anymore.

So, love is one manifestation of a transformed life. Another one is honesty...honesty or justice. That's a beautiful picture, fairness and justice, a characteristic of God. Then there's a third group here, soldiers. And in my Bible...in my study Bible I put the note that they were probably Roman soldiers, I think I was wrong. As I've studied it again, it's debatable in some ways, but I really kind of...I'm going to change that in the next edition. I'm going to change it to the fact that I think they were Jewish soldiers who were really assigned to Herod Antipas and stationed in Perea, that's the best way to historically track them back. There's really no compelling reason why Romans would show up here to get ready for the Messiah, and maybe some of the soldiers that functioned in Jerusalem in a sort of a police faction. But these soldiers, most likely Jewish soldiers, came and were questioning the same way. And this would have been probably a repeated scenario...what about us? What do we do? What are the fruit of...what's the fruit of repentance for us? What are you looking for? What is God looking for?

He says to them, "Do not take money from anyone by force or accuse anyone falsely and be content with your wages." Those are the three major pit falls for people in authority, people who carry the sword, people who carry weapons, police, soldiers. Those are the three most obvious ways that they can pervert their authority.

The first one, "Do not take money from anyone by force." The Greek verb literally means "to shake down." Don't shake down people. How do you shake down somebody? By intimidation, by threat, you shake them down by force. And soldiers did that. They robbed people. That was the pattern for them. They would rob people. They had authority. They had power. They had weapons and they would shake down people and take whatever they wanted.

I remember being thrown in a jail in Mississippi during some racial problems when I was preaching in black high schools. And I remember a sheriff coming in and throwing me in jail. They literally arrested us for preaching the gospel in a black high school. Took us into one of those "Heat of the Night" places and the guy looks at me and he says...he said, "There's a fine for this."

And I said, "Really."

And he said, "Yes, how much money do you have?"

And I remember saying, "I have $17."

And he said, "That's the fine." And I gave him my $17. That's a shakedown

Now the second thing he says to the soldiers is, "Don't accuse anyone falsely." Have you been reading the Los Angeles papers lately? You've got a whole long laundry list of people who literally have been imprisoned on false accusations. People in positions of police have tremendous authority and tremendous ability to twist and pervert evidence in order to convict people who are innocent and perhaps in some cases to blackmail those people for money, if they want to be set free. Fining people on false charges, extorting them by fraud.

And the third thing he says, "Be content with your wages." It's the discontent over your wages that turns policemen to criminals. If they were content with their wages, they wouldn't be running some kind of scam in the police department and stealing drugs, or selling drugs or using their power and position to corrupt, right?

So these are the issues that they deal with with people in positions of authority like soldiers and police. Oh, he's simply saying...Hey, honesty, integrity, justice, fairness, love, let it be that that's manifest out of your life. This is contrary to how unforgiven, untransformed, unregenerate people act.

Really it all shows love. It all shows justice, honesty, contentment. Those are righteous virtues that evidence a changed life. And so, John is saying...Look, are you a true repenter? Have you reflected on your personal sin? Recognized the wrath to come? Rejected ritual? Renounced ancestry as a protection from divine judgment? And is there a revelation of transformation into your attitudes and your actions are so different?

I think about Zaccheus, remember, when he was converted. Immediately he returned to everybody four-fold what he had stolen. Remember that? That's an illustration of that.

Now up to this point we have a clear compelling understanding of true repentance. This is the real deal. The genuine repenter does a real honest inventory of the reality of his personal transgression. He understands that no religious ritual and no heritage can bring about escape or protection from divine judgment. That he must have a heart transformation that results in a righteous life that manifests love and justice and honesty and those virtues that are characteristic of God Himself. And all that is good.

There's one other thing missing. And the one thing missing is the sixth and final element in a true gospel preacher's arsenal is this...he must receive the true Messiah...he must receive the true Messiah. All the rest is insufficient without the true Messiah so that you repent but you also put your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ because Acts 4:12 says, "There is not salvation in any other name." Right? That's John's theme in verses 15 to 17, and that's my theme next week. Let's pray.

Our Father, we are so awed by the power and the consistency of real gospel preaching and the true call for repentance. We're so grateful that You have given us this picture, this model of John, the greatest of men up to his time, the one who pointed to Jesus Christ most clearly, most explicitly, most faithfully. May we do the same. May we live our lives to point sinners to Christ, to call them to repentance and faith in the true Savior. Use us to that end, we pray. Amen.

True Repentance: God's Highway to the Heart, Part 3

When I was young and just learning how to preach, there were a number of preaching models that perhaps I could have followed. The Lord was gracious to lead me to the one that we call expositing the Scripture, which I've done through the years. But there were other models. I suppose the more popular one was: a joke, three points and a poem...and that constitutes a sermon. If I may argue with that, I would argue with it on a lot of fronts. But I am much more concerned that you get one point than that you get three, for example.

I really think that effective preaching communicates one main message. And sometimes if we say too much, you lose the main thrust and I would hope that as I open the Word of God to you, even though we cover passages and we talk about history and we talk about backgrounds and we talk about the language of the text, and all of those kinds of things, that that all moves toward one main point. I'm not concerned that you get three points, I am concerned that you get one. Sometimes where some people could make three points in one sermon, I can only make one point in three months. But I confess to the fact that when I make the point, I hope you remember the point.

I am convinced there is a point to be made in Luke 3. You can open your Bible to Luke 3. Now as a faithful preacher you not only want to make a point but you want to make a point that is out of the Bible. You don't want to invent your message, you simply want to proclaim God's message. So the task of the expositor, the task of the student of the Bible is to extract out of the text of the Bible the point that God is making in any given passage.

The second thing you want to do as a preacher is take that point and put it in the context of your time so that the message is understood, not only as to its truth but as to its significance, not only is what is God's message but how does it speak to our time.

In the preaching of John there is really one great point that he is making and it is the point of true repentance. John preached repentance and that's what we have been preaching to you as we have been learning about John. My task has been to determine that the message of John was repentance and repackage that message and give it to you so that you can not only understand it but understand it in the context of our day today.

We live in a time of evangelicalism when repentance is not a popular theme for preachers. There are very few preachers who are known as strong preachers of repentance. And yet repentance is a theme that belongs in the gospel presentation to the degree that we could say one has not preached the biblical gospel if one has not preached repentance. In Acts 17 verse 30 the Bible says, "God commands all men everywhere to repent." God commands all men everywhere to repent. If we are faithful preachers of the message of God, then we must in God's name command all men everywhere to repent. Matthew 9:13 says that Jesus Christ came to call sinners to repentance. Second Peter 3:9, "God is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance." Luke 15:7 and 10 indicates that there is joy in heaven over one sinner brought to repentance. And in Luke 24:47, the Great Commission Jesus gave is that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in His name to all peoples.

Our message is repentance. It is a hard message. It is a harsh message. It confronts sin. It unmasks hypocrisy. It denies superficiality. You cannot preach the true gospel apart from repentance. John came preaching repentance, the Bible says. Jesus came preaching repentance. The Apostles preached repentance. Christ commands repentance. He does it at least three times in just Revelation 2 and 3. God saves through repentance. In fact, in Acts 11:18 it calls repentance, "Repentance unto life." There is no spiritual life, there is no eternal life without repentance. In Acts 5:31 it is said Christ is exalted as a Savior to give repentance and the forgiveness of sins.

Now, folks, that's the gospel. And yet you do not hear repentance being preached today. The message is that God will forgive all the sins of the sinner who truly repents. That is the good news. That is what we must preach. But it is not the message today.

As I was thinking about that this week, I thought...I'll just pick up the latest Christian periodical on my desk, the latest one to arrive and see if there's anything in there about repentance. I picked up the current issue of Christianity Today. Christianity Today is the best window in compromising evangelicalism that I know of. So I picked it up. And I was looking for something on the gospel, something on repentance. And I was glad when I got into the magazine a little way and I found there was a section entitled, "What is the good news?" I said, "That's perfect because that's the issue." What is the good news? What is the gospel? What is it that we preach. And the second heading was, "Nine evangelical leader define the gospel." I thought, "This is perfect, nine evangelical leaders define the gospel."

The beginning of the article went on to say that these nine evangelical leaders were either evangelists who spend their whole life preaching the gospel or they were scholars studying the text of the gospel, or they were both evangelist scholars, but they were all evangelists, they were all scholars to some degree. So they were carefully selected for their erudition and their experience in the gospel.

The article then said that all of them found this to be a tremendous challenge to give a short statement on the gospel of 250 to 300 words. They said this was a tremendous challenge. I'm not sure why but it was. Though they were self-confessed evangelists and self-confessed scholars they said it was, quote: "A tremendous challenge to give the gospel in 300 words."

I read the nine statements...the nine 300-word statements. In six of the nine there was never the mention of the word "repentance," wasn't mentioned, didn't appear, or any synonym. That was interesting. How can you proclaim the gospel without repentance? You can't. One of them used the word "repentance" and never defined it at all. A second one used the word "repentance" and never defined it at all. A third one used the word "repentance" and said it was a synonym for faith, so turning it from a positive...a negative into a positive...turning it away from anything to do with sin, and redefining it as something to do with Christ. So essentially with a wrong definition of repentance, seven out of nine never even referred to biblical repentance. The two that mentioned the word gave it no definition whatsoever.

This is really a window on what I call compromising evangelicalism. You can present the gospel without any understanding whatsoever of repentance, and if you don't feel like it, you don't even need to mention it. What you have today is sort of a gospel of addition. It's the gospel that says...Add Jesus to your life, He'll fix your life, He'll make you more comfortable, happier, better, successful, help your marriage, get you to heaven. It's minimalistic. It's superficial. Nine articles, 3,000 words without any definition of repentance. And there is the window on contemporary evangelicalism. No confrontation of sin, no concern about shallow belief. Where was...where was just one out of the nine that was a John, huh? Just one, just somebody calling people to repentance. And these are not men-on-the-street interviews, these are evangelists and scholars.

I get the feeling that the prophet John wouldn't be invited to too many conferences if he was around today. Because, you see, he placed repentance in the middle of everything. In fact, he really belabored the point, as I have surely indicated you...to you in the time that it's taking us to get through this passage on his preaching, he preached about repentance because he knew that the preparation for Messiah was repentance, that the way you made a pathway through the wilderness of your heart so that the Messiah could enter in was through repentance. And so he was a preacher of repentance. And when he came he came saying...Repent.

Now as we have been looking at Luke 3 from verse 4 down to 17, we have been defining the nature and character of repentance. Realizing that there can be such a thing as a shallow or superficial repentance, we want to avoid that as John wanted to avoid that. And we've said a number of times he preached hard truth, he preached a harsh message, he preached a very confrontive message, he preached a very uncomfortable message. He preached a message that ripped the mask off people who thought they were good and even thought they were godly. He dug deep into their hearts to penetrate the true assessment of their real condition before God which was a condition of utter and comprehensive sinfulness and consequent lostness that led them directly into eternal judgment. He really did unbare the reality of their condition. That kind of preaching today is just really not popular...a lot of sort of soft psychology has invaded the gospel and we think that we can just schmooze people into a relationship with Jesus Christ without ever exposing the reality of what the heart is and the reality of superficial repentance.

A little bit of an ongoing debate going on myself with somebody and I got a letter on my desk this morning regarding this. I...statistics came out that said the divorce rate among Christians is higher than that among non-Christians. And I said, "I don't believe that." Somebody asked me if I believed that and I said, "No, I don't believe that." So I got a letter saying, "How dare you question our survey?" I don't question your survey, I will respond by saying I don't question your survey, I just question your definition of a Christian. That's the issue. I think the church is filled with people who fit the Christian category in the sense that they're involved in a church and they label themselves that. But the conduct of their life doesn't evidence that they are Christians. It's one thing to say it, it's another thing to be it. And it's back to Matthew 7, "Many will say...and the Lord will say, 'I'm sorry I don't know you.'"

Well John preached repentance and he was concerned about false repentance. He was concerned about shallowness. He was concerned about superficiality. And so he preached strongly and sometimes even harshly and very confrontively because it was necessary to repel the shallow repentance if possible. Even with all of John's hard preaching it became clear that there were many shallow repenters who came out to see him and to hear him and even to be baptized. We know that because when believers in Jerusalem gathered together after Jesus ascended into heaven, there were only 120 of them. And during the ministry of John the whole of Judea and Jerusalem was going out to listen to him and to be baptized. So even when you preach the truth and you preach it as it should be preached, there will be shallow conversions, there will be shallow repentance. How much more of that there will be when there is no repentance at all being preached and there is no confrontation of sin at all. And you have so much of that going on in evangelicalism today that people are affirming something and then labeling themselves Christians, who in fact are shallow repenters who do not have a saving relationship with God. When you ask them about their life, you should expect to have them conducting themselves in a manner not dissimilar from non-Christians because that in fact is what they are.

So, John marks out six features of true repenters. We've gone through them. Number one, true repenters reflect on personal sin. And that is in the analogy of verse 5. Every ravine being filled up...remember I told you it's kind of like the low base deep things, the ugly hidden sins of life being brought up. You're going to have to deal with those. And then the mountains and the hills being brought down, the lofty sins of pride and self-exaltation and self-righteousness need to be brought down. And the devious crooked things, the scheming things need to be straightened out. And the clutter and the things that make the pathway difficult and impassable need to be dealt with, all the remaining iniquities that clutter up life. You've got to deal with sin deeply. That's the first point, reflect on personal sin, its height, its depth, its length. True repenters do that. They come to grips with their personal sin even to the point where John is saying to these Jews, you have to consider as if you were a Gentile, you're no better off than a Gentile, you're outside the covenant, you're outside salvation and so you need to come and repent and acknowledge that you're no better than an outcast which will be demonstrated outwardly when you go through what was proselyte baptism, a kind of baptism that Gentiles went through when they wanted to enter into the people of Judaism and become a part of their religion. So they reflect on personal sin.

Secondly, the recognize divine wrath. You...in order to preach repentance you have to have people do an honest inventory of the depth and height and length and breadth of their own personal sin, and secondly, you have to tell them, at the end of verse 7, about the wrath to come. You cannot preach the true gospel without discussing hell. I can't remember, and I don't want to say for certain, but I don't think the word "hell" was mentioned in any of those nine presentations. But people who are going to truly repent are stimulated to repent typically today because somehow Jesus will make life more comfortable rather than the truth of the matter, life might get far more uncomfortable as you try to live for God in an ungodly world. But one thing will be true, life is going to be very comfortable when you die cause you're going to be in heaven, not hell.

John preached the wrath to come. He preached eternal wrath. He preached eternal hell. Where is that on today's list of sermon subjects?

Thirdly, true repenters reject religious ritual. John saying in verse 7, "You brood of snakes, you know, you're just the same snakes, the sons of the original snake, Satan, you're just vipers like snakes scrambling before a brush fire to get to the water so they don't get burned. You don't want your nature changed, you just think that if you can get to the water you'll evade the fire." Well, whoever warned you about that? Not me, is the implication. You've got to reject the ritual. You're not going to be ready for Messiah, you're not going to be accepted in God's Kingdom because you're baptized. It's not something that ritual accomplishes.

So you have to do an inventory on personal sin, you have to understand coming wrath, you have to reject religious ritual, fourthly, true repenters must renounce ancestry as any means of salvation. The Jewish people were prone to say, as verse 8 indicates, "We have Abraham for our father. I mean, you know, John, we're certainly God's children, we're in the Kingdom, we are the offspring of Abraham." Well that's good. Abraham gave you two things...one, he gave you a sin nature. So Abraham passed down sin to you. Second thing Abraham passed down to you is privilege...privilege. And the privilege is there but you'll never get that privilege as long as sin is unforgiven. So being a child of Abraham gives you privilege but privilege that is only yours through repentance. And if you don't repent, listen to this, privilege then turns to become a worse eternal fate. Right? Because you've had more privilege, you therefore will have greater judgment. So you have to reject any salvation from your family, from Abraham, from your lineage, from your parents.

So, true repenters renounce religious ritual and family ancestry. They realize it's a personal matter between them and God. They do personal inventory on their sin. They recognize eternal wrath, eternal hell. And then, fifthly, as we saw last time, they reveal spiritual transformation. True repenters, listen to this, according to 2 Timothy 2:25, God grants repentance. According to Acts 11:18, God grants repentance. And when God is working the work of repentance in the heart, that is a work connected with regeneration, new birth, conversion, so that change is taking place. In the words of Ezekiel 36:27, it is God's Spirit being put into someone with the effect that they begin to keep His ordinances, to keep His commandments so that when someone is genuinely repenting, God is regenerating that person so there is manifest evidence of a changed life. So that's why he says to them in verse 8, "Bring forth the fruits that are in keeping," or that are fit, or that go along, "with repentance."

I mean, you can't just say...We repent. Let's see the evidence of it in a changed life. Is it, Acts 11:18, repentance unto life, and that means divine life, spiritual life, the life of God which is eternal? Can we see the evidence of it? Somebody says, "Well, I repent." Let me see your life. Let me see your life, John says. And when we see their life, what do we look for? Well, you could say we look for love for God. But how do you see that? You know, how do you...if you're going to look at somebody and say how do I know they love God? That's hard to know because that's something that goes on inside. We can all sing the songs, you know, about loving God. We sung hymns this morning and I'm sure as all of us sung them there were varying degrees of worship going on in our hearts and we don't know that. I stand next to people, hear people behind me, in front of me, around me like you do and they're singing the song but I can't measure that love in their heart, I can't see that love toward God.

So when the people say to John, "What kind of fruit is God looking for?" John picks out some things that are very visible, very visible. He says in verse 10, Luke does, the multitudes were asking John and they were saying...what do we do? Okay, what kind of fruit are you looking for? How do we manifest that our repentance is real? How do we give evidence of this real repentance? What do we do? And he would answer, which means this was the customary thing repeatedly as day in and day out these questions came up, and he would say to them, "Well if you had two tunics, two inner garments, you can only wear one at a time, give one to somebody who doesn't have one. And if you have food, then give food to somebody who doesn't have any." The bottom line here is we can't see your love for God which evidences a changed life, but we will be able to see your love for man.

Now there are only two great commandments that sum up the whole law of God. "Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And love your neighbor as yourself." The love that you have for God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, that's hard to measure because your heart, your mind, your soul, your strength are all inner things. But loving your neighbor the way you love yourself, you don't love yourself with an inner love. You don't sit there and say, "Oh, I love myself, I love myself." That's not inside, you're not meditating, looking off and just contemplating how you love yourself, you love yourself in a tangible way. You love yourself by acts upon yourself that satisfy yourself, right? You don't have to be taught to love yourself, you love yourself. You got up this morning and you loved yourself in the mirror for a while and you loved yourself at the breakfast table for a while and you loved yourself, you know, by putting on your proper clothes and you took care of yourself. And that's what you do, you love yourself by the attention you give to yourself. And you made sure you were clothed, you weren't really concerned about folks in India this morning, you were concerned about you. You weren't concerned about people who might not have something to eat, you were just there loving yourself. So loving yourself is a very visible thing. We all do that. And to a degree it's okay. I mean, God made us to love ourselves, that's part of self-preservation and that's part of why you can come out in public and we can endure it. This goes with life. We understand it and God understands it and I think it's fine.

But that's what he's saying. Loving God is very hard to measure, I can't see that. Over the long haul I might be able to see patterns of your life, but I can look at your life and know whether you love your neighbor. And so that's what he's saying. I can tell whether God's changed your life because if He changed your life you're going to love people the way you love yourself. So if you have two tunics, it's fine for you to have one and somebody else to have what you have equally. And if you have enough food, you're going to have some for you and have some for somebody else.

And if you happen to be a tax collector, they come along in verse 12 and they say, "Okay, what do we do?" And what he says to them is just to love people by never taking more than what is authorized for you to take. Jesus never argued with the right for the government to take taxes. In fact, He even said, "Render to Caesar whatever is Caesar's. Render to God's whatever is God's." Jesus Himself paid His own taxes and told the disciples to do the same. In Romans 13 the powers that be ordained of God, pay your tribute, pay your custom, pay your tax. Jesus didn't argue with that. But what He did say was do not ever take more than is authorized, treat your brothers honestly and justly. That's an expression of love.

And if you're a soldier...the soldiers came, "What do we do?" Again more expressions of love toward your neighbor. Don't ever take money from anyone by force. Don't you ever extort. "Shakedown" is the literal verb here. Use your power and your force to get money out of people, or falsely accuse people, trumped up charges, lying witnesses, etc., etc. The very thing they did to Jesus at His trials. And be content with your wages. It's your discontent with your wages that makes you take your force and your power and use people for your own aggrandizement.

So again, he's saying if there's a change here, real repentance is going on, it's going to show up in the attitude you have toward others. And, of course, Jesus particularly condemned the Pharisees, the Jewish leaders, because they would devour widows' houses, they were cruel, they were brutal. They bound heavy burdens on people, never helped them carry them. They put their legalistic rules all over people and made life miserable. They did the very opposite of showing love to people.

So if there is true repentance there is going to be a deep and honest evaluation of one's sinfulness. There is going to be a recognition of divine wrath. There is going to be a rejection of any religious ritual, whatever that ritual might be as a means of salvation. And there is going to be a renunciation of any confidence of salvation in family ancestry or heritage. And there is going to be in a true repentance the revelation of a real transformation that shows up in an unselfish act of love, or an unselfish life of love toward others.

Now all of that is true, but it's one step short of what is necessary. One final point. True repenters receive the true Messiah. And now we turn from the five things that are looking at sin and the means of salvation and we turn to the One who alone can save, Jesus Christ. And let's look at verse 15.

"Now while the people were in a state of expectation and all were wondering in their hearts about John as to whether he might be the Christ, John answered and said to them all, 'As for me, I baptize you with water. But one is coming who is mightier than I and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. And His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor and to gather the wheat into His barn. But He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.'"

Now at first glance, again you see the harshness of John, you see the hard truth that John preaches and maybe you don't see anything else. But what you really have here is a very significant attestation to the fact that the coming One, the Messiah, the Christ is in fact God. This is a great statement on John's part that Messiah is God. And that is plenty of reason why John is not the Christ because the Christ can do things that John cannot do. John can baptize with water, frankly so can I. And so could you. But John cannot baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire. That is supernatural. And that terminology comes from the Old Testament and has deep meaning in the minds of the Jewish hearers. And we'll get more into that next time.

In that same magazine that I was reading there was a dialogue going on there with a gentleman, a theologian who was part of a committee that wrote a statement on salvation, a very accurate statement, a very good statement on salvation which, I believe, they're referring to the statement which I agreed with and actually signed. But the editors of the magazine said to this man, we see the statement, we read the statement but there's been some criticism of the statement because in this statement it says no one can be saved unless they have, first of all, an intellectual understanding of the content of the gospel. That is to understand Jesus Christ, who He is and what He did. Then the question came, "Don't you think that's too narrow? Don't you think that excludes some people? And haven't you been criticized by the narrowness of that statement which is that you can't be saved unless you understand the person and work of Jesus Christ?"

Now that's where modern evangelicalism is. They think if you have to believe in Christ to be saved, that's too narrow. But it's not. Acts 4:12, "Neither is there salvation in any other...what?...name than the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth," as in that context. No matter what kind of repentance a person makes, there will be no salvation unless there is trust in the person and work of Jesus Christ. So that's the capstone on John's preaching. He preaches repentance, repentance, repentance, but he then turns them toward Messiah.

Let's look at verse 15. "While the people were in a state of expectation," now I have to stop there for a minute. There was...there was just general expectation that went on all the time because, I mean, they've been waiting and waiting for the Messiah for centuries, waiting for the promises of God to Moses about the prophet who would come...the promises of God way back in the Garden, the one who would be the seed of the woman, who would bruise the serpent's head...they've been waiting for a long time for the promise that God made to Abraham to be fulfilled in the seed who would be the Redeemer. The promise to David in the King who would come and establish His Kingdom all throughout the earth. So there was a sort of expectation just built in the fabric of their religion. But that's not what it's really addressing here. There was a level of expectation that had been heightened by the ministry of John. John came as the herald. He came saying he was the fulfillment of Isaiah chapter 40, he was the voice crying in the wilderness. And everybody was going out to hear him, all Jerusalem and Judea, and they were literally having their expectation heightened because John was preaching.

And by the way, according to Matthew 11:3 and Luke 7, I think it's verse 20, it's in the section from verses 18 to 20. Messiah is called the expected one...the expected one. Messiah and expectation in some ways was synonymous. They were waiting for, if you will, the coming one, that's another way to translate it, and I think in the NAS in those two verses, Matthew 11:3 and I think it's Luke 7:20, He is called the expected one. So they were eagerly waiting the expected one.

And it was very natural, I think, for them to wonder as it says in verse 15, in their hearts about John as to whether he might be the Messiah who is synonymous with the coming one, or the expected one. By the way, in verse 16 Messiah is referred to as the coming one, but one is coming, or literally the coming one, the expected one.

Was John the expected one? Could it be that he is the expected one? Now let me fill in the blank here. John never claimed that...never. John never did. In fact, right here in verse 16 he says he is mightier than I, the one who is coming, the coming one, the expected one is mightier than I and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals. We are on two different levels. I am not even worthy to climb up and be the lowest slave imaginable rendering the humblest duty in His behalf. We are in two different worlds, He is so superior to me. John never claimed to be the Messiah, you need to understand that...never.

In fact in the gospel of John it says I think in unmistakable terms, "There came a man...verse 6...sent from God whose name was John. He came for a witness that he might bear witness of the light...who is Christ...that all might believe through him." Verse 8, "He was not the light but came that he might bear witness of the light." He was not the Messiah. He knew it. Everybody knew it, really. Luke 20 verse 6 says, "All men perceived that John was a prophet." He was a prophet. There was no doubt about that because he did what a prophet does. What does a prophet do? A prophet preaches sin, repentance, forgiveness, judgment, salvation...that's what prophets do. John did it. John perfectly fulfilled the mission of a prophet. And, of course, of all the prophets who had ever lived he was the greatest, Matthew 11:11 says of all the people who had lived he was the greatest up until his time. His message of repentance and forgiveness and judgment and salvation and blessing and Kingdom, both sides, made everybody know that he was a prophet. And all men, Luke 20 verse 6, perceived that John was a prophet.

But it was natural to wonder at the beginning whether or not he might in fact be more than a prophet. But he wasn't more than a prophet and he knew it. That's why in John...John's gospel, chapter 3 verse 30 and 31, John the Baptist, the prophet said, "Jesus must increase and I must...what?...decrease." I'm not even worthy to untie His sandals. That was the worst, that was the lowliest of the lowest of the low duties. In fact it was said by some that it was such a dirty thing to do that it should only be done by a Gentile. I'm not even worthy to do that. I can't even climb up to do the dirtiest job in His behalf, that's how separated we are.

So, John answered and said to them in verse 16, "As for me, I baptize you with water." That's all I can do, folks. I can just dunk you here in the Jordan, that's all I can do. "But the coming One, the expected One who is mightier than I." Boy, there's a great statement. He's in another category. He is in another category all together. "When He comes, and by the way, I'm not fit to untie the thong of His sandal, He will baptize you not with water, but with...what?...the Holy Spirit and fire." This is a completely different paradigm, now we're in to the supernatural. John says I can dunk you in the water of the Jordan River, what I cannot do is immerse you into the Holy Spirit, nor can I immerse you into eternal judgment, that belongs to the divine category, right? So what he's saying here is I am a man, He's not. They associated the Holy Spirit and the giving of the Holy Spirit with God. Why? Ezekiel 36, God says, "Under New Covenant terms I bring you New Covenant forgiveness and wash away your sins, I'll put My Spirit in you." They associated that with the work of Almighty God. They also associated the fiery judgment of final retribution with Almighty God.

What John is saying is with me you're dealing with a man who is a prophet. With Him you're dealing with God who dispenses the Holy Spirit to those who repent and eternal judgment to those who don't. That is a completely different category. I...I'm like John, I really don't like it when people say Jesus was a great teacher, or Jesus was a prophet. I mentioned some months ago to you that I was listening to some of these candidates talking and this endless dialogue that these guys are in and somebody said to George W. Bush, "Who is the most influential person in your life?" And he said Jesus. And one of the other candidates said, "I don't think that people when asked that question should answer by naming a philosopher." Well Jesus is not a philosopher. Jesus is God. No philosopher can baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. And John, who is miles ahead of philosophers as a prophet who spoke the truth of God had limitations. He could preach the truth and he could baptize in water, but that's where it ended...that's where it ended.

Jesus is the One John's pointing to. The coming One, the Messiah who by the way is even referred to as the coming One in Isaiah 40. You remember back when we read the opening ten verses, some of which is quoted in verse 4, 5 and 6 that I pointed it out to you that God is called the coming One. That when Messiah comes it will be God who is coming. So the coming One, borrowed from Isaiah 40, God when He comes in the form of the Messiah is mightier than I. Yes, He's a mightier preacher of righteousness than I. He's a mightier preacher of repentance than I. But more than that, He's so far beyond me that I'm not even worthy to do the humblest task in His behalf. He's so far beyond me that it's inconceivable because He will immerse you in the Holy Spirit, or He will immerse you in fire. And I don't have the power to do that.

John is saying I can't save you, nor can I damn you. I can't give you the Holy Spirit, nor can I bring you to eternal punishment. That's way beyond me. We have now catapulted out of the human realm and we're into the realm of God. So the Messiah is coming is none other than God. And He will do what no prophet, no man even the greatest man who ever lived up until his time could even begin to think to do. For anybody to imagine they could dispense the Holy Spirit or eternal judgment would be to have arrived at a level of lunacy and blasphemy beyond which one cannot go. Nobody can do that but God. He is the asserting the deity of Jesus Christ. You're dealing with the coming One who is none other than God as promised in Isaiah 40.

Now what does it mean to be baptized with the Holy Spirit and fire? Next Sunday I'm going to tell you and I'm going to tell you in the Jewish context...and see, this is part of great preaching, you have to preach the blessing side and you have to preach the cursing...you have to preach the wondrous realities of what it means to be immersed with the Spirit and the horrifying reality of what it means to be immersed in judgment. And that John said only the Messiah as God could do. And we'll look into that in some depth next time. Boy, that went quickly.

So, I didn't give you a joke, three points and a poem. But I hope you're getting the main point. I don't care about three points, I care about one point, that true repentance demands trust in the true Messiah apart from whom there is no salvation. That's why John is introducing Him to them. Join me in prayer.

The Word strikes us seemingly always, Father, with its tremendous power and its clarity. And we're reminded that You have hidden these things from the wise and the prudent, the educated, the erudite and you have wonderfully revealed these things to babes. There are not many of us that are noble, and there aren't many of us that are mighty. We are the humble and the lowly of life, but these profound and eternal truths we understand, the world does not. And all of this by mercy and grace to us as sinners that we in believing might be saved. We thank You that You have granted to us true repentance and from that transformed lives and with that You have immersed us into Your Spirit and in Him the guarantee of eternal life with all of its endless blessing. We thank You for that. We pray for those who are yet under the sentence of fire, who are yet under the sentence of eternal hell, who will...who will perish in a never-dying, never-ending suffering because they have rejected the only Savior. O, God, may You be gracious to them and save them for Your glory, even today we pray. Amen.

True Repentance: God's Highway to the Heart, Part 4

We return in our study of God's Word to the third chapter of Luke, this marvelous gospel. Luke is such a great historian, such a great theologian. And, of course, on top of that he was inspired by God to write every word that he wrote. Luke gives us the record of the life and ministry of Jesus. He gives us such a rich, rich look at it because he loads up all the background material. We're right in the middle of that chapter 3 of Luke.

Luke has given us the flow of history from the birth of John, the great prophet, the greatest man who ever lived up until his time, so said Jesus as recorded in Matthew 11:11. Followed by the birth of Jesus and all the great events that surrounded both the birth of John and particularly the birth of Jesus.

As you come in to chapter 3, thirty years passed by. And John is now launching his ministry. John, this great prophet, known as John the Baptist because of his baptizing ministry, he is the forerunner of Messiah. He is the herald who announces the Messiah is coming. He has two responsibilities really. One, to prepare the people for Messiah's arrival...two, to identify the Messiah to the people.

When John begins his ministry it is about six months before Jesus appears publicly. John is preaching. He's preaching a message, according to verse 3 of chapter 3, a message of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. If one is to have a relationship with God, if one is to receive the blessings the Messiah brings, the sin must be forgiven. If one is to receive forgiveness, there must be repentance. The note of John's great preaching was repentance. That's how he prepared people for Messiah and His arrival. Simply stated, John's message is this, God will forgive your sins if you repent and then embrace the Messiah.

That is exactly what we preach today...it isn't any different. We preach that God will forgive all your sins if you will repent and embrace the Messiah, the Savior, Jesus Christ. But John has been concerned as all true prophets are concerned not only to preach the true gospel, not only to preach repentance and acknowledgement of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior, but John has been very, very aware of the fact that there is much shallow repentance. He's very used to it because it's standard stuff in Israel. Really, hypocrisy was a way of life. They had mastered the art of intricate hypocrisy from the top down, from the religious leaders, the scribes and Pharisees, Sadducees, they had crafted hypocrisy into a fine art that filtered right down through the people. The whole nation was predominantly hypocritical. They were used to shallow repentance, superficial repentance. John, as are all other true prophets, is very much aware of the fact that that is the work of Satan, that Satan is primarily a religionist. He devotes his time and his effort to deceiving people about their spiritual condition through false religion. He is disguised, says Paul, by very, very clever, clever disguises. He appears himself as an angel of light when in fact he is a demon of darkness. His ministers also disguise themselves as angels of light and they go about to do the work of shallow repentance and conversion. They are counterfeiters.

And that's how it was in Israel at the time of John. There was much shallow, superficial religion. And consequently John preached what I call hard truth, harsh, confrontive, unrelenting, penetrating, convicting because he understood how predominant this shallowness was. I'm convinced that all preachers should see that, particularly in an environment where Christianity has some kind of nominal influence. We should follow the pattern of John. He is really the proto-typical preacher for us, preaching the gospel in all its strength and all its glory and wonder and all its hardness as well, trying to penetrate through the shallowness and reach the depth of the real issues.

John was very aware of what the Bible is continually telling us, that many, many people repent on a shallow, non-saving level. For example, Jesus said there are people who say Lord, Lord, didn't we do this and didn't we do that in Your name? And He says, "Depart from me you workers of iniquity, I never knew you," Matthew 7. Jesus described these kinds of people also in His sermon on the Second Coming in Matthew 25 as having the lamp of profession but without the oil of salvation. Titus chapter 1 and verse 16 they are described as those who profess to know God but in works they deny Him. In 2 Timothy 2:19 they name the name of Christ but they do not depart from iniquity. That's common. They name the name of Christ, they don't depart from iniquity. They say they know Him but they deny Him by what they do.

It's like the church at Sardis in Revelation 3, they have a name that they live, but in fact they are dead. They're like Simon Magus. Simon Magus, you remember, in the eighth chapter of Acts came and followed the Apostles and ostensibly, superficially repented and was baptized. It was so superficial that Peter said to him, "You're going to perish." Shallow repenters are very common. The scribes and Pharisees were very good at it. They sort of led the parade, they defined it.

So John knew all of this. He knew what the apostle Paul experienced. Remember now, Paul was a Pharisee. Paul is a Hebrew of the Hebrews, that is he was a traditionalist. He was an orthodox, hyper-orthodox. He was of the tribe of Benjamin. He was a Jew which meant that he was in the framework of Abrahamic heritage. He was zealous concerning his religion to the point where he wanted to execute heretics. As far as externals were concerned, he could not be held guilty of any outward violation of the law of God. He fulfilled all of that and he came to the conclusion when he saw Christ that it was all manure. Just another illustration of the intricacies of shallowness. Jesus said in Matthew 5:20 that if your righteousness doesn't exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you'll never enter the Kingdom.

So, you see, there are many people like the Pharisees. They pray. They fast. They attend religious services. They attend religious ceremonies. And they're not converted. They talk about penitence but it's very shallow. They give alms to the poor. In some cases they might even give their bodies as martyrs, but they're not regenerate. It may be on the surface and it's true today that there are people who are good at sort of binding up their visible corruption by refinement, by education, by self-discipline, by original personal sort of convictions, or even by some level of religious illumination or partial reformation. They might even shake a little bit under the threat of judgment, like Felix who trembled when the gospel was preached to him. But they're still shallow.

That is very common. And is particularly common in our environment today when the gospel has been reduced to such a minimalistic level. And much of the time is preached utterly without a call to repentance.

Well, in the words of Jesus all those kinds of people are building on sand and when judgment comes it's going to wash their religious house away. All these well-intentioned religious people are no better off than the most irreligious. Did you hear that? All these well-intentioned religious people are no better off than the irreligious and no better off than the profane who relish in all their iniquities to the max and flaunt their sin. These would-be religious people, these shallow repenters are no better off, in fact they are worse off, they are worse off for the fiercest judgments of God, the fieriest elements of hell, the severest levels of punishment in eternal damnation are reserved for those who profess to believe in the true God and have been actually impenitent hypocrites.

John knew that. And any preacher who is faithful must realize that. And I told you a few weeks ago that even though all Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to hear John, huge crowds of people going out there, no doubt by the thousands to hear his message and be baptized and get ready for the Messiah, when all was said and done and Jesus came and lived for three years and taught and died on the cross and rose from the dead and went back to heaven, and all the believers were gathered in Jerusalem in an upper room, there were only 120 of them. So even with the strong preaching of John, even with every effort made possible to avoid shallow repentance and to shatter the illusions of superficiality, in the end it is still a major problem. And how much more severe a problem it is when we don't preach the strong gospel as John preached it.

He knew all the falsities of Jewish religion. He knew all of the tricks of the human heart, all of the hypocrisies, all of its self-righteousness. So he confronted shallow repentance and called for the real thing. And as we started in verse 4 and moved on through all the way to verse 17 in this section, we've been looking at the essence of true repentance. John wasn't going to be guilty of not preaching the true message of repentance. And we've already given you the points that define that.

First of all, true repentance is marked by a reflection on personal sin. We saw that in verse 5. "Every ravine has to be filled up, every mountain and hill be brought down, the crooked become straight and the rough roads smooth." That's an analogy of what has to happen in the human heart. If God is going to come to the human heart, the highway is going to be made, a highway of forgiveness into your heart. It is a highway of repentance. And that means the deep and secret, dark and base things of the life have to be brought up. And the high and lofty elements of pride and self-righteousness brought down. And the devious, deceitful and crooked and perverse patterns of life straightened out. And all the other sinful clutter taken off the road so that a smooth highway is made for God to bring His forgiveness. One has to deal with the breadth and length and height and depth of sin in his own life. Even to the degree where he's willing to confess himself as these Jews had to as no better than a Gentile, needing what essentially was a Gentile proselyte baptism. Here they were as Jews having to confess they were no better off than an uncircumcised Gentile as far as God was concerned because they were still in a condition of unforgiveness. So there had to be a reflection of personal sin.

Secondly, there needed to be a recognition of divine wrath. John at the end of verse 7 preached the wrath to come. And that is absolutely critical. Any faithful preacher preaches on hell. He preaches on fiery, eternal judgment because why bother to come to Christ for the forgiveness of sin if you're not going to by that coming escape eternal wrath? There must be a recognition of divine wrath to elicit a true repentance.

Thirdly, there must be a rejection of religious ritual. Remember I told you John says to them..."You know, you're scrambling down here like snakes, you haven't changed your nature, you're still snakes. You're still subtle and devious snakes. All you're doing is scrambling like vipers in front of a prairie fire. You're trying to get to the water." It's a very, very clear analogy, like snakes would run before a brush fire to get to the water to save their lives, he sees the Pharisees and the scribes, in particular, but the rest of the crowd as well, not wanting their nature changed but in their vile identification with the ultimate serpent, Satan, they're just scrambling to avoid wrath through John's baptism. Very shallow and superficial and he says to them...I didn't tell you to do that. I didn't tell you you could escape the eternal judgment of God simply by getting dunked in the Jordan River. You have to reject any religious ritual. That's not what's going to save you, that is only an outward symbol of a heart work.

Fourthly, true repenters reflect on person sin, recognize divine wrath, reject religious ritual and, fourthly, there is a renunciation of ancestry. A lot of people think they're going to get into God's Kingdom because of their parents or grandparents, and certainly the Jews felt that way down in verse 8. He says, "Don't begin to say to yourselves we have Abraham for our father, because I'm telling you God can make children of Abraham out of rocks. That's nothing special. That's not going to save you. What you got from Abraham was a sin nature. Yes, you got covenant promise, yes you got some wonderful promises and blessings, you'll never know any of the fulfillment of those unless your sin is dealt with. And being a child of Abraham doesn't save you from your sin, you have to reject that ancestral view. Just because you were a part of a family that had religious heritage has nothing to do with your personal salvation.

And then fifthly, not only a reflection of personal sin and divine wrath and rejection of religious ritual and ancestry, but fifthly, true repenters demonstrate a revelation of spiritual transformation. He says in verse 8, "Bring forth fruits in keeping with repentance." In other words, if this is real repentance, I'm going to look at your life and see the evidence. If it's the real thing then God is changing you and you're going to be a new creation, you're going to be a different person."

Listen, a new creation isn't reserved for the New Testament, that was always the case. When anybody was a true repenter, when anybody came to God and confessed sin, anybody in the Old Testament era or any time comes to God, truly repents, truly is forgiven, they are changed. They are transformed and it is manifest in their lives by how they live. And we discussed the details of that in verses 9 through 14 how that practically works out.

That's the essence of repentance. That's what true repenters do. They deal with their personal sin in a full sense. They understand divine wrath. They reject religious ritual and ancestry. And they give evidence of the genuineness of the work of God in that true repentance by the fruit of their life. That leads us to the final point here, I started into it last week, we'll finish it this morning.

Where there is true repentance there is also a reception of the true Messiah, that's number six, a reception of the true Messiah. You know, you could go through all of that repentance and fall short if you didn't embrace the true Messiah. Acts 4:12, "Neither is there salvation in any other name. There is no other name given among men whereby we must be saved." Heaven has given no other name. John 1:12 says, "As many as received Him, He gave the right to be called children of God." Acts 16:11, I think it is, it says, "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved."

I went back this week again just to check in my mind was I right, that article in "Christianity Today," where there was a statement on salvation made. And the person who wrote the statement, an excellent statement, was asked by the editors of the magazine, "Don't you think you're being too narrow when you say that in order for someone to be saved they have to have an intellectual knowledge of Jesus Christ?" I thought, "Maybe I missed that." But that's what it said. The idea that somehow you could be saved apart from the knowledge of Jesus Christ is heresy. It's a sad lie. John says in verses 15 to 17, there's one coming, He's mightier than I, He's the one you've got to look to. Don't look to me, verse 15, "The people were in a state of expectation, they were wondering in their hearts about John as to whether he might be the Christ." Remember, he never claimed that, never. He never claimed that. His followers never claimed that. They never claimed that he was the Messiah, he never claimed that he was the Messiah.

That's indicated in chapter 19 of Acts. It tells us Paul was passing through the upper country and he came to Ephesus and he found some disciples. Interesting, he's in Gentile area, he finds some disciples and he says to them, "Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?" They said to him, "No, we have not even heard whether the Holy Spirit has come." They had heard of the Holy Spirit, all Jews knew of the Holy Spirit, of course. But they hadn't heard whether the Holy Spirit had come in the way that had been promised. And he said to them, Paul did, "Well then in what baptism were you baptized?" And they said, "Oh, into John's baptism." These were disciples of John from way back who had never yet heard about the Messiah. They had been baptized down there in the Jordan River at the time that John was doing his baptism. Wandered back off into the Gentile world but never knew about the Messiah. And he said then, "John baptized with the baptism of repentance," Paul said, "telling the people to believe in Him who was coming after him, that is in Jesus." Just point that out to you because I want you to know that's exactly what John said. He never told anybody to believe in him as Messiah. Paul says he told people to believe in the One that was coming after him, even Jesus.

And that's the way it was from the beginning. When Gabriel told Zacharias, the father of John, when he was going to have a son, he said his son would announce the coming of Messiah. That's what John knew from the very time the angel gave the message, and that's always what he knew and that's always what he preached. He was not that light, John 1 says, but was sent to bear witness of that light. He knew that...he knew that. And he makes that very clear because he knows that question is in people's minds. In verse 16 he answered and said to them all, that's a very important phrase because the Greek language there indicates a formal introduction to official teaching. Here was an official doctrinal statement, "As for me, I baptize you with water but one is coming who is mightier than I and I am not fit to untie the thong of His sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire." John says don't get us confused, folks, we are worlds apart...we are worlds apart. I can baptize you with water, that's all I can do. I can take you down here into the Jordan River and I can dunk you, and that is not very special, anybody could do that, you could do that, I could do that, anybody could do that. That is not a supernatural act. That is not some kind of act of great power. That is just a plain old human act. You can take somebody in water and baptize them. John says I can do that. But literally in the Greek with a definite article, "The coming One," and again I say that is a technical title for Messiah, "The coming One...the coming One," that's how the Jews knew Him as the coming One, "who is mightier than I." In the eleventh chapter of Luke and verses 21 and 22 He is called the stronger One, the coming One, the stronger One, the Messiah. "I'm not even fit...John says...to untie the thong of His sandals." And I told you last time that task of taking somebody's sandals off and washing their feet was so low on the service ladder that you couldn't get lower than having to do that job and it was a job usually assigned to a Gentile because it was beneath the dignity of a Jew to do it. John says I'm not even fit to climb up to the point where I could tie...untie His sandals, I don't even belong with Him. I'm not even near Him. I'm not even fit to go up and do the lowliest, most despised duty. We're so far apart. We are in two different worlds. We are so far apart.

The reason we're so far apart is clear. "I baptize with water," end of verse 16, "He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire." That is a great statement filled with tremendous profound truth. John says...Look, I can immerse you in this Jordan River, I can do that, anybody can do that...what I can't do is immerse you in the Holy Spirit or immerse you in fire. I can do a human thing but I can't do a divine thing.

What he's saying here is the One who is coming, the coming One, the stronger One, the mightier One, the One I'm not even worthy to untie His sandals, that One will do things that only God can do...only God can immerse you in the Holy Spirit. Only God can immerse you in fire. John is pointing out the deity of the Messiah. John is saying...I don't have the power to save you and I don't have the power to damn you. I don't have the power to immerse you in the Holy Spirit. And I don't have the power to immerse you in hell. That's not my power.

The Jews understood this. You notice there's not a big explanation about this because the Jews knew that when Messiah came He was going to be a dividing line. They knew that because the prophets said that over and over in the Old Testament. The coming of the Messiah was a two-edged sword, believe me. When the Messiah came there would be blessing. And when the Messiah came there would be salvation. And when the Messiah came there would be the Kingdom. But when the Messiah came there would be judgment and there would be death and there would be burning.

You see, the Jews knew about the New Covenant. And I'll just give you the quick little summary. When God was giving covenants to Israel, He gave them promises in those covenants. The ones that are important for us to know are the promises He gave to Abraham. They understood that God promised to Abraham that He would bless this people if they were faithful. If they would be His witness nation. It wasn't that He wanted only to bless them, He wanted to bless the whole world through them. But if they would be faithful He would bless them. And all that blessing is laid out to Abraham and to Isaac and Jacob. And then He made promises to David that He would bless them with a Kingdom that would stretch over the whole earth. And they wanted those blessings. The Jewish people wanted those blessings.

But God gave them another covenant called the Sinaitic Covenant, the one made on Mount Sinai, or the Mosaic Covenant made with Moses. That was the covenant of law. In order for you to be blessed you've got to keep the law. Well they couldn't keep the law and so all the law did was damn them and cut off the promises of Abraham and the promises of David from them. So here they were caught in that situation. God made promises, they couldn't attain to those promises because they couldn't attain to the standard of holiness God required which was perfection and they were crushed under the Mosaic Law, they were crushed under the inability to keep God's law. So God had to introduce another covenant, that other covenant was called the New Covenant. It was the covenant they needed, it was the covenant of forgiveness. And when you read New Covenant passages, whether you're reading Ezekiel 36:25 to 27, or whether you're reading Jeremiah 31:31 to 34 you find in the New Covenant, God says I'm going to give you a New Covenant and in there is the forgiveness of sins. God's going to forgive your sins. If you'll come to Him and ask and repent, He'll forgive your sins and He'll make a New Covenant and once you come through the New Covenant, then you can have the promises to Abraham and you can have the promises to David fulfilled.

So they knew the New Covenant. They knew it because the prophets wrote about it. But they also knew this that in the New Covenant was the giving of the Holy Spirit. You see, in the New Covenant it says in Ezekiel 36:25 that God's going to put His Spirit within you. And they knew that when a person was really converted, when a person was genuinely forgiven, even in Old Testament times, God's Holy Spirit took up residence in that person. They knew that. Did you think that only people in the church age received the Holy Spirit? Not so. Why do you think I read this morning in Psalm 51:11, David said, "Don't take Your Holy Spirit from me." He had sinned so greatly that he was fearful that he had gone too far and God would reject him. Don't take Your Holy Spirit from me.

They understood the role of the Holy Spirit. They understood the Holy Spirit's role in creation. They understood the Holy Spirit's role in the life of a believer to take up residence. That God in the New Covenant would plant His Spirit. Now remember, folks, the New Covenant wasn't ratified officially until Jesus died, but was in place and operative through all of redemptive history. God forgave those people who repented and asked Him to forgive them on the basis of what Christ would do because in the mind of God it was already done because God lives in one eternal present and that's why God calls Jesus the Lamb slain from before the foundation of the world. So they were all people who were ever saved were saved by the New Covenant terms. And in the New Covenant, according to Ezekiel 36, God's Spirit is planted in believers. So they were knowing that when the Messiah comes, He's going to come, He's going to bring the blessing of the New Covenant and He's going to bring the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is not only going to be planted in us, but the prophet Joel said when the Messiah comes and sets up His Kingdom, the Holy Spirit is going to do some amazing things. There's going to be a mighty explosion of the work of the Holy Spirit. So they associated the coming of Messiah with the Holy Spirit.

So, they understood that. When the Messiah comes the Holy Spirit is going to come and He's going to pour out the Holy Spirit. Joel says He's going to pour out His Holy Spirit. They also knew that the Messiah would have the Holy Spirit in a unique way on Him. Isaiah 11 associates the Messiah with the seven-fold Holy Spirit. Isaiah 42:1 associates the Messiah with the Holy Spirit. Isaiah 61:1 associates the Holy Spirit with the Messiah. So when the Messiah comes He's going to come with the attendant power of the Holy Spirit, He's going to bring the Holy Spirit and He's going to grant the Holy Spirit to those who believe. He's going to pour out His Spirit, Joel 2:28 and 29, in fact He's going to pour out His Spirit beyond Israel on all flesh.

So they associated the coming of the Messiah with salvation and salvation in New Covenant terminology meant the granting of the Holy Spirit. So John says...Look, when He comes He's going to come and immerse you in the Holy Spirit. They would understand that. Oh, New Covenant blessing, this means that the Messiah is going to come, bring the Holy Spirit. He's going to give us that New Covenant salvation. And we're going to be immersed into the Holy Spirit. They understood that. And that's why on the day of Pentecost when Peter stood up to preach, Acts 2:38, he said, "Repent, repent, receive the forgiveness of sins and you shall also receive the Holy Spirit." You see, nobody is converted, nobody is saved, nobody is forgiven, nobody is transformed by some human act. When a sinner is truly repentant and comes to God in a broken and contrite spirit and asks for forgiveness and God forgives and transforms, it is the working of the Holy Spirit. So in the Old Testament, the New Testament alike it was the Holy Spirit that brought about that wonderful work of regeneration.

Now you say, "What's the difference now and then?" The only difference is in some...some degree, there's some quantitative work of the Holy Spirit in the church that is in some sense different or some qualitative work of the Spirit that is in some sense different than it was in the Old Testament, but it's the same Holy Spirit. He has been with you, Jesus said, all along in the future in the time after the church He shall be in you. I don't know the details of that that means, it's a new dimension of the Holy Spirit which we enjoy. They were not at all without the Holy Spirit since He is essential in the New Covenant, I'll plant My Spirit within you.

So, what John is offering them is this, the Messiah is way beyond me because He dispenses the Holy Spirit. I can't do that. I can't do that. No man can do that. Secondly, He's greater than me because He's going to bring fire.

Now if the Jews heard the word "fire" in connection with Messiah, they had plenty of Old Testament scriptures to pop into their minds. Many, many times in the Old Testament "fire" is associated with judgment. And I'm not going to take the time this morning to give you all those scriptures. But, for example, and there are many, many of them, Isaiah 29:6, "From the Lord of hosts you will be punished with thunder and earthquake and loud noise, with whirlwind and tempest and the flame of a consuming fire." That's just one of many, that's Isaiah 29:6. You can see it in Isaiah 31:9, Ezekiel 38:22, Zephaniah 1:18, Zephaniah 3:8, Daniel 7:10, God's final judgment is associated with fire.

But for a moment, look at the last book again of the Old Testament Malachi. Malachi 3, and here we're in the context of John's ministry because Malachi 3:1 is a prophecy about John...I'm going to send My messenger, he'll clear the way before Me...God says I'm coming, again this indicates that the Messiah was in fact God incarnate. I'm going to come and I'm going to send My messenger to clear the way...that was what John did, he was the voice of one crying in the wilderness, clearing the way for the coming of Messiah. I'm going to send John before Me and then the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to His temple. And the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming. So, He's coming, He's coming, the coming One, that's where they got that term for Messiah, the coming One, but before the coming One is going to be the messenger who announces His coming, so that's John. And when He comes, verse 2, who can endure the day of His coming? Who can stand when He appears? For He is like a refiner's fire. When He comes He's going to come to bring the Holy Spirit. But He's also going to come to bring fire.

Go over to chapter 4 verse 1, "Behold the day is coming, it's that same day when He comes burning like a furnace and all the arrogant and every evil doer will be chaff and the day that is coming will set them ablaze," says the Lord of hosts, "so that it will leave them neither root nor branch." So when the Messiah comes, the coming One arrives, it's going to be a day like a furnace that's going to consume everything. "But...verse 2...for those who fear My name, the Sun of Righteousness will rise with healing in His beams. You're not going to be burned, you're going to go forth and skip about like calves from the stall and you're going to tread down the wicked and they're going to be ashes unto the souls of your feet on the day which I am preparing, says the Lord of hosts." Boy, what a frightening thing.

So when the Messiah comes there's going to be a forerunner, according to Malachi 3. Then the Messiah is going to come and He's going to come in fiery blazing judgment that's going to consume the ungodly and turn them into ashes. And He's going to save those who belong to Him and that's all John is saying. When the Messiah comes, He's going to do the supernatural work, He's going to immerse some with the Holy Spirit, He's going to immerse the rest in fire. Fire is in Luke's gospel frequently a metaphor for judgment. For example, in Luke 9:54, His disciples James and John come to Jesus and said, "Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" Well at that point Jesus rebuked them for saying that but they understood that associated with Messiah was the consuming fire of judgment on those who dishonored God. In Luke 12:49 Jesus said, "I have come to cast fire upon the earth." Wow. "And how I wish it were all ready kindled." What a statement. Jesus came to burn people up.

In the seventeenth chapter of Luke and verse 29 we're reminded that fire went out from God, fell on Sodom and Gomorrah and destroyed everybody.

So Luke touches on the fire of judgment in his gospel. Obviously the book of Revelation, chapter 19 verse 11 describes fire when Christ comes. But maybe the strongest word comes from 2 Thessalonians 1:7 when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels in flaming fire, dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.

See, when Messiah comes He comes to separate. John had a work of separation. His baptism separated, but it only separated visually, or superficially. There were the baptized and the non-baptized. But when Messiah comes, His separation is at a supernatural level. He will separate those who are immersed in the Holy Spirit, who received promises made to Abraham and David, who receive all the blessings of salvation, who receive the Holy Spirit and eternal life. And on the other hand, those who are going to be burned eternally in everlasting hell. Messiah is a divider.

Now the principle given at the end of verse 16 is illustrated in verse 17 by just a simple and graphic illustration that is reminiscent of the language of Malachi 4 that I just read you. Verse 17, here John and his preaching illustrated the principle of baptism with the Holy Spirit and with fire. It's like a winnowing process. "And His winnowing fork is in His hand to thoroughly clear His threshing floor, and to gather the wheat into His barn so He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire."

Now here's the imagery, very interesting. This separation the Messiah is going to do can be illustrated by an agrarian illustration very familiar to the Jewish people because grain was grown in all the lowlands of Israel, and is still in many places there today. When all the grain was gathered, it was brought into a flat, hard floor and there were winnowing shovels, really, a winnowing shovel, a large, flat shovel that was thrust under a pile of this grain and then thrown in the air. And the breeze would then blow the lighter chaff, or straw, away from the grain and the grain being heavy would fall straight down. So it depended upon the way the wind was blowing. At the end of that process when the entire floor had been picked up and thrown into the air, all the grain would be piled in the middle and the chaff would be lying on the perimeter...therefore the separation was complete. And when the separation was done, the wheat would be taken to the barn, and the chaff would be burned with fire.

This is not a new illustration, by the way. Psalm 1 verse 4. "The wicked are like the chaff which the wind drives away." Jeremiah 15 verses 5 to 7, exactly the same illustration. The ungodly again are like chaff. So here you have the picture. When Messiah comes everybody will be dealt with.

And I want to point something out to you in verse 17. You see that verb "to thoroughly clear" - "to thoroughly clear," that's very interesting in the Greek. That is a verb diakathairo, that's what we call a hopox legamana(???) in the Greek which means it's the only time in the New Testament this word is used. It's a very...it's a very unusual word, it is a rare word, this being its only usage. What it means is no traces are left, nothing is left, everything is dealt with. The separation is complete. That is to say nobody is left out. The separation will take place completely. You either fall in the pile of grain, or the pile of chaff. You are either barned with the grain which means you go into the glories of heaven, or burned with the chaff which means you go into the terrors of hell.

This is strong preaching, isn't it, by John. I wish you'd all pray that God would raise up more preachers like John. You don't want to be without love or without compassion, but you need to preach the truth with boldness, courage and conviction because the sinners need to know what they're dealing with. Everybody will be dealt with, thoroughly that threshing floor will be cleared, everyone will be done with. And there are only two piles, the barn and the burnt.

Would you notice an interesting word in verse 17? Unquenchable...with the word unquenchable you move from the analogy to the reality. The fact is that the fire that burned the chaff eventually went out. When all the chaff was consumed and there was nothing left to fuel it, the fire went out. But the fire that John is talking about and the fire that Messiah brings is a fire that never goes out. That introduces to us for the first time eternal hell. Oh, I mean the first time in Luke, not the first time, cause even the Old Testament talks about it. Job chapter 20 verse 26, you can read for yourself Isaiah 34 verses 8 to 10, talks about God's judgment and a fire that never goes out. Isaiah 66 and verse 24, the last statement in Isaiah, "Those who have transgressed against Me, their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched." And Jesus quotes that in the New Testament...the unquenchable fire. Isaiah talked about...the Jews knew...Messiah would judge with an eternal fire. Hell is an eternal time of punishment, really an eternal and timeless experience of punishment. Jesus picked up this message. Jesus said more about hell than He did about heaven. The Apostles preached it in the epistles. The book of Revelation speaks of it.

So John's preaching was very straightforward. He called people to true repentance and he called them to turn and acknowledge the true Messiah. And the one who was greater than John, so much greater because all John could do was a human, physical ceremony, but the Messiah could immerse people in the Holy Spirit...on the other hand, he would immerse them in eternal fire. You have to acknowledge Him as God, therefore. This is a statement about the deity of Christ. This is a monumental statement of the deity of Christ. Jesus is going to do what only God can do, save people and damn people, glorify people and punish people. This is the standard, beloved, for all gospel preaching. It's a call to repentance and an acknowledgement that Jesus is the great divider who either saves or damns.

So, repentance means you come to an honest understanding of your own personal sin. You recognize divine wrath. You reject ritual and ancestry. You demonstrate transformation in the fruit of true repentance. And you receive the true Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ.

And, you know, it does weigh heaven on my heart that there are so many people who call themselves Christians today who have no understanding of this and they're engaged in a false repentance, shallow, non-saving repentance. Let me give you a final warning about that regarding false repentance. False repentance is grounded in selfishness, rather than the honor of God. Because it has nothing to do with the honor of God, and only has to do with the regret that a person has because of the consequence of sin. It's not built on the fear of hell, or the fear of dishonoring God. False repentance also leaves the feelings unchanged. The love of sin is not subdued and the passion for holiness is not initiated. False repentance leads men to hypocritical concealment. Once you've falsely repented, now you've got to keep it up. And so you just lay on one more level of hypocrisy after another to keep up the deception. That leads eventually to self-deception and to a deadly false security where you begin to believe the lie you're living that you wanted originally others to believe and now you've come to believe it, and that is that you really are God's when in fact you're not. And that hardens your heart. Each time shallow sorrow washes over the emotions of the heart, and doesn't truly break that heart, the fountains of feeling are more and more dried up. And then the conscience seared and then you're irretrievable.

John understood this. We need to understand this and call people as we would call you today to a true repentance.

Father, we thank You again for the clarity of Your Word. We would pray, first of all, that You would raise up many faithful preachers. We think of these 300 plus young men at the Master's Seminary, first of all, Lord, would you raise up a mighty force of men from that place who preach with the boldness, the power, the conviction, the clarity of John. May he rise even in our generation to become the model of a real true preacher, not the surfeited self-centered and shallow examples that so many follow today. And, Father, would You as well by the mighty work of the Spirit of God in the hearts of those who are caught up on shallow repentance, who to some degree have followed a certain regret grounded in their own selfishness because of the consequence of sin, who have not had their feelings changed, not had the love of sin subdued, who are to one degree or another hypocrites piling on more cover up, more sin leading to deadly false security and actually hardening the hearts, searing the conscience. Lord, before it gets that far, break through that false repentance and work a true work that will produce the fruit of repentance in changed life to Your glory. And we thank You, Father, for this forgiveness which is ours when the repentance is genuine and the faith is real and placed in the one and only Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.

By John MacArthur