I Have Seen the Light
Preparing for the Light
Luke 3:1-16
 
Several years back a life-style management consultant surveyed about 1000 people about how they prepared for Christmas. What he found was this:
  • The average person spent up to an hour and 10 minutes a day during the last week of December bickering over holiday related plans such as what parties to attend, what to wear … and whether to leave early.
  • People spent less than 17 minutes planning holiday purchases and 6 hours shopping for them with an average of 3 trips to the same store.
  • Nearly 7 1/2 hours were spent baking and preparing the holiday meals while less than a 1/2 day is devoted to relaxation and enjoyment.
  • And perhaps most tragic of all, on Christmas morning, the average parent spent just 9 minutes playing with the children.
 
How do you prepare for Christmas?
 
Lots of stores have been preparing for Christmas ever since Halloween. And many businesses are preparing for Christmas by planning parties and deciding how long they're going to shut down for the holiday.
 
Families prepare by decorating their homes with trees and lights and festive garland. Some folks even go so far as to light up the night with Christmas lights in yards and roofs.
 
Just last week several wonderful people decorated church to reflect the joy of the season. Countless hours will be put into preparing special services and cantatas and choir presentations.  Children will go out caroling and every one will be doing holiday projects for the needy and hurting. 
 
Everyone is getting ready for Christmas.  No other day gets the kind of attention that does Christmas.   
And it’s a shame that so often we spend so much time and energy getting ready physically and give very little thought for getting ready spiritually. 
 
Last year as Christmas approached we spent our Sunday’s looking at how the Jews anticipated the coming of their long-awaited Messiah.  Prophets down through the centuries had delivered God’s promise that one day He would come. 
 
And unfortunately, when He showed up, many missed Him.  Spiritually, they were not ready to receive Him when He came. 
 
Now I think it important to keep in mind from the closing prophecy of Malachi in the Old Testament to the opening scenes of the New Testament there is a period of time of about 400 years.  During that time control of the land of Israel passes from The Medo-Persian Empire to Greece and final to Rome.
 
Everything is coming together for the birth of Jesus Christ.  In fact, six months before the birth of Jesus, He will have a cousin born whose name is John.  We know him as John the Baptist.  He is a fulfilled prophecy himself. 
 
  
Luke 3:4 tells us that Isaiah declared that a man like John the Baptist would come one day as "A voice of one calling in the desert, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him."
 
That is exactly what happened.  John the Baptist was chosen to prepare; to help people get ready for Christmas.  That was his job. That was what he'd been called to do.  He did with one simple message. 
 
Luke 3:3 tells us: "He went into all the country around the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins."
 
Repent! Change your life!
 
When people came to John to be baptized, he bluntly told them they needed to change. They needed to repent.
 
Luke 3:7-8
 
The crowd asked him: "What should we do then?"
 
Verses 10b-11
 
Tax collectors also came to be baptized. "Teacher," they asked, "what should we do?"
 
Verses 12-13
 
Then some soldiers asked him, "And what should we do?"  He replied, "Don't extort money and don't accuse people falsely- be content with your pay."
 
Verse 14
 
Everyone came to John KNOWING they were there to prepare themselves for coming Messiah. John made no secret about that. Every message drove home the fact that he had come to prepare them for the promised One of Israel.
 
He just had one message.  If you heard him preach on Sunday morning, it was a message about repentance.  Come back Sunday night and hear the same thing.  His Sunday School class and Discipleship Training seminar and Wednesday evening bible study were all about repentance and seeing a change in life because of it. 
 
They kept asking "What should we do?"
And everybody received the same message from John: You need to Repent. You need to Change.
Share with others. Give to others. Live a holy life because the King is coming. 
 
So that's how John said the Jews of that day were to prepare for Jesus.
 
But how do you and I prepare for Christ this Christmas?  Today, I want to deal with the practical.  Next week, we’ll look at the theological.  Or to put it another way, today I want to look at the setting of the story, then next week we’ll look at the message John the Baptist preached.
 
I would say, the first step in preparing for the light is about
 
1. Where You Go
 
When it comes to getting ready for Christmas, some people spare no expense.  They will go to all kinds of places.  They'll go to Target, or the Mall or to Wal-Mart to buy gifts. Quite often I hear people talk about going out of town to do their shopping because of the lack of selection here.
 
They'll go to the hardware store to buy extension cords and decorations.  They'll go to the grocery store for food for the Christmas meals.  People will go all kinds of places and spare no expense to prepare for Christmas. And it’s ironic that many of them will put no effort or time or expense into going to church.  In fact, if anything suffers or has to be missed, it will be worship and church attendance. 
 
But what I notice here in our text is when the people of Israel wanted to be prepared for their Messiah, they went to church. Specifically, they went out into the wilderness to hear a preacher and hear him preach to them.
 
Verses 7-9
 
That is not your typical Christmas sermon is it?  He calls them a brood of vipers!  He calls them snakes in the grass!  Now remember, they had come to be baptized!  What’s going on in this text?
 
They had come with a pre-conceived idea of what religion was all about.  They were clinging to their Jewishness, believing they were right with God simply because of their lineage. 
 
Now they wanted to add the baptism of John to that and cover all the bases and John is repulsed by the idea of simply going through the motions of religion in an attempt to be right with God.  Remember, Matthew records that his message was very simple and straightforward, “Repent!  For the kingdom of Heaven is at Hand!”
 
And I would say that’s almost always the way it is in modern culture as well.  Give folks a little baby in the manger and tell them the Christmas story and make them feel good and you’ll be fine 
 
But if you deal with sin and the need for repentance you’ll stir up a stink.  People don’t want to hear that, especially at Christmas.  After all, it’s the feel-good time of the year. 
 
I suppose the thing we are least likely to want to be at church to hear is the sermon.  We love the music and the children’s presentations and cantatas and all of that, but to many, sermons aren't all that important this Christmas.
 
But I recently read observations by a church growth expert on mistakes churches make at Christmas and one of the major mistakes churches make is in not offering a sermon. They replace the sermon with cantatas, and plays and dramas.
 
But this church growth expert observed that
"The number one reason people decide whether or not to come back to a church they visited is how they felt about the preacher.
 
And that makes sense because the preaching of the word of God is vital to God’s plan.  In fact, we have very little instruction about public worship and orders of service in Scripture.  We fuss and fight and expend enormous energy on what kind of music we should use in worship. 
 
But the Bible says in 1 Corinthians 1:21 that God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe."
 
That’s because any preaching worth it’s salt always winds up at the cross.  In that same text of Scripture in 1 Corinthians, verse 18 says,  “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
 
No matter what Sunday people come to church, they need to be brought into the presence of the cross of Jesus because its only at the foot of the cross that we receive the power of God.
 
And at that cross we find the same message John the Baptist preached:  Repent! Change your life!
 
If that is the way God's people prepared for the coming of Jesus the first time, every Biblically-minded congregation will make that their highest priority during this season as well.
 
So the first thing we can do to prepare for Jesus is to commit ourselves to being in church with God’s people because that is where we're confronted by the preaching that brings repentance.
 
So first of all, to prepare for the coming Light, it's all about where you go.
Secondly, it’s all about
 
2. What You Do
 
Verse 10
 
It's not enough to hear a sermon about repentance and then to SAY we want to change. We actually have to decide to change.
 
Notice how John responds
 
Verses 11-14
 
In other words, John says, the proof is in the pudding.  He is actually giving some examples of the “fruits of repentance” that he talked about in verse 8.
 
Listen:  a right relationship with Jesus always begins with repentance and expresses itself in a changed life. 
 
And the Light of Christmas is all about evaluating our lives to determine if there are things that need changed to prepare ourselves for Jesus.
 
So first, it's all about where you go.
Secondly, it's all about what you do.
 
Lastly - it's all about
 
3. What's Most Important to You
 
Verses 16-17
 
When John the Baptist preached - he understood that his main role was not to draw attention to himself. He was appointed by God to point people to the Son of God.
 
Isaiah declared that John the Baptist would be: "A voice of one calling in the desert, 'Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him"
 
As we saw in Luke 3:4, his job was all about making Jesus the most important thing in his life.
 
So when the people were wondering in their hearts if John might possibly be the Christ, John immediately puts an end to that question. 
 
John the Baptist wasn't worried about getting the attention because it wasn't about him, it was about Jesus. All he wanted to do was make sure that he pointed people to Jesus.  And that should be our highest glory as well.
 
A little church was getting ready for their Christmas play one year and a little girl named Jana was so excited about her part.  Her family thought she was to be one of the main characters but she would never tell what part she played.
 
The night of the play, the family was all there and one by one the children took their places. The shepherds were fidgeting over in one corner all decked out in their robes.  Mary and Joseph stood solemnly behind the manger. In the back three young wise men waited impatiently.
 
But no Jana was to be seen. 
 
When the play began, the narrator said, "A long time ago, Mary and Joseph had a baby and they named Him Jesus," she said. "And when Jesus was born, a bright star appeared over the stable."  With that cue, Jana got up from her chair, picked up a large tin-foil star, walked behind Mary and Joseph and held the star up high for everyone to see.
 
When the teacher told about the shepherds coming to see the baby the three young shepherds came forward and Jana jiggled the star up and down excitedly to show them where to come.  When the wise men responded to their cue, Jana went forward a little to meet them and to lead the way, her face as alight as the real star might have been.
 
After the play ended and they’d had the refreshments and all of that, on the way home Jana said, with great satisfaction, "I had the main part!"
 
"You did?" her mother said, obviously wondering why she thought that.  "Yes," she said, "'cause I showed everybody how to find Jesus!"
 
That was the mission of John the Baptist, and that is our mission as well. As you prepare for Christmas this season you need to set some priorities:
  • Make it a priority to go to the right place.
  • Make it your priority to do the right thing.
  • And make it your priority to make Jesus your ultimate priority.
 
It's only in this way that you truly prepare for the birth of Christ.
 
Let’s pray.