When you drive long distances, as some of you just did for Thanksgiving, it is so easy to be lulled into a state of . I'm sure you know what I'm talking about. I'd like you to imagine this scene:

You are driving down the freeway, and your mind is a hundred miles away. You're thinking about all kinds of things. You're thinking about the time you just spent with your family and friends. You're thinking about the conversations you had, things they said that made you mad, things they said that made you laugh. You're thinking about how much you ate and how long it's going to take you to fit back into your clothes. In fact, you are so lost in thought that it takes you a while to realize that there is a highway patrol coming up fast behind you, and the lights on the car are flashing.

Immediately your mind snaps back into the present. Your heart starts pounding. Your foot automatically goes off the accelerator and over to the brakes to release the cruise control, which is set well above the speed limit. Your eyes are riveted on your speedometer and then to your mirror. Every nerve in your body is wired for action. You are completely alert. Your attention is riveted outward. Then words cannot describe the extreme gratitude you feel when the highway patrol moves into the next lane and zips past you on down the freeway. That is what you might call a sobering experience.

So often we drive down the road just that not that fast, but lost in a daze of until a rock hits the windshield or the truck in front loses its tire. All of a sudden, you are jarred to complete attention. You straighten up, and you take whatever corrective action is necessary. Our focus goes completely outward.

Friends, that is exactly what God has in mind to prepare us for the experience of Christmas. There needs to be a sobering. There needs to be a snapping to in order to prepare the way. There needs to be a waking up, a coming to complete attention. As the Old Testament prophet Isaiah put it, we need to straighten up and fly right in order to

"see the salvation of God."

Essentially that is what is happening when the people go to hear John the Baptist out in the wilderness. That's exactly what the words of John the Baptist accomplish.

[Editor's Note: Inductive outline, so the following point is not stated here.]

(During Advent, we ask the question: What should we do to get ready?)

You've heard about preachers who preach fire and brimstone. Well, John the Baptist certainly was one of the best. As it says in verse 3, he came proclaiming "a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins." There's a reason his name was "Baptist" emphasis of what he was saying was baptism: "You need to be cleansed from sin." The emphasis was repentance: "You need to turn from " [and that's what sin ] "to an outward attentiveness to God."

So, with the sobering affect of the highway patrol's lights behind, he tells the people that there is an axe against their necks, that the fire of God's wrath is ready to fall, and that they better straighten up and fly right.

John is using this harsh judgment language (that's exactly what it language) in order to say to them, "Wake up! Hey!" He's giving them an absolutely necessary call so that they can be ready for the visitation of God.

The crowds who took him seriously were all ears. They were completely sobered. They were wired for action. And they were begging him, asking him, "What should we do? If the presence and the visitation of God is imminent, how do we get ready?"

That, my friends, is the question of Advent.

I was talking to a family that just joined our church. I was suggesting to them that they might want to start having family devotions together, that this Advent season before Christmas was a good time to begin. I suggested they could get together and read Scripture together, have prayer, focus on Christ, use the Advent guide that is in the entry way (the "narthex") of the church. I was just about ready to change the I figured I'd exhausted that one of the family members looked at me innocently and said, "What is Advent?"

Good question.

Advent is a time in the church's life that is set apart to prepare us for the significance of Christmas.

By the way, Luke is a great believer in preparation. Luke believes that anything worthwhile is worth preparing for. Anything significant requires significant preparation. How do we know that Luke thinks that way? We see it by the way he writes his book.

He's writing this book about Jesus Christ, the most significant person and event of all history. All history revolves around the coming of Christ. But it takes Luke much longer than any of the rest of the Gospel writers to get to the point. It takes him chapters, over 150 verses, to even start talking about the ministry of Jesus Christ. He's doing this on purpose. He is saying that this is God's way. God has a divine order. God has a divine preparation in mind in order to prepare us for what is ahead. Luke won't let us fast forward to Jesus. He's telling us that we need this order. We need this preparation. We need the sobering of John the Baptist first.

(Advent moves us from to humble, outward expectation.)

Perhaps the best word to describe this time of preparation is the word humilityrecognizing that we really have been lost in our own thoughts. Humilityrecognizing that we really have been a million miles away from God's presence and purposes in our lives.

There's a story told of a pastor who was officiating at a funeral. When he was done, he was asked to lead the funeral procession as it made its way to the cemetery. So he got into his car, and he started driving at the head of the funeral procession. He flipped on his radio and became preoccupied, lost in thought; he forgot where he was going. About that time, he passed a KMart and thought about something he needed to pick up.

So he turned into the parking lot. As he was looking for a parking space, he just happened to glance into the saw a string of cars following, all with their lights on! So , and then so humbled.

It happened to Israel. God put this people out in front to lead the way, so that all people could see the way to the one true God. Then they took their eyes off God. They became preoccupied with themselves. And now we see them in this text looking in the mirror, so to speak, and being humbled.

Friends, this is the movement of Advent. Moving us from , which is sin, and moving us, sobering us, preparing us for the presence of the Holy One. That's the purpose of John the B us up, sobering us to an outward attentiveness, to an

outward sense of expectation before God's visitation appears. It is an absolutely necessary, divinely ordered call.

You and I both know that there are always those who refuse to be sobered because they don't think they need it. There are always those who refuse to be humbled because they don't think they've done anything wrong. And we find out several chapters later in Luke that there were many who refused to be baptized by John the Baptist. We also see that these people did that because they didn't think there was anything they needed to be cleansed from. They were good Jews. They were Abraham's offspring. They were citizens, righteous in all of their deeds.

But we see that those same folks who refused to receive this baptism of humility before God also refused to receive Jesus. Christmas came right to them, and they missed it. They refused it because they were not ready. God made the two to go together. John first and then Jesus. And we cannot skip to Jesus without the message of John. We cannot skip to

Christmas, my friends, without being appropriately sobered, appropriately humbled, this Advent.

(False shame cripples and condemns; healthy shame prepares us to receive Jesus.)

I was talking to a Christian therapist, a counselor, who was confiding in me the trouble she was having with the teaching in her church. They had done a whole teaching on the new confession of faith put out by the Presbyterian church, called the "Brief Statement of Faith." It is a great confession. The problem that she had was with one line in this confession, line 39, which says, "We deserve God's condemnation." She looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, "Do you realize how many people I see in my practice who are so beat down with that they can hardly function? When they come to church on Sunday mornings, they don't need to hear that they deserve God's condemnation. They need to hear that they deserve God's love."

She raised a good point, something that we need to clarify before we can move on. For what does it mean to be humbled before God? What does it mean for me to say that I am a sinner who needs to be cleansed, that I need baptism, that I need repentance, that I need forgiveness? What does it mean for us to say that we are sinners who deserve God's

condemnation?

John Bradshaw wrote a book called Healing the Shame that Binds You. At the beginning of that book, he talks about two kinds of shame. One shame he describes as toxic/ shame. That is the shame that binds. It is the shame that does not come from truth. It is the shame that does not come from love. It is the shame that cripples and condemns. It's the shame that this therapist I was talking to was weeping over. My friends, it is the shame that God weeps over and seeks to heal.

Bradshaw goes on and says there is also a healthy shame. There is the shame that heals. This is the kind of shame that comes from God's truth, the kind of shame that comes from God's love. It is the shame that sobers. It is the shame that recognizes a wrong direction. It is the shame that recognizes that my has led me astray, the shame that recognizes, "I have been so , Lord, that I have forgotten about you and your ways."

That is the shame that caused even John the B Jesus described as the most godly, the greatest man ever born to a say to the crowds who wanted to make him the Messiah, "Wait a minute! There's One coming who is much greater, much more powerful than I am. In fact, I am not worthy even to bend down and untie the thong of his sandals." Slaves would not even demean themselves to bend down and untie the thong of their master's sandals. John is saying, "I am not worthy to approach God even in the lowliest manner."

Healthy that none of us deserve God's presence, none of us deserve God's love.

Malcolm Muggeridge, brilliant journalist, said these words about himself: "I may, I suppose, regard myself or pass for being a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the 's fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Internal R's success. Furnished with money and a little fame even the elderly, if they care to, may partake of trendy 's pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our 's fulfillment. Yet, I say to I beg you to believe these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are than nothing, a positive against one draft of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who or what they are."

I am not worthy. You are not worthy. None of us is worthy to meet that love that comes to us from God at Christmas in Jesus Christ. And that is the only way we can be ready to receive sobered, completely humbled, knowing that we are completely

unworthy.

How do we know if we really are ready for Christmas? Well, the genuineness of your readiness will be seen in the genuineness of your soberness. And the genuineness of your soberness will be seen in your behavior. "Bearing fruits worthy of repentance" is what John said. Those who are sobered will straighten up, and they will be tuned outward. And those who have been moved and sobered from and tuned outward will be seen by those they live with and those they work with.

Did you notice the questions that were asked when the people and the tax collectors and the soldiers asked John the Baptist what they were to do? The things that John told them had to do with their behavior at home and at work. They were behaviors that were marked

by outward orientation, marked by loving kindness, marked by generosity. They were not concerned about their own needs. They were concerned about others.

But the point that you need to hear is not the importance of the works. It's the importance of the genuineness of a sobering before God.

Perhaps you heard the story about the traveler who, between flights at an airport, went to a lounge with a small package of cookies she had bought. She sat down and began reading her newspaper. As she was reading her newspaper, all of a sudden she heard this rustling next to her. She looked from behind her newspaper and was flabbergasted to see that a neatly dressed man was helping himself to her cookies.

Well, she didn't want to make a scene, so she leaned over and took a cookie herself. A few minutes passed and then came more rustling. He was helping himself to another cookie. By this time they had come to the end of the package; she was so angry, she didn't trust herself to say anything.

As if to add insult to injury, the man took the remaining cookie, broke it in two, pushed half of it over to her, ate the other half, and then left. She was absolutely fuming.

A little while later, she was still fuming, but her flight was announced. She reached into her purse to get her ticket, and when she did, to her shock and embarrassment, she found her package of unopened cookies!

How humbling for her! How generous of him!

Humility and generosity. That is the order of Christmas.

(c) Mary Graves

Preaching Today Tape #135

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