Make Way for the King, Pt. 1

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There are key moments in history when someone steps onto the public stage and changes the way we see the world. John the Baptist was one of those voices. He cried out “make way for the king!”… and soon everything changed. Pastor Nick Gatzke launches a series from the Gospel of Mark, where a new king is announced.

If you were to look up the greatest speeches of all time, you would be taken through the marvelous moments in history of the human race in which precise words and passionate delivery put voice to the thoughts and the needs of the people who heard. But one speech would be missing from the list. Many of these speeches still ring true today as you think about your greatest desires for your life or for the lives of people that you know. But one speech hasn’t made the list. Among the ones that have are undoubtedly some of the great speeches of our time. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech. in 1963, or Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address 100 years earlier in 1863, or Winston Churchill’s We Shall Fight on the Beaches speech in 1940. And those are just in recent history. When you look back hundreds of years before, you can find in antiquity… Martin Luther’s Here I Stand speech at the Diet of Worms in 1521, or the speech of Alexander the Great to motivate his troops in 335, or Demosthenes’ Third Philippic of 342 BC, and many, many more. But one never seems to make the list. Partially because we don’t know the exact script. Partially because of its source. And partially because of its content. But scholars and historians estimate that as many as 300,000 people walked for miles to hear this speech. And it was a speech that drove them like so many other good speeches, to a very particular action. And if they responded in the intended way in this speech, it would change their lives forever. One of the greatest speeches that never makes the list is the speech of John the Baptist in Mark 1, verses 1 to 13.

And sadly, we only know about the speech. We do not exactly know what was said, but nevertheless, it’s included as Jesus is introduced to us in the gospel of Mark. And so let’s look there together. Follow as I read Mark 1, starting at verse 1.

This is what it says. The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And all the country of Judea and all Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and wild honey. And he preached saying, after me comes he who is mightier than I, the strap of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit. In those days, Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And when he came up out of the water, immediately he saw the heavens being torn open and the spirit descending on him like a dove. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased.” And the spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness. And he was in the wilderness 40 days being tempted by Satan. And he was with the wild animals and the angels were ministering to him. This morning, we begin a new sermon series in the gospel of Mark. As we dive in, Let me give you a little background about the content of the book and its author.

The Gospel of Mark is the earliest of the four Gospels. It’s also the shortest. In fact, both Matthew and Luke borrow a significant amount of material from this Gospel in their own accounting of the life of Jesus and his ministry. And John Mark, the author, was a man who had a questionable beginning. He’s mentioned in Acts 13 as the guy who abandoned the apostle Paul on the first missionary journey. And as he abandoned him, as a result, Paul was unwilling to take him on the second missionary journey, which caused a great tension between this new and growing dynamic of local churches. And so Paul and Barnabas at odds with each other. Paul went one way with Silas, and Barnabas went one way with John Mark. And we know that eventually they reconciled. And Mark is listed at a couple other places in the New Testament, Philemon 1:24 and Colossians 4:10, as a fellow laborer in the gospel, and he gives his greeting to the saints. Paul actually seeks Mark’s presence to come to him, and he mentions that in Timothy, 2 Timothy 4:11.

And I tell you that because Mark’s story is a good one to remember. It’s a story of a guy who started out poorly but came around. It’s a story of a guy who started out in weakness, but the Lord ended up using in a great and mighty strength. It’s the story that is the same as some of our stories because some of you had a questionable beginning. Some of you started out in weakness and the Lord brought you to faithfulness. Some of you, maybe even right now, are living in that place of weakness and thinking about abandoning what the Lord has for you. But this is a good reminder. Mark’s life is a good reminder. But the story of your life is not yet written. And even right now, maybe you live in tension or consternation or even rebellion against God, that he can still use you in this life to do incredible and mighty things. It’s not the message of the book. It’s not the message of this sermon. But it’s one of the messages behind. the message. God can take wayward people and use them mightily.

And Mark is an encouragement to us in that way. Beyond that, we know that Mark was close to the apostle Peter. He received much of his accounting of the gospel from Peter. And through the careful memory of the apostle, the careful arrangement of the material, the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, Mark was able to write this beautiful and powerful description of the life of the king of the world, King Jesus. The original audience of the gospel of Mark was Gentiles in Rome. And he wanted them to understand that even though they lived under the banner of the empire and under the rule of the Roman empire, who was functionally the king of the entire known world at that time, there was a greater king who had come, King Jesus.

And the introductory verse to the book points to what he is going to say about him. Look at it with me. The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the son of God. This Jesus I’m going to tell you about is not just a here today, gone tomorrow celebrity. He’s not just a prophet. He’s not just a Caesar. He’s not just a miracle worker. He is the son of God. And with that, let’s look a little more carefully at the passage.

Hundreds of years before the coming of Jesus, his coming was foretold to the prophets. But not only his coming, also the coming of the messenger, John the Baptist. He would help the people make way for the king. And it says that in verse two and three as it quotes Isaiah chapter 40, verse three. “Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way, the voice of one crying in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.’” The prophet Malachi gives a similar prophecy in chapter three, verse one of his book. And both of these prophecies mention the messenger. It was gonna be a specific person, John the Baptist. But the focus of the prophecy is not on the messenger himself. It’s on the one in which he is preparing the way for. And immediately we see right from the

prophecy to the next verse, John appears. The baptizer is introduced. And his appearance is not typical for the day. He’s described, as one who is clothed with camel’s hair and wore a leather belt around his waist and ate locusts and honey. You might say that he didn’t fit in with the Hollywood crowd. He was not up on the latest fashion trends of Jerusalem, but don’t be mistaken. John’s dress and his bizarre diet did not indicate that he was oblivious to what was happening. It was very intentional because his lifestyle pointed to his message. John took the appearance of the prophet Elijah. The prophet Elijah is mentioned in 2 Kings 1:8 in these types of terms. And he did so because just as Elijah had done, John was going to call the entire country to national repentance. His dress was a protest. It was a protest against opulence and self-serving behavior that was part of the day, self-absorbed people engaged in such things. But his appearance was meant to display a life that rejected the material, that highlighted the spiritual and had repentance, repentance, repentance right at the core.

And here we see how he prepared the way. In verses four and five, the message begins. John appeared, it says, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And all of the country of Judea and all of Jerusalem were going out to him and were being baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins.

Now, as you know, or may know, the word baptism or baptize literally means to immerse. And John’s baptism was completely unique in this way because no one had quite done it to this point. In the ancient world, there were baptisms of some kind. There were ritual cleansings that happened, especially for religious elite. And in other ceremonies, even baptismal type ceremonies, There were ceremonies for Gentiles who converted to Judaism. But the call for Jews to be baptized, common, normal Jews, by the masses, was completely a new thing. And this baptism was a baptism of a physical action, but a baptism that pointed to a spiritual posture. And the posture was one of the repentance of sin, it says. So envision it with me. Just try to picture it in your mind’s eye. Not 10, not 100, not 1,000, but tens of thousands of people over the course of day upon day upon day. moving out of Judea and Jerusalem toward the river, and not just to engage in an activity, not just to engage in some kind of service of worship, but to confess their sin and to do it both through word and through action. It’s a striking thing to picture. And the location is interesting. Because John strategically baptized in the wilderness. This was not something you could just happen to come across in downtown Jerusalem on the day. Like, yeah, I’m gonna participate today in the local religious thing that is happening. They had to go to him. Their act of repentance was an act of their will. And just as the people of Israel had followed God out of Egypt, into the wilderness during the Exodus hundreds of years earlier and thus found their freedom. Here, as the baptizer comes, the people of Israel are called once again to come out of their locale into the wilderness and thus to find their freedom. But their freedom would only come as they repented. And their freedom would only come after they embraced God’s eternal king, who’s the one who could forgive them of the sins that they repented from. John came on the scene, and it’s not what somebody would normally expect. He came on the scene, preaching about sin. Now, I don’t know about you, but if I’m gonna pave the way for somebody that I want people to love and admire and follow, that’s probably not the first thing that comes to mind. You might expect John to come forward and to extol the great qualities of the coming king, to speak of his marvelous works, to speak of his high character, to talk about his mighty victory, to engender goodwill of the people toward this one so that they would love him before they even saw him. But that is not what he does. He gives them a message about sin. And the message was clear. The only way to welcome the Son of God is through repentance from sin. And even though John’s context is unique in a specific moment in history, there’s a spiritual principle there that remains true today. You want to welcome the Son of God into your life. You want the things of God among you. You want the blessing of God upon you. There is a way to welcome him. The only way to welcome the Son of God is through repentance from sin. And that begs the question, well, what exactly is repentance and how do I do it?

Well, repentance is not merely apologizing, though that’s part of it. It’s more than that. When you train children, as many of you have done successfully, some of us have done unsuccessfully, as many of us are struggling and trying to do day in and day out, when they make a mistake or when they rebel, an apology is appropriate. But an apology is not enough. Repentance, a changing of your ways, is required.

And so repentance has at least three parts to it. The first is an acknowledgement of sin. And this is half the battle for some of us, especially in our day, where we want to blur the moral lines and lower them in the name of tolerance or in self-justification. For some of us, even in our pride, it is hard to acknowledge what we do might be sinful. And yet without acknowledging sin, repentance is not even possible. It also includes a confession or an apology. Now, you know this to be true. It is a terribly distasteful thing when people are caught in something evil and they wait a while and provide some space and distance and then reemerge and pretend like that evil thing never actually happened. that their offense actually never occurred, and hope to just go on pretending like everything is normal. We see this in public life, and we actually also see this very often in private life, don’t we, when we don’t want to deal with each other in the ways that we should. But in public life, the examples are striking. You think about the last number of years, countless celebrities or public figures have been caught up in sexual misconduct. and then move on without actually apologizing for it and try to reignite their careers. But then shortly thereafter, shortly after disappearing from the public eye, providing space for the news cycle to die down, reemerge, pretending like nothing’s ever happened, and try to reignite their career without apology. Sometimes people can get away with that in Hollywood because there’s no real relationship between you and the public figure. But in real life and in real relationships and in your relationship with the Lord, where there is no repentance, there is no forgiveness. And where there’s no forgiveness, There’s no reconciliation.

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This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy, but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.