Alan J McSeveney
John 5: 33-35
Luke 1: 15, 18; 3: 2-8, 15-20
Matthew 11: 2-6
Mark 6: 17-29
The great need of the day is for persons to be on fire for Christ. It is not a day for half-heartedness; it is not a day for lukewarmness. My Saviour deserves everything from me. He loved me and gave Himself for me; so I ought to live for His glory. We need to be on fire for Christ.
John the baptist was one who was on fire for Christ. I know that a little one in the kingdom of the heavens is greater than him (Matt 11:11), but I want to submit to you that we can learn much from John the baptist. The testimony of the Lord Jesus is that John the baptist was “the burning and shining lamp”. He was a man who was on fire for Christ, and we will find in the scriptures that we have read that characteristically his life was lived for Christ’s glory. It is not that he did not make mistakes; it is not that his faith did not waver, but characteristically he was out and out for Christ. If a man can do that who did not have the indwelling Spirit, then we as having the indwelling Spirit should be out and out for Christ.
The first thing is that we need to be filled with the Holy Spirit. With John the baptist, that was a miracle. He was “filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb”, Luke 1: 15. You were not filled with the Holy Spirit from your mother’s womb. You needed to repent of your sins first and believe the glad tidings, before God could give you the Holy Spirit. The moment when God gave you the Holy Spirit, you would normally be filled with the Holy Spirit, but we also need to be continually filled with the Holy Spirit. Please bear in mind that is a divine commandment. Paul says to the Ephesians, “And be not drunk with wine, in which is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit”, Eph 5: 18. I have to own how much I have disobeyed that divine commandment, but my desire now is to be continually filled with the Holy Spirit. How can we be filled with the Holy Spirit? We need to go into our closets and shut the door. We need to kneel before Christ. We need to confess that we are not what we ought to be. We need to believe that there is more to Christianity than what we have realised, and not leave our closet until we are filled with the Holy Spirit. If you have to wait an hour or ten hours, stay there until you are filled with the Holy Spirit. I tell you, dear friends, your life will never be the same. You will be on fire for Christ. He will be everything to you, and the rest of your life you will live for His glory.
John the baptist was filled with the Holy Spirit from his mother’s womb, but the rest of his life he made way for the Holy Spirit. Let us also remember that John the baptist died in his early thirties; so he made way for the Holy Spirit when he was a young man. In verse 80 of Luke 1, we find that as a young man he was in the deserts, and I tell you, dear soul, you will be nothing for God unless you have a desert experience. There needs to be a time when you get alone with God. There needs to be a time when you turn your back on even legitimate things. You need to wait on God, and minister to God, and you need to allow God to change your character. There are many younger persons here, and older persons too, and we all need to learn this lesson. I wonder if you feel lonely. I can understand it if you feel lonely. I have often felt lonely myself, but I am going to tell you what the cure for loneliness is. The cure for loneliness is to get alone with God, because once you get alone with God you become satisfied with God, and you find something in God’s presence you cannot find anywhere else. That is when you begin to get a bit of power into your soul. That is when God begins to train you for His service, and it is that time alone with God that helps you to stand alone for God. John the baptist was in the deserts so that he could be continually filled with the Holy Spirit, and if we are going to be continually filled with the Spirit, we need to get alone with God. Half an hour in the morning is not enough. Ten minutes in the evening is not enough. We need to commit ourselves unreservedly to getting alone with God. Perhaps God has arranged your circumstances so that you might get alone with Him. You are not in a place where there are many brethren, and I can understand that being difficult, but my dear soul, you can get alone with God, and you will find alone in your closet with God something that you cannot get anywhere else. Will you accept the desert? Will you accept what it is to be alone with God? Will you set yourself from this day to pray in God’s presence and remain there until He speaks to you? That will form your character. That will make you a man of God or a woman of God.
John the baptist “grew and was strengthened in spirit; and he was in the deserts until the day of his shewing to Israel”. There has never been a day like this when God needs men and women who are going to be on fire for Christ. God has something to say to this world, and He is not giving that message to angels: He is giving it to men. The Western world has largely turned its back on God, and yet you know Christ as your Saviour, you have confessed Him as Lord. Perhaps God has placed you here to testify for Him. You say, ’I am young’. So was John the baptist. It is not a question of being young; it is a question of getting alone with God. John the baptist may have only served publicly for six months, but he was in preparation for thirty years. His private life was greater than his public life, and I wonder as a preacher whether that is so with me. I am humbled by the time brethren have spent travelling here. I ask myself, have I spent enough time in praying in private so that a word might come to the brethren? There are too many meetings that do not have the weight that they should have. I feel for myself there are too many meetings when we are just going through the motions. Dear brethren, we have come here to meet God, and it is the responsibility of His servants to be alone with Him, so that they have a word for God’s people. You could read ministry, and that is not wrong, but I would say this to you, if you pray for an hour for every address you read, you will not get through the ministry so quickly, but you will grow far more in your soul before God. Prayer is the great thing. It is prayer that gives power, and I say again, we need power in our meetings. We need persons to be convicted in our meetings. If I am not convicted in my soul as a preacher, how can I expect those who are listening to me to be convicted? John the baptist was a burning and shining lamp. He was a man who was on fire for Christ, and what underlay that was his private life before God.
Well, God did bring him forward. He came forth as the forerunner. Perhaps he only preached for six months, but what months they were. There were two things that characterised his preaching. The first thing was that he preached repentance, and the second thing was that he exalted Christ. If we are going to preach rightly, we need to be repentance preachers, and we need to exalt Christ. To preach repentance is not easy because it demands a moral answer in those who hear. Not everyone likes being told to repent but if men do not repent, they cannot be forgiven: so a preacher needs to preach repentance. What does repentance mean? Repentance means that a person needs to accept God’s judgment upon the whole course of their life and turn their back on sin. I might think I am getting along very well, but what does God think about my life? That is the test, dear friend, and the preacher who will preach repentance is preaching to glorify God. God “enjoins men that they shall all everywhere repent”, Acts 17: 30. It has been said that the preacher does not deliver a compromise; the preacher delivers an ultimatum. Men must repent, and all men must repent. You will notice how unbiased John the baptist was in his preaching. He preached to the crowd, he preached to soldiers, he preached to tax-gatherers, he preached to royalty, and the same basic message was that they should repent. It has been well said that preaching is not a boys’ game; it requires a man to preach, it requires courage to preach, and it requires the fullness of the Holy Spirit to preach. John the baptist was on fire for Christ, and if he became biased in his preaching, he would lose that fire, the Spirit would be quenched and he would not glorify God. God is no respecter of persons. It does not matter to God if you are royalty or a tax-gatherer. There is the same message for everyone: they need to repent. Even the Jews needed to repent although they had Abraham as their father, but they needed to repent as well. It is not just drunkards who need to repent; those brought up in Christian households also need to repent. God is enjoining all men everywhere to repent, and I would say to the preachers here, preach repentance whoever is listening. Persons’ souls depend upon it, and one day you will need to stand before the judgment-seat of Christ and give an account of your preaching. Brethren might tell you your preaching is good. What does the Lord think about your preaching? What does the Lord think about this address? I will need to answer before the judgment-seat of Christ for this address. Will this address merit Christ’s approval, or will I suffer loss, 1 Cor 3: 5?
Oh, we need to preach repentance, but when preaching repentance remember to exalt Christ. You know, it is the goodness of God that leads men to repent, and the goodness of God was expressed in the giving of His Son. If God loved me so much as to give His Son for me, I am only too willing to repent. God did not save His best, He gave Him. God did not save what was most precious to Him, He gave Him. If He gave His Son for me, then I should repent of my sins. Every preacher ought to exalt Christ. Do not try to make up a sermon. It is all Christ! Make much of Him! He is the Saviour. You will find in the preachings of the Acts in chapter 2 with Peter, and in chapter 13 with Paul, that when they preach, everything leads up to Christ. There is no one like Him. It is a wonderful privilege to mention His Name. Every preacher ought to exalt Him, lift Him up as the Saviour, the Saviour of sinners. John the baptist was a man who was full of the Holy Spirit. He was a man who was on fire for Christ. He was a man who preached repentance. He was a man who exalted Christ. John the baptist only preached for six months and then Herod put him in prison.
That brings me to Matthew 11. There is only one perfect Man in Scripture, the Man Christ Jesus. Even John the baptist, great man that he was, had a time when his faith wavered. There was a time when the fullness of the Spirit receded within him. There was a time when his faith was shaken, and so he says, “Art thou the coming one? or are we to wait for another?”. This is the man who had exalted Christ, and now he is the man who is doubting Christ. Why is this left in Scripture? Is it not because we have known the same thing in our lives? Has your faith ever been shaken? Mine has. John the baptist was not doing anything wrong, he was exalting Christ, yet God brought him into circumstances where his faith wavered. Maybe you are in those circumstances now. Maybe you are saying with another, “Why am I thus?”, Gen 25: 22. ’Why have these things befallen me? I do not understand why God would do this to me’. Your faith is shaken. What a thing that is. John the baptist was in the prison. The prison is a place of testing. The prison is a place of discipline. Prisons in those days were so difficult that I can see why John the baptist’s faith would waver. What was God doing in John the baptist’s life? God was helping John the baptist to see what he was in the flesh. John the baptist had no power in himself. The only power that he had was given to him by God. God can bring us down, He can bring us very low, and He can humble us in a way that only He can humble us until we learn that the power is in God alone. John the baptist’s faith wavered, but that is not what he was characteristically. Characteristically he was a man who was on fire for Christ, and as he had been in the past, so he would be in the future; indeed he was stronger when he faced martyrdom. You know, dear friend, God has not finished with you. He has something more for you in your life, and if God is going to leave you here on this earth any longer, it will be that you might glorify Him in a new way. John the baptist went out of this scene in a blaze of glory. He went out as a martyr. Would you be prepared to die for Christ? There are persons in this world at the present time that are prepared to die for Christ. There are persons in the past few years who have been martyred for Christ. Christ meant so much to them that they laid their lives down.
John the baptist recovered, and he was a martyr. How do I know that? Well, in Mark 6 it says that Herod heard John the baptist, and did many things that John told him. Now I judge that Mark 6 is after Matthew 11. John the baptist is fully recovered, and the same preaching that he preached on the banks of the Jordan, he preached in the prison cell. He will not alter his preaching for Herod, he will not alter his preaching for Herodias. He will preach repentance just the same and Herod, weak person that he was, was prepared to listen to him until the feast day in Mark 6. I do not want to say too much about that feast day, it is too sorrowful to see the way that God’s servant was martyred, too sorrowful to see the way that a faithful man died. We have read the scripture, and I am not going to read it again, but I am going to say this. We should avoid the set of circumstances in Mark 6 at all cost. Herod had listened to John the baptist and “having heard him, did many things, and heard him gladly” but he lost any conviction he had gained under John the baptist’s preaching through the circumstances in Mark 6. That is what this world can do to us. May God preserve us from these things.
What it must have meant that day to John the baptist when the guard came to his cell door. The guard took him out, raised the axe, and when the axe came down, John the baptist was beheaded. That was John the baptist’s entrance into glory. He died for being faithful to Christ, and yet the sequel is very, very sad in this scripture. John the baptist’s head was taken to Herodias, and his disciples took his body and buried it. You might say, ’What a sad end’, but that is not the end. There is going to come a time when the dead in Christ shall rise and John the baptist’s head will be reunited with his body. John the baptist will have a body of glory. He will put on incorruptibility. He will go up at the first resurrection. He is going to sit down with the twenty-four elders. In Revelation 4 and 5, they include the New Testament saints and the Old Testament saints; so even though John the baptist is not part of the assembly, he is part of the twenty-four elders. Those twenty-four elders have crowns, and John the baptist will have a crown. Do you know what John the baptist will do with that crown? He will cast it at the feet of Christ, and as he was on earth, so shall he be in glory, exalting Christ, making much of Christ.
My dear friend, John the baptist was a man who was on fire for Christ. Are you going to give your life to Christ? I am not preaching the gospel; but I am preaching to believers. Are you going to present your body a living sacrifice, Rom 12: 1? If he is not Lord of all he is not Lord at all. Do you want the fullness of the Holy Spirit? Then lay your body down on the altar and give yourself entirely over to Christ.
May the Lord bless the word.
Endbach
24th September 2011