Imagine your house on a normal day.
A few dishes in the sink. A jacket on the chair. Mail on the counter. Shoes just inside the door.
It’s fine and nobody notices or says a word — until someone calls and says, “I’m 10 minutes away.”
Suddenly, your household standards of cleanliness change from “it’s just us” to “company’s coming!”
You’re up and moving with a purpose. You pick up what seemed fine a few minutes ago and you clean up what was clean enough a few minutes ago.
Matthew 3, Mark 1, Luke 3, and John 1 all tell the story of John the Baptist calling out to everyone who will listen: “Company’s coming; prepare the way for the Lord!”
And like Jesus in the temple when he was 12 years old, you’d expect that news to come from the temple in Jerusalem, but like Jesus at his baptism, that news comes from the wilderness — not from the city, not from the palace, not in the temple, but from places nobody ever expected!
Two words: repent and prepare!
“Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’”
— Matthew 3: 1-2
The first word is “repent,” meaning to “turn around and move in a different direction!” Wife Mary Ella and I drove to Charleston, S.C. a couple of weeks ago, and if we missed a turn, our GPS never once said, “feel bad,” nor “be ashamed,” nor “be sorry,” nor “be afraid, not even “try harder;” it simple said, “recalculating” while it rerouted us to our destination.
Repentance is not punishment, nor is it meant to make us feel guilty, nor shame us. It’s simply a re-calculation and a re-routing to get us back on the right path.
People walked into the wilderness to see and hear John the Baptist.
Some were sincere and they walked away in a different direction. Some were insincere and they walked away unchanged in the same direction they came from. Some were simply curious.
Lee Strobel was a hard-driving atheist and award-winning legal editor at The Chicago Tribune until his wife, Leslie, met a neighbor who introduced her to Jesus. Then he did the only thing he knew how to do. He investigated her faith with the goal of leading her back to atheism, back to their once-happy marriage.
He spent the next two years investigating the historical evidence for Christianity and in 1981, moved by Leslie’s changed life and convinced by the evidence, he became a follower of Jesus.
Charles “Buddy” Whatley is a retired United Methodist pastor serving Dawson Street Methodist Church in Thomasville, Ga. With wife, Mary Ella, they are missionaries to the Navajo Reservation.
