Matthew 3:1-3
The Rev. Dr. Robert S. Langworthy, preaching
November 30, 2025 – First Sunday of Advent
It is a striking fact that, while only two of the four Gospels tell of the birth of Jesus, all four tell of the ministry of John the Baptist – and all of them do so before they tell of Jesus’ ministry. To understand Jesus, then, it helps to understand the one God sent before Jesus to prepare the way of His coming and to make His path straight before Him.
In his ministry John did two distinct things: 1) he opened up a route for Messiah Jesus to draw near to those who’d lost their way and lost touch with God, and 2) he urged those lost folks to “repent” and thereby give Jesus a path straight into their hearts. They open up their path by clearing away the obstacles of sin that would block His arrival. In other words, though “the kingdom of heaven has drawn near”, no one on earth can receive its King apart from repenting. So, both the first word John spoke at the start of his ministry and the first word Jesus spoke at the start of His ministry were one and the same word: “Repent!”
To repent is to do an about-face, to make an 180° turnaround from indifference to, and independence from, God – toward devotion to, and dependence on, God. To repent is to reorient yourself in a new direction.
Repenting orients you toward righteousness, but that doesn’t mean you’ll never do wrong again. For, at its inception, repentance does not take you one step closer to perfection. At the start, it’s only a change in attitude and outlook that just launches you on a new trajectory to a different destination that takes a lifetime to reach.
To repent is no great achievement. Anyone can do it if they wish. It’s the “next to nothing” of simply deciding to alter where you set your sights and what you pursue first and foremost. That change in you opens the way for the Lord to come to you and fulfill His good will for you.
God longs for a friendship with everyone. Hence, He takes the initiative and takes ten billion steps toward each human being; but God cannot take the last step in establishing the friendship. It’s up to you to decide whether you’ll let God be God in your life – that is, your ultimate concern around whom you’ll center all other decisions – say, about how you spend your time and money. For God is a God of integrity and thus, not even for the sake of fitting into the life of someone He loves, can He be less than who He is: the One to whom all other interests should defer and for whom the sacrifice of anything is worth it.
Though God aches to be friends with you and inclines you to respond to His perfect love with your imperfect love, God cannot do your repenting for you. For love is never truly love unless it is freely chosen and freely given. You then must make up your mind whether you value a friendship with God enough to pay every cost of repenting. Are you willing, for example, to think about giving anywhere near as much money in support of the church as you spend on your vacations, or about giving as much time to praying and Bible study as you spend watching TV or playing video games?
To repent is to make God your top priority. That will, over time, lead to your repudiating anything in you that is unjust, unkind, unrighteous or as yet unsettled in your resolve to love like Jesus. But you cannot make any headway along these lines on your own. All you can do, all you need do, is decide to seek such a change in yourself and turn to God to make it happen because you can’t. It is to give up on improving yourself and instead give yourself over to the God who can improve you. It is to put all your hope on God for becoming, say, gentler with those who annoy you or more generous to those who need you. It is to let God keep his hand on your back and keep nudging you forward.
But God’s nudges are always resistible, and you can always brush His hand off your back. God respects your right to reject His help – or retract your repentance. On the other hand, if you choose to go along with His nudging you along, He will never give up on moving you forward in the transformation He began in you when you first turned around and turned to Him.
You are not free to make your way to God and His righteousness. You are not able to get yourselves there. But you are always free to let God into your life that He might get you there. You just have to open up and give Him a straight, (mostly) unobstructed path into your heart by clearing away the obstacles that block Him out.
There are many such obstacles. We have time today to consider only two.
There is selfishness. If you’ve allowed yourself to care about no more than a few select folks and let your heart grow hard and callous to the cries of others, you can’t feel God’s loving touch when He reaches out to You. What’s worse, your heart may grow so small from closing in on its tiny circle of concern, that the big-hearted God who cares about everyone can’t squeeze into it. If it’s the merciful who see God, as Jesus said, then it is the uncaring who grow blind to God’s mercy; and if it’s the forgiving who are forgiven, as Jesus said, then it’s the resentful and the vengeful who see God as coldly indifferent to how it goes with the children of earth.
Another obstacle that can block the way for God to enter your life and reform it is what the Bible calls idolatry. You can allow something – say, a pleasure or a comfort – or someone – say, a child or a lover – to become your ultimate concern and prime preoccupation. Then God fades into the background and looks either too distant or too little to merit your serious consideration.
Let’s get clear about one thing, however. Not even the genuinely repentant ever get entirely free from lingering selfishness and idolatry. It takes a lifetime to fulfill the call to repentance. You just keep trying as God keeps nudging You forward – and keep thanking Him for your becoming a tad less imperfect.
Before repentance is a change in conduct, it is a change in outlook and attitude. That means that the church is not so much a hall of fame for the holiest as a hospital for the sick who are not yet as well as they should be, or are going to be, but who praise God that at least they’re not as sick as they used to be.
This Advent let each of us prepare the way for the great Physician, the God-Man Jesus, to find a straight path into every part of our life!
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