Devotional for Adults November 30, 2016 The generation to John the Baptist - 4

Devotional for Adults
November 30, 2016

The generation to John the Baptist - 4

"And he went throughout the region adjoining the Jordan preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins." Luke 3: 3.

We were in Europe trying to find Neuschwanstein, that fairy-tale castle in Bavaria, which our daughter had been wanting to see for a long time. We stopped in Innsbruck, Austria, to eat and then we followed our journey by car, discovering a magnificent four-lane motorway that ran through spectacular mountain landscapes. But it seemed we were headed south. We finally left the road next to a small house on a hillside and asked the family how to get to the castle. Looking at our map and then at us, they shook their heads. "No, no. This Italy, this Italy! " Many miles before, we had taken an undue diversion, getting on a wrong highway and heading in the wrong direction in the wrong country. That embarrassment! But that is precisely what the call of John the Baptist to repentance means. Turn your life around! You go in the wrong direction. And he preached, more than anyone, to the saved.

Christ goes to Laodicea, the last church in this world, and begs: "Be fervent and repent" (Rev. 3: 19, NIV). So what will we repent of the elect? Some of us are ashamed of a long list of dirty rags and sins. Others are unable to identify anything in particular, so they invent some minor infraction. "The closer we come to him and the more clearly we discern the purity of his character, the more clearly will we see the extraordinary gravity of sin, and the less will we be tempted to exalt ourselves. There will be a continuous effort of the soul to approach God; A constant, fervent and painful confession of sin and a humiliation of the heart before him. In every step of progress we make in Christian experience, our repentance will be deeper "(The Acts of the Apostles, 55: 418, emphasis added).

If repentance for the elect is to deepen as we go along, should we not raise the prayer of David: "Examine me, God. See if there is any way of perverseness in me "(Psalm 139: 23, 24)? And then, should we not want to contemplate the "Lamb of God, who takes away" (John 1: 29) the sins it reveals? After all, are not all our sins ultimately against Him? One day I was very angry with Karen and I was hurling words at him that were cruel and sharp. And I would have been delighted if she had simply countered me with a bout of her own. But he did not. Instead, she burst into tears. And at that moment-when I saw those tears-I knew the depth of pain that my sin had inflicted upon it. And it broke my heart to realize that it had broken his heart. Yet, do not you think that if we kneel at the foot of the cross enough each day, the heart that we break will also break ours?