Sermon Tone Analysis

Well, here we go again!

Christmas is coming!

Or as the coco cola advert puts it ‘holidays are coming, holidays are coming’ with Father Christmas dressed in his red costume and white flowing beard.

Nativity stories will abound here and there though many schools are starting to withdraw from any sense of there being any kind of religion attached to Christmas and would rather celebrate a festival of lights instead, which, without realising it, it is a religious festival anyway of the Hindus and Sikhs.

Preparations are already on the way; some people have bought presents and wrapped them already, the house decorations including tinsel, lights and a tree.

Preparations are afoot everywhere and today, being the 1st, Irena will be looking to get the tree up as indeed it is already up here.

But before we get to Christmas there is a certain man who needed to come before the main event.

And this was a preparation well in advance by thousands of years for there are many prophecies but between the Old Testament and New Testament passage I read today is about 400 years.

We call them the silent years.

They were not too silent, in the sense it was a time of war, winning and losing, mainly losing to the Romans.

But it was silent in a different sense, for Malachi was the last prophet to speak before what we read in Luke of the announcement of a certain person’s birth who was none other than John the Baptist followed by the announcement of Jesus, the Saviour.

Indeed, it is not the first 400 years without a word being spoken for there was Joseph until Aaron and Moses who are types of John and Jesus.

Malachi who we heard at the beginning lived in a particular time where corruption had once again come to the holy place.

The hearts of the people had turned.

The priests became lax and immoral.

The ceremonies of the temple were no longer God-pleasing.

The number of the faithful were dwindling once again.

We could actually be talking about the Church right here in the West if it wasn’t about the Jewish Nation.

Everyone thought that it didn’t matter whether you were good or evil for God will not dish out any justice anyway for they were of the Jews and saved anyway.

Then the prophet Malachi speaks out against these sins, and preaches: The Saviour is coming.

"The Lord, whom you seek, will suddenly come to His temple," he prophesies (Mal.

3:1).

These words ought to be words of hope but, instead, they are of impending doom.

Those who call evil good and good evil will find no place to hide when the Lord does come and Malachi asks, in verse 2, the rhetorical questions: Who can endure the day of His coming?

Who will stand?

If the righteous are scarcely saved what of the ungodly, Paul asks in another place.

Who can endure the day?

Answer: No-one.

Those who think that they will delight in God’s coming have another thing coming.

The silence of those years was deafening.

The Words of God in Malachi were the last to be heard.

Then nothing.

Wintertime requires a bit of planning when it is not as mild as this.

If I am taking the dog out for his walk I put on my coat, put on my wellies if I am going on the field, put on my baseball cap, and put up the hood on my coat so that I am cosy and warm.

Some people go out to their cars to warm them up before they set off for work or Church.

Though, I don’t recommend that unless you can stop people from nicking it.

Some will put on their long johns, gloves and extra layers of clothes to cope with the cold.

Then you might need some de-icer for the windscreen.

Hopefully you have serviced your car engines to cope by having antifreeze in the radiator.

You never know, we might even need snow chains for the tyres.

You certainly cannot get out the door so quick so you have to get ready earlier.

And one day to the next you do not know what it will bring – maybe another named storm!

What does all this require?

Preparation, right?

Malachi has just said that when the Day of the Lord happens this will not be a good day.

And a sign that it is on the way will be the turning up of a man called, “the preparer”, whom we know to be John, who was a miracle baby, born to very old parents, making people wonder about him.

From the outset the expectancy of people has been raised.

John’s arrival though was not only a sign of the Lord coming but also a sign that judgment is not long behind.

What we can read into this is that John not only came to prepare the way for Jesus’ first coming but was also unwittingly a sign of His second coming too.

The passage we read was not the only passage which alludes to John in Malachi.

We find him also in:

These are the very last words of God before the silence.

These words actually end the Old Testament.

The silence was only broken with the fulfilment of the prophecy of Malachi.

John was sent as one to prepare the way for the Lord’s first coming or first advent.

He came as one to announce peace to everyone and was sent with an olive leaf in his mouth.

Well, not exactly.

John came to show the way to Jesus.

He was the Announcer.

The Messenger.

The Town Crier, if you will, though more like the Desert Crier.

John’s coming signified that judgment was coming but his message was the same as Jesus: Repent for the Kingdom is at hand.

This was the only way to avoid judgment.

It has been the same message throughout all ages in both Old and New Testament.

What does it mean to repent?

It is to change one’s mind and to change the course of one’s life.

This time of year celebrates Jesus’ birth in His first coming but the babe in the manger is also the judge of all the earth.

The first advent signals that the second is on its way.

It is going to be a day of dark gloom, fear and awesomeness.

John’s message is very clear: Repent and believe the Gospel!

This is the only way we and anyone can survive the coming day, a day that is surely coming.

I know there were the doubters that there would be a Messiah first time Jesus came but there was an expectancy in the air.

There are also doubters and mockers who exist today about the 2nd Coming but among true Christians there is an expectancy in the air.

I’m sure that just as people were not right in the details of Jesus’ first advent we are not accurate about everything concerning the 2nd.

It might not be right now but it is going to happen.

It is going to come suddenly.

Some will be prepared and some will have prepared others.

The point is that John is a sign in Malachi of a judgment that is coming that only a few will be saved.

The majority will be simply taken away in the ensuing fire into an eternal judgment.

But God does not want this.

There may have been a silence for 400 years but God does not forget His promises.

400 years is nothing to God.

He picked up right where He left off.

God always fulfils His Word.

We can be unfaithful, forgetful and negligent but God is none of these things.

God’s timing is perfect.

John came at just the right time before Jesus.

But something else about God is that He shows mercy before judgment, God does not want people to die without trust in Him.

John came to turn the hearts of those who would hear him; as Malachi said:

He will turn The hearts of the fathers to the children, And the hearts of the children to their fathers.

John came to prepare the way in people’s hearts for Jesus.

He came calling for repentance and faith – not in himself or in his baptism, but in Jesus.

All this to bring people to Jesus and to avoid the judgment of His Second Coming.

In the same way we are preparing the way for Jesus’ return.

Calling for repentance.

We are a sign to this generation of the judgment that is coming and people are either coming to Christ or running like mad from Him into the world, but eternity and judgement will encroach at a time they do not expect.

The end result of John the Baptist’ preaching was that those who receive the message would be as it says in:

The result of those who have come to Christ is not so that we can then just live our lives the way we want or to continue in the way of the world but we have been delivered from the hand of our enemy the devil.

We are to serve God without fear for He accepts us as we are.

We are to walk in the holiness and righteousness He has made us to be.

In this way we are light to the world.