This reading opens up with sort of a template, a formula we see quite often, and I think it's important that we understand it. It says, "In the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and Herod being Tetrarch of Galilee," and goes on to say, "In the high priesthood of Anise and Caiaphas." That's the setup. Why is Luke setting it up that way? The reason is is because from the beginning, until now, one of the great attacks against Christianity has been to say, "Oh, Jesus, I mean, he's a figment of Christian imagination." And so what is Luke doing? He is placing Jesus very clearly in history. He's saying, "Jesus is not a figment of Christian imagination. He walked this earth at a particular time, in a particular place, as a particular person, in the 15th reign of Tiberius Caesar, Pontius Pilate being governor of Judea, and he goes over and over and over. He gives six data points so there can be no confusion about exactly who he was and where he was. After that, the reading is very short. He says, "The Word of God came to John, the son of Zechariah, in the wilderness." John had gone out to the wilderness, been out in the wilderness, and John went into all the region about the Jordan, preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.
What do we learn here? Well, John is submissive to the Spirit. We think of submissive as like got a bad connotation in our culture now, right? Only if you're submissive to the wrong things or the wrong people, but if you're submissive to the Spirit of God, that's a beautiful thing, right? How did John end up out in the desert by being submissive to the Spirit? The Spirit led him out there, and then Word of God's come to John. The Spirit has come to John and said, "All right, John, you've been prepared. You've done your apprenticeship. We send you out." And he goes out, and he speaks to the people. And he baptizes the people. He talks to them about repentance, which is what? To turn back to God, to turn back to God. In what area of your life do you need to turn back to God? We all do. Maybe we just sort of turned our back a little bit on him. Maybe we walked away completely in some area of our lives, but there's an invitation to turn back to God. And then John has another very unpopular phrase and idea in our relativistic culture, and that is the forgiveness of sins. What is sin? The actual definition is to miss the mark. It's like an archer that misses the mark. We miss the mark all the time, right?
We miss the mark every day in dozens of ways. What is it? In one way, it's to be less than who you are. In one way, it's to abandon your deepest, truest, that best version of yourself. That is to miss the mark. And we all do it every day, and you don't need me to give you a list of things. Oh, these are all the ways you can miss the mark, because you know them. You know them when you see them. You know them when you're participating in them. You don't need me to tell you, and I don't need you to tell me because I know them. What we do need is what John had, and it's that submissiveness to the Spirit of God, to allow the Spirit of God to lead us. But in order to do that, we have to be aware of God's presence. We have to be aware of the Spirit moving in our lives. We have to learn to listen to the Spirit in our lives, which takes time. And like anything else, we get best at it if we do it-- if we practice it every single day with unerring and relentless consistency so that the Spirit can lead us wherever the Spirit wants to lead us because whatever it is you really want, deep, deep, deep down inside, you might think you yearn for this or hunger for this or ache for that or whatever. But what you really want deep, deep, deep down inside will only come from following the path, the call, the Spirit, the destiny that God has created you for.
