DAILY DEVOTIONAL – December 14, 2020
“Open Road (Advent 2020)”
Prayer: Lord Jesus, thank You for making Your way into our hearts and revealing to us the Truth of Your love and salvation. Lead us in Your Word and guide us in our hearts and thoughts that we would remain humble and faithful toward You alone. Amen.
Devotion – “Over My Head”
As we continue in our Advent and Christmas devotional series looking at some of the writings of Martin Luther, we hear some of what Luther has to say about John the Baptist. For the past two weeks in our Sunday services at St. Mark we have also been focusing on John the Baptist. John is a critical part of not only the Christmas story, but the story and ministry of Christ Himself.
It was absolutely unimaginable to any man or woman, even the most faithful of prophets and kings of old, that God Himself would come to walk with us and walk for us to the cross. The Jews of Israel expected a specially sent and anointed king that would save them and restore the theocracy of Israel on earth. Certainly, they expected this king to be mighty in words and deeds and to rule the hearts and minds of the people according to the Word of God, but they would have never anticipated the Word of God itself, the very mind and will of God, to come in the flesh as both God and man. This is why God had to set someone apart Himself to proclaim the coming, arrival, and appearing of the Messiah, the Godman, Jesus Christ. No one would have ever looked at Jesus’ physical appearance or His stature or His status and concluded simply by what they saw that Jesus of Nazareth was the mighty Messiah and King of Israel. So God had to set someone apart, someone to whom He would give the initial special revelation necessary to recognize Jesus as the Savior of humanity; the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. – Jhn. 1:29 That man whom God knew before he was conceived (just as God has known all of us from eternity), the man whom was conceived miraculously by the power and promise of God, and the man whom God set apart to serve as the last Old Testament prophet who would prepare a way for the Lord in the hearts and minds of God’s people through His preaching and baptism of repentance, was John the Baptist.
In one of his sermons on the Gospel of John, Martin Luther speaks to how John the Baptist was uniquely called and sent to prepare a special way for a special Lord.
Though not by name, the role and purpose of John the Baptist was foretold long ago by Isaiah the prophet in Isaiah 40:3-5
A voice cries:
“In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord;
make straight in the desert a highway for our God.
4 Every valley shall be lifted up,
and every mountain and hill be made low;
the uneven ground shall become level,
and the rough places a plain.
5 And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,
and all flesh shall see it together,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
I very much like how Luther summarizes this message that Isaiah foretold John the Baptist would proclaim and prepare a way for the Lord with.
Excuses. We all have them. Excuses are the obstacles that block the way of the Lord into our hearts. Excuses make crooked our path, they bring us into the darkness of the valley, and they are the mountains we put between us and the Lord and that we ourselves cannot scale. If we are to receive the Savior we all long for, then the way of the Lord must be prepared in us and for us because we cannot do it ourselves. The Good News proclaimed by John is that the Lord has come, in the flesh, on the cross, and resurrected from the grave to do just that. As Luther said in one of his lectures on Isaiah 40:
“To ‘prepare the way of the Lord’ is to take up a new life, the divine life. For the word ‘way’ in Hebrew denotes a plan of life. Our writers {false teachers} teach that this preparation consists in confession, fasting, and other works. These are the ways of humanity. To prepare the way of the Lord means to prepare ourselves for the Lord’s activity in us, so that God may help us and our life may be the life of Christ. It is the way because people ought to have a heavenly way.
But how is this way prepared? To prepare is to clear out of the way whatever will be an obstruction. This preparation is nothing else than our humbling ourselves from our arrogance and glory. Those are the chief obstacles for the hypocrites, who walk in human ways and their own presumption and do not accept the grace of Christ. To prepare this way, however, means to walk on it naked, without merits of any kind, in the grace of God alone and with the reception of gifts by faith.” (Lectures on Isaiah, Luther’s Works, 17, 8)
Thanks for joining me for another time of devotion in God’s Word, and remember, that God has forgiven yesterday, is with you today, and has already taken care of tomorrow. Amen.
