He Must Become Greater
Nathan Adams · Tidal Church Moncton · October 16, 2022 · INdependence series
Nathan Adams explores John 3:22-30, where John the Baptist says Jesus must become greater and he must become less. Using Martin Luther and Gideon, he shows that we are loved, not worthy on our own, and that depending fully on God lets Him show up.
More from Nathan Adams · The INdependence series
Topics: Grace, Identity, Discipleship
Transcript
[0:00] I don't think there could be more. Wonderful setup for what God would have to ask to hear from Him today than the worship that we just experienced, or then the message that we heard last week from Dr. Stephen Elliott, our national superintendent. You know, he has sent all his notes and his slides and his small group questions for us last week, and he sent it early too, you know, like Tuesday, but then a couple days later he says, "No, that's not the message God has for me. He wants me to share a different one." And I've been speaking with so many of you, and you, we will, you quoted his sermon, were for when we need purity and power and passion and the tree and the leaning and and this is, you know, and it was exactly what you needed to hear, and I was almost crying while he was sharing it because I just said, you know, it's Thanksgiving. You're the national superintendent. You preach, right?
[1:01] But we're beginning a series, a six-week series, as we journey through the Gospel of John, and this is the thing that God put on my heart more than anything else for this session that we have. Everything we've been doing up to now is like clearing the ground, you know, you've got to get the junk out of the way before He can build something nice. It's been demo, but this is building, and we're gonna look over the next six weeks to the Gospel with John about the theme of dependence on God. To be catchy, we called it living INdependence. If you want to open your Bible to John chapter We're going to read about another John, John the Baptist. Now, in one of our Haiti missions trips we had years ago, there were two Johns that went, and one was an off-the-wall guy and the other guy's kind of like solid, right? And so people in the group would say, "What did the Off the Wall, Off the Wall John said this," and the other John would go, "Not this John."
[1:58] So there's two Johns in this story. There's John the Apostle, who wrote this account of Jesus' life and perhaps the most intimate, insightful account there is of the four Gospel accounts of Jesus' life. But he opens it talking about another John, John the Baptist, and we can take a look here in a second at verse verses 13 and 19. So if you've got your Bible open it to around there. What happened is this: this guy named John shows up on the scene 2,000 years ago in ancient Israel. And he sets up his pulpit in the wilderness along the Jordan River. He came dressed in fancy camel hair clothes and eating whatever he could find in the desert to live on.
[2:48] This is not a recipe for success, by the way, if you're going to be a preacher usually. But there was something so powerful about John the Baptist's message that almost the entire nation of Israel ended up coming out to the wilderness. And this message was highly unpopular. It was, "You sinners, repent." Do you think that's a popular message today? And someone's coming after me." So people were being baptized for repentance. Even the leaders, the priests, the leaders of Israel were being baptized. And they said, "Who are you, John? This is phenomenal. This is unprecedented. What's going on with you? Are you the expected Messiah? Are you the Christ?" And John said, "Not even close."
[3:38] In verse 13, "I'm the voice of one crying in the wilderness. Make straight the way of the Lord," as the prophet Isaiah said. And if you look up the prophecy he's referring to, it says, "Prepare the way of the Lord." He's nobody. John said, "I'm baptizing you with water, but among you, actually standing in these crowds right now, stands one you do not know, even He who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I'm not worthy to stoop down and untie," like a slave would do for a master.
[4:24] I'm not worthy. Can you say that with me? I'm not worthy. And in that environment, of course, that's when Jesus shows up and in fact He steps forward out of that crowd, and we can look at the Gospel account in Matthew and Luke to compare, and Mark. And He comes up to John and says, "I need you to baptize Me." And John said, "Baptize you? You baptize me?" How do you baptize the sinless One? And Jesus said, "No, do it to fulfill all righteousness." And as John plunges Jesus the Messiah below that water and comes up again, the Bible says that the heavens opened and the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, came down in the shape of a dove and rested upon Jesus.
[5:25] And a voice from heaven said, "This is My Son, whom I love so much. Listen to Him." And in that moment, John says, in fact, this is his recording in John 1:32, "And John bore witness, This is my testimony. Enter it with the chords. I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove and remain on Him." And then Jesus is now empowered by the Holy Spirit and goes off and begins His ministry. So the next day, if we're looking at John 1:35, the next day again, John was standing with two of his disciples. And he looked at Jesus as He walked by and said, "Behold the Lamb of God."
[6:13] And the two disciples of John heard him say this, and they followed Jesus. This is interesting. See, John's incredibly powerful ministry that had literally called the nation, the whole nation almost, had come out had also attracted some people that wanted to learn from John, his disciples. And they start, John's disciples start to leave him and go with Jesus, and this trend continues. So follow with me in the meat of the Scripture that we will examine this morning in chapter 3, verse 22. It picks up the "John, not this John" story again. "After this, Jesus and His disciples went out into the Judean countryside, where He spent some time with them and baptized."
[6:59] So Jesus is baptizing now. John was also baptizing at Aenon near Salim, because there was plenty of water. And people were coming and being baptized. Verse 26: They came to John and said to him, "Rabbi, the man who was with you on the other side of the Jordan, the one that you testified about, look, He's baptizing, and everyone is going to Him." John, you're losing your popularity, John. You're losing your platform. It's slipping away, John. To this John replied, "A person can receive only what is given them from heaven. You yourself can testify that I said, I'm not the Messiah, but I'm sent ahead of Him.
[7:48] The bride belongs to the bridegroom. The friend, the best man who attends the bridegroom, waits and listens for him and is full of joy when he hears the bridegroom's voice. That joy is mine and is now complete." He must become greater. I must become less. And the attention of the nation of Israel shifts away from John to Jesus, and John will shortly thereafter be arrested for the courageous words of rebuke and repentance that he had spoken, even to the king of that area. And he will give his life for the truth. As he fades out of the story.
[8:34] These are the three lines. The three principles that we see from John the Baptist's story. They are the principles for that spiritual power that Dr. Elliott talked to us about last week, and they will absolutely change your life if they become part of your heart and they sink deep into you today. The first one is I am not worthy. I only prepare the way. It's only when Jesus shows up that the heavens open. He must become greater. I must become less. Consider the first line. Are you worthy or are you not worthy? The world sends you two messages. The first says you're terrible. You're not stylish enough, not cool enough, not current enough, not adequate enough. You're not keeping up. You don't measure, you don't matter. You're not with the cool kids.
[9:27] And then it has to send us another message, because we're all pretty near ready to take our own lives. Okay. We're still unworthy feeling. Okay, you are worthy. And so we begin to, we do these self-affirmation things, you know, like the self-help thing. I am worthy. I am able. I'm gonna date myself a little bit here. When I grew up, there was a guy on Saturday Night Live called Stuart Smalley, and he was kind of one of these guys, and he looked into the mirror. And he said, I want to say it right, I want to misquote the great Stuart Smalley. He'd go, Oh, good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me. And he's building up this sand castle of self-affirmation. And of course the skit is always, whoosh, some wave comes in and wipes out Stuart Smalley, and all, he goes away, runs away crying. Is this not life?
[10:26] We are either arrogant or destroyed. And we have great difficulty living anywhere but those two extremes. But essential insight of Christianity is what John said: I'm not worthy. Perhaps one of the most influential people in our whole 2000 years of history as Christians was a guy named Martin Luther, and he said this: It is certain that a man must utterly despair of his own ability before he is prepared to receive the grace of Christ. Now, Martin Luther lived at the close of the Middle Ages in the 1500s, and he wanted to seek God, so he did, in a way that you did that at that time. He became a monk, and he went to a monastery, and that guy punished himself, trying to get close to God. He'd fast and pray for days on end and then be totally discouraged, because he'd come out of the fast and praying, and the first person that crossed him, boom, he'd blow up at that person with anger.
[11:32] What was that? He tried to confess every sin he'd ever had and purify his mind, and then the first woman he'd see, he lusted after. What's going on? And he tried, and he strove with all his might to tame his human nature and get that thing under control and become what he needed to be. He worked on the virtue of humility. And after he had completely humbled himself, he was, of course, quite proud. Is the achieve something? It's something like what happened to me this week. Sometimes I'm a considerate husband sometimes. And sometimes if I'm happy to begin up early, than my wife, rather than other way, I'll try to get dressed in low light or the dark, you know.
[12:21] Very nice, right? Well, I show up to staff meeting this week. Sit there, and I look down, and there's an orange splatter all over the middle of my shirt. That's a light blue shirt, and let's just, I don't know if an orange exploded on me or something. Anyway, and so I excuse myself and go into the bathroom and get some paper towel. And of course it's a brown paper towel, and then I have orange and brown all over my shirt, and it won't come out. See, in the low light the shirt looks fine. Doesn't it? But when you get onto the fluorescent big lights of a boardroom or this, it's dirty. And what Martin Luther was doing is he was refusing to judge himself based on the low light of human experience.
[13:09] He instead was taking as an ultimate standard the righteousness of God. And no matter what he did, he was always falling short. That blazing purity of God was showing that even in his best deeds, Martin Luther was motivated by a desire for self-importance, to be better. And then one day he read in Romans chapter 3, and something happened. He had been viewing God's righteousness primarily as a standard that he could never, ever achieve to. But as he read this in Romans chapter 3, he read in verse 11, and it says, hey, there's no one that can actually keep that highest standard of righteousness.
[13:55] And that standard of righteousness, in verse 20, is actually, they are primarily to make us conscious of our inadequacy. And then when we give up trying to be worthy, when we put our faith in Jesus, God gives us a gift of righteousness. You don't achieve it. He gives it to you. He calls you and even enables you to say, okay, I received the gift. And so in Romans 3:24 says, we are justified, we're made righteous, we're counted righteous by His grace as a gift. And when Luther read this, this incredible weight of trying to be worthy on his own fell off.
[14:42] And he realized he was worthy because God gave him a gift, because God included him and connected him with Jesus Christ, the only worthy one. And now God was seeing Martin Luther as worthy. And it freed him. That man exploded out of that monastery, got married, and started the Reformation, which still reverberates around our world today. Our church is still part of that movement of reformation, and other churches have also been positively impacted by that great witness. But the truth that he narrowed on, that he zeroed in on, is unpopular. Here's the truth: You are a sinner.
[15:32] Your heart's corrupt. If we were to make a movie of all the thoughts that go through your mind in a day, I don't think even Netflix would want to show that. And the reason I know you are sinners is because I am too. I am deeply aware. Of my shortcomings and outright sins, and I am terrified of my infinite ability to say and do dumb things. I mean, it's just, it keeps coming.
[16:17] And when I became a Christian, I didn't stop being a sinner. I became a sinner who was saved by grace. And when I sought to follow Christ with all my heart, I did not cease to be a sinner. I became a sinner who was saved by grace, who is now seeking to follow Jesus only by that same grace. You see that baseline awareness of having nothing before the holy, bright light standard of God? That is the grounding we need in everything we do with God. And it's strange. When we actually admit our unworthiness, that is when true worthiness of an external source, the worthiness of Jesus, is given to us.
[17:10] And we say, "I am not worthy, but I am I am loved. I'm not worthy because I'm lovely. I'm just worthy because I'm loved." The goal, my friends, is not self-improvement. It is self-forgetfulness. There's an amazing story that illustrates this with Jesus and His disciples. The disciples were on the Sea of Galilee. They had rowed out in there and Jesus was not with them. A storm came up in the darkness of night. And in that rise and fall, all of a sudden the disciples see Jesus. They think... Walking on the water towards them.
[17:57] And Peter says, "Lord, if it's You and not something weird going on here, a ghost or my mind losing it, Lord, if it's You, command me to come to You on the water." Oh, by the way, I'm not saying anything about ghosts. Just, "Lord, if it's You, command me to come to You on the water," and He said, "Come." So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. I've got to back that up again. So Peter got out of the boat and walked on the water and came to Jesus. That, of course, is completely impossible. And Peter's looking at Jesus and he's walking to Him. But then Peter took his eyes off for a minute. He saw the wind. He saw the waves, and it says in verse, probably about 30 now, he was afraid and began to sink. He cried out, "Lord, save me!"
[18:55] And immediately Jesus reached out His hand and took hold of him, saying, "Oh, you of little faith, why did you doubt?" You see, when our eyes are on Jesus, we progress. And when our eyes, the moment they come off Jesus and they look at ourselves or our circumstances, we go down. The goal is not self-improvement. It is self-forgetfulness. It is Jesus focus. And like Martin Luther said, I want to read it one more time: "It is certain that a man must utterly despair of his own abilities before he's prepared to receive the grace of Christ." Utterly despair. This brings us back to the example of John the Baptist. Number one: I am not worthy. It is the whole basis for anything God will do in your life, is to start there.
[19:45] Number two: I only prepare the way, if I want to serve God. All I'm doing is preparing the way. It's only when Jesus shows up that the heavens open. You know, John the Baptist, he never tried to be more than God asked him to be. John never tried to do a miracle that is recorded. He just preached the message God gave him. And God, for some strange reason, took just words and changed the nation through it. And the other thing about John the Baptist is the message that he gave left him 100% vulnerable. His message was pretty much, "Repent, because the Messiah is coming."
[20:31] So where's the real risk for John in that message? The Messiah might not come. You see, if Jesus hadn't showed up in John's ministry, then John would have been a lunatic raving in the wilderness. Everything he had done would have been discredited. And it was only when Jesus showed up and the heavens opened that his ministry became truly effective. We need to depend on Jesus to the extent that we leave ourselves vulnerable to looking stupid and failing if He does not show up.
[21:17] Many of your primary ministries, to your family. You may be trying to raise godly children, whether they be young or old. You're still trying to raise them. You realize, of course, that you can't do that in a way that's going to bring them to Christ. Because you can do all kinds of wonderful things, teach kids to say their prayers, but Satan could twist that whole thing and make it into something that wasn't meant to be. And honestly, if you raise kids for, say, 18, 35 years, what, pick a number, and you tell them about Christ and they never have a supernatural experience of Christ, they will not be Christians.
[22:09] You see, unless the heavens open and Jesus shows up for your kids, they will not believe in Jesus. His job is to prepare the way. In our church, we do all these things and we take our efforts and our talents and we lay them before God, but unless the Holy Spirit falls, nothing much happens. We go home and have lunch and share a few opinions about what we heard. So John's most profound statement in John 3:30 starts to make a lot more sense. "He must become greater. I must become less." You see, if we are sinners who are saved by grace who can only follow God to the degree that we forget about ourselves and look at Him, then absolutely, Jesus needs to become greater and we need to become less.
[23:09] We can't open the heavens. We see in the text there, if you want to go to that, John 3 text that we're going to look at, slide people, the slide people, of course, are losing their minds today because I'm going to go all over the place. Thank you for your ministry. But it says, "I'm like the attendant to the bridegroom." I want you to imagine you're at a wedding, and the groom will look so good. He's in a beautiful tuxedo. But then the best man comes out and he's in a designer tuxedo.
[23:55] Heck, he looks like George Clooney. And all of a sudden the attention shifts from the groom to the best man. Even worse, if one of the bridesmaids comes in and her dress is prettier than the bride. Choose ugly dresses for bridesmaids anyway because the focus needs to be on that bride. And that groom, it's their day. It's no one else's day. And John says, "It's not my day. Everything I'm doing is for His day, for Jesus' day." And when He has attention and focus on Him, I'm so happy.
[24:43] And he says, "You can't receive anything except that it come down from heaven. A person cannot receive even one thing unless it's given to him from heaven." It's all grace. As a Christian, it's all a gift. It just shows up. So unexpectedly, before the service, our amazing guitar player here, Crest, was showing me. Apologies, camera people and light people, he was showing me this beautiful guitar. Now that's pretty, isn't it? And if I knew anything about music and instruments, I would also know it's a high end guitar, and all these pedals here.
[25:36] They're beautiful. And Crest and his wife were in Dubai serving the Lord. Someone just gave it all to him as a gift and said, "Use it to glorify God and nothing else." When we realize it's all a gift, it changes us. Now the thing is, church, you still haven't heard me. It's not because there's anything wrong with you, other than you're human. Let me share a story from the Old Testament that illustrates this, because it is so hard for us to hear this message. It does not penetrate our skulls very easily.
[26:31] There was a time, this is now 3,000 years ago, a thousand years before John, the other John, and Jesus. It was a time when Israel had forgotten their God and they had become like other people around them too much, and they were serving all kinds of gods. And so God said, "I'm going to leave you to it and see how that works out for you." And with their supernatural protection withdrawn, they were quickly overcome by their enemies, and their enemies didn't just take over rulership. They took their crops. They were living in holes in the ground. They're starting to starve. And in that desperation, the people began to cry out to God again. They didn't have any other options left. And so God said, "I'll save them," and He looked over all Israel and He found the biggest wuss of the mall.
[27:23] Gideon. He really was. He's the most cowardly person you can find in the Old Testament. He says, "God, You want me to lead people, lead this nation to rebel against these other nations that have taken us over? Who am I? I'm the least. I'm nobody. I'm not from a big family. I'm scared." God says, "Yeah, it's you." "Well, give me a sign." Okay? Well, God gives him this great big supernatural sign, and Gideon says, "I'm still scared. Can You give me a second sign?" I mean, this guy's a wuss. He really is. He's little. And so then Gideon finally says, "All right, let's start the rebellion," and he starts a little thing, ruins an altar to a false god. He's gonna get in trouble.
[28:13] And he sends messengers out to Israel and says, "We need to rebel now and turn back to God." And 32,000 men show up around Gideon. Now they're underdogs because their enemies number in the hundreds of thousands. The Bible says they were gathered in a big valley and there are more than you could count. And Gideon's got 32,000. And then God says to Gideon, "You have too many men. If you win this victory today, you will think that by your own strength you saved yourself, and you will boast against Me."
[29:04] And so God says to Gideon, "Ask anyone to raise their hand if they're a little afraid." Twenty-two of the 32,000 say, "Yep," and Gideon says, "Go home." And then God says, "Okay, let them have a drink at this stream." And of the remaining 10,000, most of them drink a normal way, and there's about 300 that drink in a slightly different way. And God says, "Take the weirdos." He says, "And now you are small enough that I will get the glory." And so God tells Gideon, just go in the night with 300 men, surround the camp, get some torches ready and some trumpets and see what happens.
[29:53] And you know what God had been doing to those hundreds of thousands of people from a few different nations, Midianites and some other ones? He'd been sending them dreams of terror. They are petrified. And so when 300 men smashed these, smash these pottery pieces that they have covering these jars that have covering the torches, and blow the horns, they all wake up, they look around, they think there's enemies everywhere, they kill each other. They literally slaughter each other. And Gideon, I don't think, even used his sword that night until everyone was in a full rout and had already left. See, the problem is, we have too many men.
[30:45] Think about your life. If you lose the power, you're like, "I have that backup generator." Well, I have a friend that's got me. If you have a problem at your house, you're handy, you have tools, you can fix it. Right? And if not, you have a buddy that can, and if not, you've got a bank account. You can pay someone, they can. See, we have way too many options. If we're sick, we've got medical care sometimes, and you can go to that, and you've got the internet, and you can drive your doctor crazy and figure out your, you know, figure out your symptoms. What if your only option was God? What if you're poor, what if there's no healthcare? What if there's nobody around you and you're alone? You've got not an option of last resort in God, but you've got an option of first resort, and you go to Him.
[31:45] And He can come through for you, and whether He comes through directly with a miracle or indirectly through people, yet your focus is on Him. It's God that's working. And as you go about your life, you know, you're gonna do pretty much the same things you do every day. When you're depending on God, you're gonna get up, brush your teeth, you know, you're gonna have a shower, you know, work, and try. But you're going to just do it so differently when you're depending on God. So differently. You will start with prayer, you will do it in prayer. You will end with praising God and only He will get the glory, and slowly you'll begin to realize that He is greater and you are less, and what you're doing personally isn't quite as important as you thought. You are the junior assistant to the whatever partner in this relationship.
[32:42] As the worship team comes out now, I want you to think about Jesus' words, "Unless you become like a little child, you'll never enter the kingdom of heaven." Now, there is a little child in my life. She's 14 months old. My oldest son has had his first kid. And when she puts her little arms up like that, I picked that kid up right away. And so much fun right now because she's beginning to verbalize and talk. That's just wonderful, these new words come out, but my name's hard to say.
[33:28] You know, French people and other people that don't have a th in their mother tongue, they call me Nathan instead of Nathan. So my youngest daughter, she likes to make a nickname, so she started calling me Tin. And then she's called me Tinny. Anyway, the name is stuck, and it was going to be hard to teach my little granddaughter to say Grandad, and again, as difficult sounds. So he said, "You know what? She called me Tinny." And I work with her. Tin me. Tin. Everyone's working with her because she's already gotten Dad and Mom, and I'm like the last one. I want to hear these words from this little angel. I pick her up. I feed. This is what happened with the oranges. I was feeding her oranges, just putting them in her mouth one after another. Happiest I could be, to feed this little angel.
[34:20] And finally she comes out. And I'm here. I'm waiting for Tinny, and she says, "Ninny." Ninny. And everyone says, "No, she called you Ninny." Ha! I said, "No. She has an accent. It's not Ninny. It's me." And when she says Nanny. That last scripture I want to share, Neil. Can you put that up?
[35:05] Jesus, as He nears the cross and is praying over disciples, He says, "God, I want that the love which You have loved Me with, which You have loved Me, that love with which You have loved Me, I want that to be in them." That love, and with that love, as powerless as we might be, as unworthy as we might be, we're whole with that love that has no greater joy than to hold us and feed us. We're okay.
[35:51] And that strength will pick us up at every time, and you will say, "Stop comparing me to a baby. I am an independent grown-up adult." Compare yourself to God, baby. You are an infant with a full diaper. So I ask you to join us in singing "How Great Is Our God." I want us to be small for once. You know, we to stop striving and start receiving. Put up your arms to your heavenly Father.
[36:38] Let His grace and love flow into you, and commit to being small from here on in. You know what happens? Of course, we ask for God to move, and He moves, and maybe He moves through us, through you. The first thing that happens is we get a big head. They go off, "What God did through me. I prayed and a miracle happened. I got a gift. I'm special." And you're useless too, by the way. Just to the one moment, God began to open the heavens in your life, you immediately took credit. Became big. And now, like Gideon, no. You're gonna say you saved yourself. You're gonna say it was by your strength. This is the foundation: I am small.
[37:26] And when I'm small and I refuse to become big at any point, then God's big, then God shows up. Then God can do a miracle through you, and you will still be nothing. He could do something huge through our church, and our church is still nothing. Maybe He could do something through a pastor, and you would refuse to make the mistake of thinking that the pastor to come or any pastor's a superhero or villain. He says, "No, they're nothing other than loved." So let's stand, and let's sing. Let's make God bigger. Let Him become greater, and let us become less, that His grace may flow. Come, Holy Spirit, and move now. We ask, Lord, in our hearts, let all pride be laid aside. Let all self-importance be laid aside. Let the big man become a baby before the almighty God, and let Your love and power flow. We ask in Jesus' name. Amen.