So let me start off by not just thanking Helen, but thanking Colin and thanking the elders and thanking the whole church for this opportunity to speak this morning. And not just do I say that because of what has happened in the political arena recently about the necessity of giving thanks, yeah. But also, because this is one of the passages that I have always wanted to preach from.
When I was a very small boy, I had an uncle who was quite a Bible scholar. And I remember him saying to me, he said, Jonathan, he says, in your life, you will hear hundreds of sermons and messages and preaching from the first half of John chapter three. He says, but you will probably count in one hand the number of sermons you will hear on the second half of John chapter three.
Because it’s one thing to hear about John chapter three verse 16, that “God so loved the world and that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life”. But you’ll maybe not hear so many people wanting to hear about “He must increase and I must decrease”. And if you’ve been looking at your messages that have come through on your email or the notifications about today’s message and passage that we’re gonna look at, you’ll know that that was the heading that was given to this section.
He must increase and I must decrease. For many people, if John chapter three stopped at verse 21, that would seem fine. And for many people who call themselves Christians, that’s where John chapter three seems to finish.
It finishes at John chapter, at verse 21. You come into this new birth, this new life, you see you’re a Christian and you treat your Christian confession as some sort of fire insurance policy against a perishing and the lake of fire. And sadly, some churches are quite like that.
And I’ve been to a few over the decades that you hear the message being preached every week about becoming a Christian, about becoming a Christian, about becoming a Christian, and that is right. And so we should, and so you should become a Christian. But very often, if that’s the environment that you hear time and time again, you have this sense of, well, what next? What happens on day two after you become a Christian? What happens next? People want to know what happens next.
And if we just did John chapter three, the first half of the chapter, we would maybe have some questions if you’re a thoughtful reader. What happens to this character of John the Baptist? Or verses 20 and 21, do you have any illustrations of what that might be like, the one who comes into the light that his deeds might be clearly seen that they’ve been done in God? Well, I think that John the writer has very cleverly and very thoughtfully juxtaposed these two stories in John chapter three as stories of contrast, but at the same time, stories that continue themes that come through from one section into another that we want to look at today. Colin gave us an illustration last week about going on holiday.
A couple of years ago, I went over to visit my relatives in San Francisco. And when I was there, they said, while you’re here, if you wanted to go to Yosemite National Park, you can borrow one of our cars. I thought, this is fantastic.
I don’t have a bucket list, but Yosemite National Park was one of the things that if I did, it would probably be in the top three. And those of you who are students at university, decades ago, when I was at university, you have these poster sales in the student union and all the Ansel Adams pictures of Yosemite who you could buy for a fiver, which was a lot of money back then. Pin it up on your wall, blue tack, as a student with these pictures of Yosemite.
And if you’ve been there or if you’ve watched the YouTube videos or the Instagram reels, you’ll know that when you come from the south, you come from Sequoia National Park and the Sierras, which are beautiful in themselves. And you come up the hillside and then you enter this dark tunnel. And when you go through this dark tunnel, you come round a corner, a bend, and just as you come round the bend, you come out into this incredible vista.
It opens up right in front of you and you’re in Yosemite Valley and you see this incredible view with El Capitan, the mountain, or Half Dome, the rock, the man did a solo climbing up, and the brightness of a Californian sunshine and the exquisite detail that you can see. And it’s so refreshing and the snow in the mountains and the pine trees, you stop. There’s a place where you have to pull your car in till you catch your breath.
All conversation stops. And I sometimes feel that this is what’s happening here in John chapter three. John, the writer, takes us in verse 20 and 21.
It’s that tunnel of connection that takes you from one scene to another scene. It takes you from John chapter three, verses one to 21. And you have an example here as we come out of this tunnel of the life of John the Baptist illustrates the one who has done the truth comes to the light that his deeds may be clearly seen that they’ve been done in God.
And from one scene, which is Nicodemus comes at nighttime, we emerge from this tunnel into glorious sunshine. You can almost see the plain open in front of you, feel the breeze in your cheeks and the bright Middle Eastern sunshine coming down in the countryside. From being in this enclosed space of an inner of a room where people meet together to speak to Jesus, there’s this open countryside where the plains are wide open.
Rather than been in the city, you’re now way out in the towns and villages in the Judean countryside. And rather than in this nighttime scene with one person speaking to Jesus, you’re in broad daylight where thousands are milling around. And when there’s very focused discussion, there’s now all these different, there are loads of people, the disciples are baptising folks here and there, John the Baptist disciples are there, the Pharisees, the Jews are coming with questions.
There’s all this activity. And from being a point of where it’s introspection about your personal relationship with the Lord Jesus and being born from above, the necessity of that, now there’s this engagement with society as a whole amongst all these towns and villages. What a contrast.
But yet there’s these themes that run right through it. In this second section, verse 21 is illustrated by the life and ministry of John the Baptist. In that, we see John the Baptist face some direct challenges to his ministry by the Pharisees.
And disappointments in performance are raised by his disciples. It’s a bit like a football manager of a once glorious football team that no longer seems to be winning the matches and staying up in the league. They come with all these questions.
But John the Baptist allows an open analysis of his life purpose in ministry before God and the eyes of all. And here’s the important point. And in doing so, in this chapter, John the writer allows John the Baptist to write himself out of the story.
And it leaves us with Jesus alone. John the writer allows John the Baptist to write himself out of the story. If you remember a few weeks ago when Colin was giving us some teaching from John chapter one, verses 35 to the end of that chapter, he talked about this, there’s John the Baptist and then Jesus appears.
And there’s this backwards and forwards in the narrative and the story about these two characters. And John the Baptist’s appearance gets less and less as Jesus gets more and more. And here we have that in its crescendo moment.
And that is really like what Christian life should be like in many senses. I have a friend down in London and Helen knows him as well. Darren, who’s an associate minister at an inner city church.
And on his WhatsApp, where you can have a tagline or a handle, Darren’s tagline says, preach the gospel, die, be forgotten. Now that brings a lump to my throat every time I talk about it. Preach the gospel, die, be forgotten.
John the Baptist, in one sense, does this. That in some sense is what our life is like as a Christian. I heard somebody say recently that if the Lord be not come in a thousand years, there’s only really one person within our lifetime who stands a chance of being remembered.
It’s not the president of any country. It’s not the monarch of any realm. It’s probably Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon.
He would maybe be the only person whose name would be remembered in a thousand years time. If you were to cast your mind back in the year 1025, who was the king or queen? Who was the Pope over the Roman Empire at the time? Or the Chinese emperor? Or who invented some great thing then? Or the equivalent of the Nobel Prize? None of us can remember. You can’t even tell me the list of the top 10 richest men or people in the world right now.
You maybe get what, five? Half a dozen names? And yet in a thousand years time, maybe one person stands the chance of still being remembered by name. All of us will fade into insignificance anyway, but preach the gospel, die, be forgotten, is this wonderful example of what John the Baptist does. Let me put this in Gen Z terms of what takes place.
And I quite like this. John the Baptist does a vibe check to make sure that we all understand that he does not hold main character energy. And he dips out and leaves us with Jesus solo.
And that’s actually a very good way of doing it. That’s exactly what he does. The people come to him with these questions and he does this vibe check.
I am not the main character. I do not hold main character energy in this story. It’s Jesus.
And we should do the same thing. In our lives, we may think we are the main character, and in some senses we are, but Jesus has the main character energy. And he is the one who should be left.
And John the Baptist does that. It’s the one of these characters in a play who retreats off the stage into the curtains and he’s pointing at the main character, says, this is the person. Listen to what he has to say.
And he spends the rest of this section making much of the Lord Jesus. But actually what I really want to do for the few minutes that remain is to just take one or two secondary applications from this passage to us as Christians. Because I think in John leaving the scene, he teaches a few things that we learn about being a Christian.
The first thing in verses 22 to 26 is, if you read it, I think a question that arises is, what’s with all these baptisms? What’s with all these baptisms? Now it’s here in the passage, and there’s lots of water, and water features quite often in John’s gospel. John the Baptist has already pointed out the magnitude of difference between his baptism and Jesus’ baptism. Doesn’t he? He says, I came baptising with water.
Well, there’s one coming who will baptise with the Holy Spirit. Different groups at this period of time carried out baptisms. The Pharisees carried it out.
John the Baptist, by name, obviously, carried it out. Jesus and his disciples carried it out as well. And we know from history and from archaeology that there were other religious groups practised baptism as well.
Well, what did that mean at the time? What that meant at the time was, as you went about your life, you might encounter a rabbi or a teacher or a religious individual who comes saying, this is how you should live your life to please God. This is the righteous way of living. That God had given all this revelation with the law, and this is how you apply it, and this is how you live to please God.
And you would listen to these preachers, and you say, I agree with that. The way that I have been living my life actually is not up to scratch for how God wants me to live. I embrace all your teaching and your doctrine about what you’re seeing, God wants me to how I should live, and I will show to everybody else that I am buying into, completely into what you’re saying is, and I’ll undergo this public ritual of baptism.
Now, the Jewish people at the time, of course, they didn’t cremate, they buried people. So they go under the water, and they come back up in this public show that the old life has gone and buried, and they’re now raised to walk in this new life that they’ve believed in from what this teacher has told them. And John the Baptist, of course, he comes preaching a repentance of sins.
So John says, this is how you should behave, this is what the law means, this is how we should behave as good, righteous individuals. And people listened to what he had to say, and he was commissioned to prepare the way before Jesus, and he would say that there’s one coming who will baptise you in the Holy Spirit. And people would listen, and they would respond to the message, and they’d say, yes, what you’re saying about the right way to live, I agree with, and they would get baptised to show this new start in life.
Now, the Pharisees did something similar. They would say that this is the way how you ought to live to please God. These are the rules and regulations that you must keep, and as Colin said last week, there were a lot of hoops you had to jump through, and for the most part, they regarded baptism as a sort of washing so that you could become clean to perform the rites.
Unless you were going to become what they call a proselyte, somebody who converts into their understanding of religion, and you become one of them, having come from a non-Jewish background, and then you were baptised. And of course, this argument has now broken out between the people of that party and John the Baptist’s disciples, and so they come to get that clarified. Now, it’s good and right for us to ask you the question, for me to ask you the question, what does your baptism mean to you? Now, I can say that with authority from the Bible because you’ll find out later on in the New Testament, the apostles ask that question.
In Acts chapter 19, Paul comes to Ephesus, and he finds some people who are living righteous lives, they’re behaving like Christians, but there’s just something not quite right, so he starts to ask a few questions and ask them about their baptism. That’s what he goes straight to. What was your baptism and what does it mean to you? And he finds out they were being baptised after John the Baptist’s way of baptism, but they’d never come to know the baptism of Jesus.
And so they then go on and get baptised. In Hebrews chapter six, verse two, the writer to the Hebrews saying there’s some elementary things about Christian life and belief, it’s almost like baptism class, that you go through to understand what you’ve believed. Do we need to go back to go over the doctrine of baptisms? We should be moving on to other things in Christian life, but okay, we should maybe readdress that.
In Romans chapter six, if you don’t understand what your baptism means, having been baptised, the Apostle Paul’s got a powerful punch in chapter six about how does that, how do you relate to your Christian life and witness and testimony of how you live before God in terms of what your baptism meant to you? And if you’ve not been baptised, having believed in the Lord Jesus, why? Now sometimes, I heard this past week, sometimes us Christians who’ve been involved in church for a number of years can actually make it difficult for people who are new Christians to become, to ask for baptism. I hope that we never do that. This week, somebody was telling me that they knew for a couple of years that they ought to be baptised having become a Christian, but they felt shame because they didn’t have friends and family to invite along to the party that it had become or seemed to be necessary that went along with it.
It’s a lot more simpler than that. If you have believed in the Lord Jesus and you know that the next thing that you should do in day two of becoming a Christian is to be baptised to give that public testimony, then come and ask to be baptised. Years ago, I was with my father when he was preaching at a church in Lanarkshire and there was to a baptismal service that morning and he happened to say, if there’s anybody in here who’s a Christian and you know you should be baptised and you’ve not been baptised yet, come forward and get baptised.
And as a woman got up and walked down the aisle, to speak to the elders. And so they took us to the back and another lady was there and she was added onto the end of the line of the people who got baptised that day. I knew for years when I was a youngster that I should be baptised.
But I didn’t go and ask to be baptised because I was worried that people would say, oh, you’re just wanting to get baptised because your mate decided to get baptised last month, okay? There was this, you felt you had to show it was an independent decision of your own. If you’ve grown up in a Christian family, maybe that’s what you feel, okay? Your mother’s saying one thing, your father’s saying another. You feel this pressure and you want to show that it’s an independent decision of your own.
Well, that’s right. You should give that public testimony if you’ve not been baptised, that your old life is gone, that the way that I used to live has been nailed to the cross as Jesus was nailed to the cross. And that way of living is now dead and it’s buried and I’m raised as he was raised to walk in newness of life and I have a public testimony as a Christian.
And that’s what you should do. It’s not the doorway to make you a Christian, but it is, in one sense, it is. It’s that first step of public discipleship, is to be baptised.
And I would encourage you to do that if you’ve not been baptised. The second thing I think in these verses that we’ll learn as application from the life of John the Baptist, verses 20, 70, 32, is about Christian service. People, when they become Christians, often want to know, what did I do? The Lord has saved me.
I feel so blessed. I want to help in some way what I do in the church. And very often, if you, as I had to, to join Greenview, had to go through a baptism and membership class.
Okay, I remember Andy Hunter taking it. And they said, you should think about getting involved in the church. And a lot of people, when you become a Christian, I do, I want to, but what do I do? Well, there is a ministry and there is Christian service.
And sometimes it seems to be a big ministry. Maybe you’re called to full-time service, like Colin or Alan McKinnon and Jackie. Or maybe you just think it’s something simple, but God lays something in your heart.
There’s a purpose that heaven gives you, and you have a joy in carrying that out. Verses 27 and verses 28, what we’ll learn is that John the Baptist knew about his calling and he was faithful to it. If God has laid a calling on your heart, stick to that and be faithful to it.
You don’t have to do everything in the church. You don’t have to think you have to cover all the bases. Okay, there are things that God will plant in your heart that you find a satisfaction in doing to honour the Lord Jesus, to bring praise to his name, to help other believers, and to help other believers come to a deeper relationship with the Lord Jesus.
Do that and you’ll find that you have joy in it. Verse 29, take joy in seeing the love between Jesus and other disciples unfold. I love hearing about how people become Christians.
I really love hearing how folks, but that was one of the great things I experienced in London, was just meeting so many people who had just become Christians, first generation, and hear their story. And to hear what their relationship with the Lord Jesus was like in that appreciation was just joyful. If your ministry is a commission from heaven, then there’s the joy of heaven takes place in your heart and in your life as you see other people be connected to the Lord Jesus and grow in that relationship.
In verse 29, John the Baptist says, he who has the bride is a bridegroom, but the friend of the bridegroom who stands and hears him rejoices greatly because of the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore, this joy of mine is fulfilled. A lovely and beautiful picture, isn’t it? And I’ve often thought if you were the best man at your mate’s wedding, okay, and you saw how much your mate loved the bride, or if you’re the chief bridesmaid, how much the bride loves the groom, and you are invested in them being together as a couple rather than my relationship with the mate or the chief bridesmaid’s relationship with the bride, what do you find greatest joy in? You find your greatest joy when they are standing there and you hear the words said, I do, I do.
“Do you take this person?” “I do”. And in Christian ministry, that is one of the great joys. When you hear the Lord Jesus say, come unto me, I take this person, you hear this other person, Lord, I do.
When you hear these people come together and you hear those words, it gives you great joy, the joy of heaven. Verse 30, John the Baptist makes it, your ministry and what you do in Christian service make it all about Jesus. Jesus is the glory of heaven.
Make what you do all about him and not about yourself. Verse 31, John the Baptist says, he who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth is earthly and speaks from the earth.
He who comes from heaven is above all. What John’s essentially saying there is, is that you can’t improve on what God has given out of him. I can’t make the gospel any better than it is.
Thank goodness, okay. I can’t improve on the Christian message. It’s the best that you can get, but also there’s a secondary application of that, and that is that you can take comfort in your creatureliness in ministry.
You are of the earth, earthy, and so am I. I can’t invent anything better than what God has given from heaven, but there’s this aspect that we have frailty, and we don’t always get it right. We are of the earth. We don’t always find the right words to convey and to speak to people in our ministry, but nonetheless, in that very humbling aspect, it is quite freeing at the same time.
You and I are of the earth, earthly, in our Christian ministry. We will not always get it right in what we do. Now, that doesn’t mean to say we shouldn’t try, okay, but it helps us be gracious to other people because we know that we’re not perfect ourselves in how we act and behave as Christians and how we try to encourage others.
And then finally, verse 32, the last thing to think about in Christian service is that you can rest on the sovereignty of God. Fewer and fewer people were coming to join the Baptist to get baptised by him and by his team, and more and more people were coming to the Lord Jesus. It’s interesting, some of the translations in English, I think the NIV says going to, but most of the translations, and you’ll hear it carefully, it says coming to because you come to Jesus more than go to him.
He’s the centre. These little nuances in the Bible are really, really encouraging. You can rest in the sovereignty of God that when you see other people’s ministry get better or seems to be more effective and yours is getting less, that no matter what the outcome is, the outcome’s dictated by heaven.
It’s not dictated by me or Colin or anybody else in the church. What happens, happens from heaven. The Apostle Paul, at the end of his life, we find in one of the letters he writes, he gets word that all Asia has turned away from him.
Imagine spending decades of your life planting churches around northern Mediterranean. Turkey, Greece, into Italy, plans to go to Spain across the south of France. You’ve planted Cyprus, Malta.
You’ve visited all these sites and you’ve planted churches. And as you’re getting frail and you may be facing the prospect of being beheaded, you find out that all your churches are not interested in you after all at the end of all these. And other people have come along that they’ve got more engaged with.
Yet he, Paul, has that confidence that he is committed into the hands of the Lord Jesus and the outcome is from him. It’s not about ourselves. Finally, in this last section, verses 33 to the end, let me point out that whether you are involved in ministry or not, in a big way or a small way, that there is a satisfaction that comes to you as a Christian that’s of personal experience with God and it’s independent of service.
And that’s a really important thing in Christian life. One of the wonderful things about the gospel is that it is by faith. It’s not about what you do to become a Christian and it’s not about what you do, in one sense, to continue as a Christian.
The faith that you exercise to become a Christian, you live your life by faith as a Christian as well. It’s helpful sometimes to think about the situation if I had a stroke and I was lying incapacitated on a long-term hospital bed getting pressure sores and I’d never become a Christian, that if I could barely talk or if I couldn’t talk and I could only think, and I, in my mind, turn over the fact that the Lord Jesus died for me, John 3 and 16, and that by trusting in him, I have new birth, then I am saved. There’s nothing I can do in terms of an activity to try and earn salvation and there’s nothing that I can do in activity in Christian service, apart from pray, which is very, very important, okay? But what we have here in these verses are satisfactions that you experience as a Christian, regardless of what you do in terms of service.
The first in verse 33 is, he who has received his testimony has certified that God is true. I love that Colin referred to that in his introduction. I really do, because when I read this passage in preparation, this was the main verse that stood out to me.
Not so much, he must increase and I must decrease, but that God is true. One of the wonderful things that happens when you become a Christian is that you prove for yourself that God is true. John talks about God as light in his epistles and God as love, but here we have, you experience that God is true.
He hasn’t told you any lies. It’s not just that you trust his word as truth, but you come to know him as true. There’s an experience in your life that as you trust him and get to know him, you come to know that God is not just that he exists, but he is true in your experience.
The second thing in verse 34 is, for he whom God has sent speaks the word of God, for God does not give the spirit by measure. One of the other things that you experience personally as a Christian is the generosity of God in giving himself. The generosity of God giving himself.
I used to work in a laboratory in Texas for many years carrying out molecular biology, cancer research, and you had these Gilson pipettes that you could ratchet that would aliquot out microlitre amounts of DNA or solutions or chemicals for your experiments. Microlitres, even half a microlitre, so precise with these pipettes. That’s not what God does with the Holy Spirit.
He gives you the whole ocean, the whole of it. God gives his entire self. God comes to live in your life when you become a Christian.
His spirit comes in. He doesn’t give it by measure. You get the whole lot, the whole person comes into your heart.
God is generous in your life with and by his spirit. That’s an experience, that’s a personal experience. Verse 35, the father loves the son and has given all things into his hand.
We get to taste and be part of the father’s love for the son. You thought about that? This verse is not just something that you can stand back and watch as if there’s a transaction taking place between the father and the son, but you are part of that gift. I am part of that gift.
We are given, the father has given all things into his hand. The father loves the son. You are part of the gift of love that the father gives into the hand of the son.
Now, I know primarily it’s to do with devolved authority, is what John the Baptist is saying, but secondarily for us, it’s experiential and it’s participatory. We participate in the love of the father for the son because we’ve been put into the hand of Jesus. Another small point, John says, I’m glad it says hand and not hands.
My anxieties would be that if people say, no, we’re placed into the hands of the Lord Jesus, the same hands that had the nails put into his hands on Calvary’s cross are the same hands that you’re placed into. Well, my mind would run a hundred miles an hour. I think, well, what if I’m the person that falls through the hole? But God places it into his hand.
There’s that wholesomeness that nothing falls out of the hand of the Lord Jesus. We participate in the father’s love for the son and we experience that in our lives as Christians. Then verse 36, he who believes in the son has everlasting life and he who does not believe the son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.
Colin mentioned last week that one of the things about these passages in John’s gospel is the stark contrast. It’s not just like two things are close together. It’s almost like they’re heading in the opposite direction.
It’s one or the other. They’re diametrically opposed. These stark, stark contrasts.
But we experience, as Christians, we experience everlasting life. It’s inextinguishable in its quality. It’s not merely eternal in its duration.
Now, it’s actually quite important why the Bible says everlasting life and not just focussing on eternal life. Because life is something that grows and develops and produces fruit and moves and becomes richer and better and keeps growing. If it was simply an eternal existence the same, then that’s a curse, not a blessing.
To have eternity exactly the same, that’s a nightmare. That’s not a blessing. That’s why John emphasised it’s eternal life because there’s a new, what’s the old word? The old word was the effulgence of glory.
It’s great, okay? You get everlasting life. It’s something that grows and develops. Eternity is not an eternity of being the same, but there’s a development.
It’s not stagnant. And that’s the experience in the Christian life. The life that God has given us is not stagnant.
It’s not boring, it’s not samey, but it’s constantly developing and growing and becoming richer. And we’ve escaped from the wrath of God. These are quite sobering things at this last section.
It’s a bit like a bucket of cold water thrown in your face at the end just to waken you up. You’ve escaped from the wrath of God. Sometimes people who are not Christians, when they hear this, they think, well, that’s a bit capricious.
Okay, God makes some sort of arbitrary standard and if we’ve not kept it, then that’s us damned. It would not be a good father that was not furious at his son’s drug habit. It would not be really a good mother who was not absolutely livid when she finds out her child has been bullied at school.
God is furious for things that hold you back from reaching your full potential as a human, as a safe person. God cares very, very deeply about you and other people. About the life that you can have and enter into and things that hold you back from that, he is absolutely furious about.
And make no mistake, I once heard a beautiful preacher preaching John 3, 16 and he said this about perishing. You know, we always hesitate to talk about this part in John 3 and 16, as Colin said last week a wee bit. He says, but perishing, things that perish are things that fail to make what the designer intended for it to do.
That’s the tragedy of our human existence, living according to our own way and not according to our heavenly father. We perish, we fail to achieve what he had intended and intends for us. And he’s furious at that prospect and that idea.
But those of us who have come to know the Lord Jesus, who have him as our centre, know this joy, this participatory love and this everlasting life. And these should be the experiences of all Christians. Is it your experience today? Thank you.
The post I must become less – John 3v22–36 appeared first on Greenview Church.
