Friendships come and friendships go. If you are a person who moves around from place to place you will understand how true it is that when you leave from some place that is when you find who are your real friends. Do you have friends that live any distance from you? Do you hear from them or do you write or call them regularly? Keeping up friendships with people who are near is hard enough, distant friendships are even more difficult to keep up. Just like many things in life, friendships take time and energy. Having said that, I would suppose social media of today might make it a bit easier with distant friendships, yet, there is still the need to invest in such relationships. Without an investment of the necessary time and energy a friendship will begin to fade. Maybe you know someone who was once a good friend, yet for reasons unexplainable, you are now not the friends you used to be. I do not want to get too carried away with this analogy about friends, but our relationship with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ is very much the same way. Is Jesus our friend, even our best friend, or is He, or has He become just another acquaintance? If we do not invest our time and energy in our relationship with Jesus, that friendship fades. The difference between our relationship with Jesus and with others is that when our relationship with Jesus fades, it is not because He moved on, but because we moved on. A more important difference is the difference of eternity. We can lose earthly friends, but if we lose our friendship with Jesus, we lose our eternity.
This morning we focus our attention on continuing to prepare for our celebration of the birth of the best friend we could ever have, Jesus. The context of our text is one which shows us what happened when the children of Israel moved away from their relationship with the Lord and what could happen to us.
Malachi is the last book in the Old Testament. Malachi was the last prophet to speak to the children of Israel until the birth of John the Baptist some 400 years later. At this point in time, the children of Israel have been waiting for many years for the Messiah and He has not yet come. Added to that is the fact that the priests, the tribe of Levi, has become corrupt. All this makes it appear that God has all but given up on the children of Israel. Again, between the prophet Malachi and John the Baptist, God is, for all intents and purposes, silent to the children of Israel.
Our text tells us that the messenger is coming. We begin at verse one, “1Behold, I send my messenger and he will prepare the way before me. And the Lord whom you seek will suddenly come to his temple; and the messenger of the covenant in whom you delight, behold, he is coming, says the Lord of hosts” (v. 1). The Lord will send His messenger. This messenger is John the Baptist. John is the one who is the child announced to Zechariah and Elizabeth six months before the announcement to Mary that she will be the mother of Jesus. John is the one who was born to prepare the way for the Messiah.
About this messenger we are told, “2But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. 3He will sit as a refiner and purifier of silver, and he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver, and they will bring offerings in righteousness to the Lord” (v. 2-3). John is the one who was born to confront the children of Israel and especially to confront the religious leaders of Israel. The message John was to bring was one that reminded the people to look at their relationship with the Lord and see how it had faded. The purpose of John’s life was to call the people to repentance. He is the one who was to call for a baptism of repentance.
John called the people of his day and he calls us today to look at our lives and to see if we are living as God would have us to live. We pick up at verse four, “4Then the offering of Judah and Jerusalem will be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of old and as in former years. 5Then I will draw near to you for judgment. I will be a swift witness against the sorcerers, against the adulterers, against those who swear falsely, against those who oppress the hired worker in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, against those who thrust aside the sojourner, and do not fear me, says the Lord of hosts. 6“For I the Lord do not change; therefore you, O children of Jacob, are not consumed. 7From the days of your fathers you have turned aside from my statutes and have not kept them” (v. 4-7). The purpose of the life of John the Baptist was to point out the sins of the people, to point out our sins so that they, so that we, might see our need for a Savior and then to point them and us to the coming of the Messiah.
This Old Testament text is seen being fulfilled in the Gospel reading for today. John is the one who came calling in the desert to prepare the way for the Messiah, the Savior of the world. John is the one calling the people back into a right relationship with Jesus.
What more fitting texts can we have for this the second Sunday in Advent than these that call us back into a right relationship with Jesus? Is our relationship with Jesus what it was a few years ago? Is it what it should be? Where are our hearts? Are we prepared to celebrate Jesus first coming? Are we spending all of our time buying presents and working overtime to pay for the presents, or are we spending time on our friendship with Jesus? And I guess the borage of questions could go on, but I think you get the idea.
Before I go on, I might also remind you that as we prepare for our celebration of Jesus birth, His first coming, we also continue throughout the year preparing ourselves for Jesus second coming and we could ask the same borage of questions concerning our readiness and our relationship with Jesus about His second coming.
Again, the main questions before us this morning are, are we prepared for our celebration of Jesus birth? And how is our relationship with Jesus? And we could ask, how do we know if we are prepared and how do we know what is our relationship with Jesus? We could put it in logical terms. I could ask you to think about your other relationships; your relationship with your spouse, your relationship with your mother and father; your relationship with your brothers and sisters; your relationship with your children; your relationship with those with whom you would consider close friends. How are those relationships? How much time, effort, energy, even money do you spend in those relationships? Now, compare that to how much time, effort, energy, even money you spend with your relationship with Jesus? We see how the law always reminds us that we come up short.
Thanks be to God that we do not rely on the law to make sure that we are in a right relationship with Jesus. The law reminds us that we can never do enough to make sure that we have a good relationship with Jesus. That is why we do not rely on what we are doing in our relationship with Jesus, rather we rely on what He has already done for us. Because Jesus knows that we fail in our relationship with Him, He gives His all in His relationship with us. Jesus gave His all, even His life for us.
As we prepare ourselves to celebrate the birth of our Savior, we do so by focusing our lives on Jesus and on what He has done for us, and still does for us, instead of focusing on what we have failed to do for Him and instead of focusing on the outward trappings of the season and the things of this world.
We focus on Jesus and we spend time with our relationship with Jesus by going to the place where He comes to us, His Word and His Sacraments. If you want to deepen your relationship with a friend, you meet them somewhere where you can talk and share. If you want to deepen your relationship with Jesus you meet Him where you can talk and share, His Word, the Bible and His Sacraments, Holy Baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Meeting Jesus in His Word means spending time reading His Word and praying about what He says to you in His Word. Meeting Jesus means making use of confession and absolution, confessing all our sins, even those we do not know that we have committed, and hearing His great and awesome words of absolution, “Your sins are forgiven.” Meeting Jesus in the Sacraments means remembering your Baptism. Remembering that at your baptism Jesus put His name on you. He put faith in your heart. He made you His own. Each day is a day to praise the Lord for the gift of baptism through which we were given faith, forgiveness and life. Meeting Jesus in the Lord’s Supper means partaking of His body and blood in, with and under the bread and wine, participating in His death and resurrection, and being given forgiveness, strengthening and life.
Today we are reminded that on this Second Sunday in Advent, we are to continue to prepare the way for the Lord. We must be prepared for Jesus our Lord is coming. We continue to prepare ourselves for the celebration of the birth of Jesus as He continues to come to us through His Word to prepare us. We continue to prepare ourselves for His second coming, or our return to Him through our physical death from this world. This morning I want to end with Paul’s prayer from the Epistle lesson. “9And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10so that you may approve what is excellent, and so be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God” Phil. 1:9-11). To God be the glory, for Jesus’ sake. Amen.
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