A Voice in the Wilderness

I am not a hard man.

I am not particularly scarred by any events in my past.

I am not anything special

Though I am not given to tears and show of much emotion, I find that a man is not one who hides is emotion, but one who can control it for the glory of the King.

This does not mean bitterness, depression, or brash cynicism have any place in the heart of a man, but it means he must fight through those to becomes the rock that he needs to be.

Lately, as I recover from a rather painful burnout the tears come easily. As I read Scripture something will jump out at me and I’ll find myself an emotional ball of weakness, or is it vulnerability?

Did you know there was a difference?

A man leads not with his charisma or with his stoicism, or any one particular trait.
It is his attitude.
A servant’s heart, a shepherd, who will make himself vulnerable for his flock.

He is not weak, in fact is strength in his ability to kneel in humility.

Humility tests a bigger man than any sword.

So with all this said….

I can be bitter
I can be depressed
I can be cynical

But I am not prone to surrender.

I am a saint
I am a sinner

Hallelujah, both receive equal amounts of the grace of God

I wonder how the news spread.
Of Jesus’ birth I mean. I wonder if it was a grandiose display that everyone knew about, or if it spread in whispers and rumblings. Remember beyond a couple angels and a visit by some wise men, there wasn’t a great deal of pomp and circumstance surrounding the first few years of Christ’s life.
So I believe the latter. I think (and once again my perspective) is that beyond Bethlehem the news spread in rumors and whispers. People hearing the grand tale and wanting it to be true, but afraid to proclaim what they had not seen for themselves.

So for year’s… rumors and whispers that never died, always of a King who was born, who frightened Herod enough to order the murder of all the male babies anywhere near the rumored birthplace of the “King of the Jews.”

Fear is a powerful accelerant.

And it did accelerate, but never into real open celebration, but they never died either.

It’s a big desert out there, and when you traveled you traveled from water to water, settlement to settlement, and you didn’t ask questions about what was beyond the road well traveled.

Then one day, out of the dust and the rocks, out the bleak hopelessness of the desert… comes a voice.

A voice of one calling in the desert
“Prepare the way of the Lord
make straight paths for Him.”
Isaiah 40:3

He was rugged, unshaven, lived off the land around him, relying on nothing but the God he served.

He gave the people reason not to whisper anymore

He gave the people reason to LIVE for something
He gave them something REAL
He gave them HOPE

And so they came, not by the few, but by many.

The religious leaders even showed up, and the man from the desert called them snakes.

He preached the word of God with a passion they had forgotten.

He taught that he was only the prelude of what was to come.

The whispered words

Messiah
King of the Jews
Deliverer
Yeshua

Not whispers anymore, but shouts carried by the winds across the desert, a cry that carries to us here… now.

And then He came.

He.
Who has been and is and will be.
Came.

The man from the desert who had made such an impact in so short a time, who had prophesied and declared the word of God so boldly….

Crumbled before this man.
Unfit to even wash his sandals… yet he baptized him in the Jordan as he had so many others.

Only this man received blessings not from the crowd but from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
God himself was there.

Jesus began his ministry, and he called John the Baptist the greatest among men.
(Matthew 3)

Yet John would be beheaded years later. (Matthew 14)

That life did not work out the way our comfort gospel says it should.

John called the religious leaders snakes… and unless we are willing to live a life that ends as Johns did, then are we any different?
Are we capable of putting aside our scars, our bitterness, and our cynicism for the sake of living a life that is HOLY and preaches something other than complacency?

If our lives look like everyone else then we have failed.
If our lives are different, but for the sake of religion and not Christ, then we are snakes.
As a voice that cries out in the wilderness it can be lost in the wind.
Do not stop, do not quieten yourselves, because if we are quiet, then we are complacent, and have lost our first love.

We all have lost that love at sometime or another... so we must cry out to him, the one who was and is and is to come. For he is our Messiah, our King, our Deliverer.

Yeshua



Grace and Peace