As Jesus presses forward deeper into his own public ministry, natural questions begin to arise. What exactly does Jesus do as his ministry? How does Jesus relate to other ministers who are faithfully serving God around him—and especially, how does he relate to John the Baptist, who began his own public ministry before Jesus did? What are all these ministers working to accomplish ultimately? Of course, these questions continue forward into our present context as we continue to ask about the nature of true Christian ministry. What are we supposed to be doing, and how much room do we have to innovate? Ultimately, how do our ministries relate to the actual person of Jesus Christ? How are we supposed to understand our relative failures and successes in ministry? What should we think when the church across the street increases, but our own local church decreases?

Where Jesus addressed a seeker in Nicodemus in the first half of John 3, the narrative shifts to allow John the Baptist to teach us about the nature of true ministry. As John the Baptist begins to decrease, those closest to him feel that Jesus has done him a disservice, but the Baptist has a very different perspective. In this passage, we find one of the clearest descriptions in the whole Bible on the activity, the motivation, and the message of true Christian ministry. In our own ministry contexts, this is a message we desperately need to hear as we continue to seek to follow Jesus.

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Please open your Bibles to John, Chapter three. We will be studying this morning John 3:22-36.

22 After this Jesus and his disciples went into the Judean countryside, and he remained there with them and was baptizing. 23 John also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim, because water was plentiful there, and people were coming and being baptized 24 (for John had not yet been put in prison).
25 Now a discussion arose between some of John's disciples and a Jew over purification. 26 And they came to John and said to him, “Rabbi, he who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you bore witness—look, he is baptizing, and all are going to him.” 27 John answered, “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. 28 You yourselves bear me witness, that I said, ‘I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.’ 29 The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. 30 He must increase, but I must decrease.”

31 He who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks in an earthly way. He who comes from heaven is above all. 32 He bears witness to what he has seen and heard, yet no one receives his testimony. 33 Whoever receives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true. 34 For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. 35 The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand. 36 Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.John 3:22-36, ESV

This is the word of the Lord. When I was in college, I had a couple of very good friends who were getting married, these are people I love dearly. I may have shared this story before, but it has particular relevance as we studied the passage before us today.

As I was at the rehearsal the night before, I was an usher in the wedding, and so I was kind of there, not really involved, but sort of there to observe what was happening. The bride and the groom were going through the ceremony of all that was going to happen, and they came to talk about the sand ceremony they were going to participate in. Now maybe you've seen one of these, or maybe you haven't.

A sand ceremony is where the bride and the groom bring containers of sand, different colored sand, maybe red and blue, or they're bringing different colors, and that is a part of the ceremony, they take their two containers and combine them together at the same time into one container. The idea behind this symbol is that you could sooner more easily disentangle the various colors of sand from this new container of completely mixed sand then you could disentangle the lives of these two people who are getting married. It would be easier to separate the colors of sand than these two lives that are getting married.

Well, the bride was a woman I have a lot of respect for. I don't think she knew what she was saying, but as she was talking and they were preparing for this and going through this, asked the pastor, well, you know, we're still going to be individuals, shouldn't we probably keep back a portion of this sand as we do it? The pastor was a little awestruck, I think, for a moment, and I think maybe too graciously, he said, sure, we could do that and they went along with it. Sure enough, the next day they kept back a portion of the sand in the sand ceremony.

Now again, I think these are two well-meaning people who didn't know what exactly they were symbolizing, because the fact of the matter is in a marriage you just can't separate two parts from each other. That's the whole point of marriage. You're thoroughly given one to another. In fact, there's a word for trying to keep part of yourself back from your marriage, it's called infidelity. It's not something you want to be a part of.

Well, that is true in marriage and God gives us marriage as a picture of what is even more true in our relationship to Christ. Christ doesn't ask for pieces of us, just a piece here or a piece there. Maybe just our minds, or maybe just our bodies or something along those lines. He actually demands everything from us. Our minds, our hearts, our souls, our spirits, our bodies, every last bit of us. The call to discipleship, Jesus says, is the call to lay down your life to follow Jesus wherever he leads you.

In this passage, we're seeing what true ministry looks like. It's true in Jesus's day, and it's true still today. This is probably one of the most profound attacks on the nature of true Christian ministry. In fact, we have a man who's going to get ordained in our presbytery as a new pastor here in a month or so, and he's asked me to preach at this ordination. I said, well, can I preach this? I'm actually preparing this sermon right now and this is profound on the nature of true Christian ministry. So that's what I'll be preaching. And a couple of weeks at the at the Fremont PCA church.

In this, we see;
1. The Actions of Ministry
2. The Activity of Ministry
3. The Motivation for Ministry
4. The Message of Ministry

The way this works together tells us the sum total that Jesus wants all of you. Let's look at how this works.

Let's start here with the observation that this is the only point in the entire Bible where we read of Jesus's ministry of baptism during his earthly ministry. During his lifetime, Jesus we read here, was baptizing. Now, a small caveat, if you look down the page at John 4:2, we read that Jesus himself wasn't the one who is administering baptism in the way that John the Baptist was administering baptism. Jesus commissioned his disciples to baptize on his behalf and Jesus oversaw this ministry of baptism. Yet it's ascribed here to Jesus. This is Jesus's baptism that he's practicing during his earthly ministry.

Now, this is again the only place in the entire Bible that we read about Jesus baptizing during his ministry on Earth. Which is remarkable because we know that at the end of Jesus's time here on Earth, right before he ascended into heaven, after his life, after his death, after his resurrection, when he's giving final instructions, a commission, the Great Commission to his disciples, what does he tell them? He tells them to baptize.

He says, "Go therefore into all nations make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you to observe. For lo, I am with you always even to the end of the Earth." That's in Matthew chapter twenty-eight. Baptism is a part of the way that we, the church, are instructed to make disciples.

We also know that baptism happens at the very beginning of Jesus ministry. Ironically, the Gospel of John is the one gospel that doesn't explicitly tell us that Jesus was baptized. If we look closely at John 1:23-24, we recognize that it's happening there. If you compare this text to what's happening in Matthew, Mark and Luke, it's just John doesn't explicitly tell us this. We know that Jesus himself was baptized by John the Baptist, but here is the only place in the entire Bible where we read that baptism was a part of Jesus's ministry. Jesus' public ministry consisted then of two parts, teaching and preaching God's word and baptizing.

Now this is a little surprising if we forget about this because, well, it might depend on where you're coming from. But you may be from a tradition of Christianity where baptism was overemphasized. Where baptism was the thing that if you're baptized, if you go through and participate in the sacraments and you make sure that the external parts of your behavior, the way that you exercise publicly in the sight of all your religion, is the main thing. That as long as you fully check off all of the to do's and definitely refrain from not doing the to not do things, then you'll be fine. As long as you manage your external behavior, things will be great, including and especially baptism.

On the other hand, you may come from a Christian tradition where baptism was really undervalued under emphasized. It was sort of the awkward elephant in the room. We're not really sure why we baptized. In fact, Christianity would probably be the better if we didn't do this weird thing with water, or especially that weird thing with bread and wine. Yet Jesus tells us to do it, and so we just sort of do it anyway.

In both of these cases, we can tend to overemphasize one thing or the other. If we under emphasize baptism, maybe we overemphasize teaching, doctrine, theology. So that we start to think that the only thing that matters is not whether we've been baptized, not whether we present our bodies to anything that Jesus is calling us to do, but simply what's going on in our minds. As long as our minds are in the right order then we think that's all Jesus wants from us. On the other hand, if we come from a place where our external actions are overemphasized, including baptism, we might think that as long as I'm doing the to do list and refraining from the don't do list, then I will be just fine. We overemphasize our external things; over emphasize our bodies, overemphasize our minds.

Jesus gives us a ministry of word to inform our minds and of sacraments to feed and nourish and cleanse our bodies. In other words, what Jesus says, you can't give him just a sliver of yourself. You've got to give him everything. Jesus commands that you give him all of you. You don't hold a piece back that's called infidelity. Jesus commands your mind, your body and where this is going, is it the bigger piece that Jesus commands is your heart, where all of this flows from.

You see you can have the right theology and be a hypocrite. You can try to do the right things on the outside and be a hypocrite. You can combine theology and the right set of actions and be a hypocrite. Because what Jesus wants from you is every part of you, that when you obey him in what he teaches, it's from your heart. When you obey him in what he commands you to do, it's from your heart. Jesus wants every last piece of you. Here's where this gets tricky. Here's where the rubber meets the road.

So we can do these actions in ministry to teach to baptize whatever. Where this gets hard is where we start to get faced with loss. That's exactly what's happening to John the Baptist. John the Baptist had been teaching and baptizing. Just as in the Great Commission, what are the ways we make disciples? Through baptizing and through teaching. This is still the ministry. There's a continuity here between the ministry all the way from John the Baptist through the Earthly ministry of Jesus, all the way to what we do in the church. We teach and preach God's word and we baptize to make disciples, to make followers of Jesus.

Here's what happens with John. John used to be the big show. John the Baptist used to be the big deal. He used to be the destination event in the wilderness, which I guess is a pretty important kind of a thing. What's happening here is Jesus is now on the scene. Jesus has himself undergone baptism by John the Baptist. Jesus is starting his public ministry of preaching and teaching, performing miraculous signs. He's talking to people in private conversations like Nicodemus, and as we'll see next week, Lord willing the Samaritan woman at the well. He's starting to teach publicly is the sense that we're getting. Jesus sets up baptism shop just a little bit down the river from John.

Now we read in verse twenty-five that a discussion arose between some of John's disciples. John still retained some of his disciples and a Jew over purification. So probably what this Jew, we don't know who this Jew is, but a Jew over purification. Probably the question is well, which is the baptism that I really need, is it John's baptism or is it Jesus's baptism? Which is the effective one, which will really just make sure that I enter the Kingdom of God? They're discussing and disputing over this.

The disciples all this time have seen the crowds that formally came entirely to them start to become diverted to Jesus instead. They come to John frustrated that their influence, their position, their authority is diminished. They say in verse twenty-six, "Rabbi he who was with you across the Jordan", that upstart guy, "he who was with you across the Jordan", they don't even name Jesus, "to whom you bore witness". There's a sense there where, like, didn't you know what you were doing? You gave away all your authority when you bore witness to Jesus. That was a foolish mistake. People interpreted that as meaning that Jesus was more important than you are, John, and you've been around longer than he has in ministry. "Rabbi he who was with you across the Jordan, to whom you bore witness. Look, he is baptizing." That's your shtick. "And all are going to him."

If we are giving a part of ourselves to Jesus in our outward actions, in our theology, in something in our service, whatever it is, the time will come where we will be pressed upon. Where Jesus will begin to squeeze the thing that we don't want to give to him, where Jesus will begin to press on that to see where our heart is.

John's influence is waning. The question is, does John want his authority, his power, his popularity? Or does he want Jesus? These four verses, twenty-seven to thirty, work on committing them to memory. These are some of the most profound things ever uttered about true Christian ministry.

John actually gives us strategies here where we can test the motivations of our heart. We saw the activities, teaching and baptizing, but now we test the motivation the heart. Not just our head, not just what our hands do, but what our hearts think, by asking ourselves, can we say the same thing that John says when our influence starts to drop?

Look at what John says in verse 27, he says, "A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven." This is the first issue that John the Baptist raises. Now, we'll stumble, if we try to understand this verse as though the person refers to one thing and the one thing given from heaven is another thing, maybe that's baptism or something else? What does it mean to be given from heaven? Who does heaven refer to? Is that God, the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit? What are we talking about? If we try to do that, we'll trip up on this verse because that's not what John is giving.

He's really giving what Don Carson his commentary says. It's really a maxim, it's a general principle. It's this idea of a wisdom, a nugget of wisdom for living. He says, look, there's not one thing that any of us have that isn't given to us by grace. Nothing you have is yours by possession by right. All that you have is given to you temporarily as a stewardship entrusted to you by grace.

Loss always hurts, but loss always hurts more when Jesus has to pry things out of our clenched fingers. John is saying a person can't receive even one thing unless it has given him from heaven. The practical strategy that John gives here for fighting discontentedness in life in ministry and whatever, is that John flips the script. He says, look, I am not trying to count up all of the things that have been taken from me. I lost this at this point. I lost that at this other point. Now I'm losing my influence to Jesus.

Instead, he flips the script and says, look, all that I have is a gift. Instead of trying to be angry about the things that I'm one by one losing. I want to instead thank God for his provision and grace and gift throughout my life in ministry. It all comes by grace.

A few months ago, we study the letter to the Philippians, and toward the end, Paul says, be anxious of nothing. Are you worried? Are you concerned and anxious about the things that you might be losing in life? Well, Paul says, be anxious of nothing. Well, easier said than done right, Paul? Well, he says, you need to take that stuff to prayer. Be anxious of nothing but in everything by prayer and supplication. Then he says, look, with thanksgiving, make your request known to God.

Don't go to God and say, OK, God. Here are the 15 things that I need from you now. Go, give them to me. I deserve them. I need them. Instead, Paul says, start your prayers first with thanksgiving. When you need things, say God, I have things that I need, but before I go there, I want to stop and thank you for all the ways that you have provided for me. That totally changes our mindset.

When we trace the way in which God has provided for us, has been faithful to us, has met our needs, even when we saw no way that that was going to be a possibility on the front end, that totally changes the way we approach God. Flip the script and practice thankfulness as the first strategy of fighting discontentedness.

Then look at verse 28. Again, testing the motivation of our hearts, John says, "You yourselves bear me witness that I said, I am not the Christ, but I have been sent before him.' John the Baptist is saying, look, you know this, you've been around me. I never once said I was the Christ. In fact, I said frequently that I am not the Christ. I have said explicitly on multiple occasions, and we saw this originally.

That was our first introduction to John the Baptist in this gospel, remember in verse 19 a delegation of religious leaders were sent out in the wilderness to figure who this scruffy John the Baptist was. This guy who was baptizing and eating locusts and honey and wearing camel skins out in the wilderness. Who was this man? Well, he says, I'm not the Christ. That was the first thing he testified to.

What John the Baptist is getting at, the practical strategy we see here is that we are a confessional people. God created us to be confessional. When we speak things out loud, it has a formative impact on us. During the Korean War, the American Armed Services encountered something that they had not previously encountered. They were seeing some of their prisoners of war go into prison camps, particularly those who were under the authority of the communist Chinese, and they were coming out of them broken. They were coming out of them, brainwashed. They no longer wanted to be Americans. They hated America. They had defected entirely, and that had never happened before. We had never seen that in the history of our country, where many of our armed servicemen were suddenly flipping to the other side. They were trying to figure out what on Earth was happening there.

Well, the strategy was remarkably and diabolically brilliant. They started by getting American prisoners of war just to say something innocuous, something really simple, something easy, like, well, America isn't perfect. Now that's true. I would say that America has problems. I mean, you'd be just foolish not to say that America isn't a perfect place. They would try just to start with that simple statement across their lips. Don't just listen to me say it. The only thing I want you to do is to tell me that America isn't perfect.

From there that opened the gate to all kinds of things because then they said, OK, I don't want you to renounce America and American ideals. I'm going to instead give you someone else's confession. The only thing I want you to do is just copy down their confession. It's not yours, it's not going to hurt anything. You're just copying down, writing down what someone else has written.

Well, through that act of speaking and writing that began a process that ended in the total brainwash of our prisoners of war, because God created us to be a confessional people. What we speak shapes us in significant ways. Now the problem is when we start to speak the wrong things too frequently.

How often have you found yourself humming or whistling or even singing a jingle for a company that you heard on the radio? Then suddenly, at the end of the day, you can't figure out why you want so desperately to eat fried chicken. Well, it's because you have been speaking their script and its formative on you. It shapes you to be a consumer and to live life with a consumer mindset.

The only antidote is to speak the truth, we are confessional people. This is why we gather week after week and what do we do? Do you sit out there passively and watch what's happening from up front? I know I'm long winded, but for a lot of the service up to now, you all have been speaking, haven't you? You've been singing. You've been speaking God's words. You've been participating in prayers, because when it comes across your lips, God shaped you to be formed by that.

When we confess, I am not the Christ, but I worship him, that shapes us to be prepared that when Jesus in his office as the Christ, as the king takes things from us, we're able to revert to what we have spoken many, many times before. I'm not the Christ, I worship him.

The third practical strategy for evaluating our hearts comes in verse 29. John the Baptist says, "The one who has the bride is the bride groom, the friend of the bride groom, who stands and hears him rejoices greatly at the bride groom's voice. Therefore, this joy of mine is now complete."

What John is saying is that ministry isn't a zero sum game. So there's a tendency, you know Mike prayed just a little bit ago about the increase that God's given Harvest. We have seen a lot of new faces. A lot of people have been joining. We've had the privilege of baptizing three children in rapid succession here at the church. That is a wonderful grace. We're thankful for that.

Yet we can start looking around and it doesn't take long to find other churches that are growing faster and becoming bigger and hiring more staff with bigger budgets, seeming to have a bigger platform than we do. We have two options in those cases. Either we look at ministry as a pie and those people are cutting into our portion of the pie. Then there'll be nothing left for us. We get frustrated and we try to figure out ways consciously or subconsciously to undercut what those other churches are doing.

John says, look, that's not the way to look at it. You're seeing those other churches as in direct competition with us. That's not the case, we are all the friend of the true bridegroom. None of the people in our church belong to the leadership of the church. I don't own a single one of you. Jesus does. Jesus is the bridegroom. The job of the pastor and the elders and all of us together one another is to care for one another and keep one another pure for Christ. When we start trying to cling to people, it is as inappropriate as the best man making an advance on the bride is what John the Baptist says. It's not a zero sum game. These other churches are our comrades in arms, not our competitors.

So in verse 30, John says, "He must increase, but I must decrease." Can your heart say that? If your life, your ministry has been about what you do for Christ, what you think about Christ, then when Jesus questions your heart and squeezes on something that's dear to you, it's going to be difficult. You're going to have to rethink this. You're going to have to work through this, and some of you are in that situation right now. It's not like we can just sort of quickly fix this kind of a thing, so that will be good to go for the rest of our lives. No, Jesus deliberately leads us into places where he knows he's going to test things that we're holding on to too tightly and he does this, listen to this, as a gift. It comes from heaven. Because ultimately, if you cling to something other than Jesus, if that is the one thing, you will give up anything, including Jesus, in order to possess, and you cannot have Jesus. Which means that you cannot have eternal life.

So one by one and one way or another, God in our discipleship leads us to give up either actually or in our hearts the things that we cling to because he loves us. Look at what John says in versus thirty-one to thirty-six, this shifts from John the Baptist to John the Evangelist writing. John the Evangelist is here summarizing all that he's written, all that Jesus talked about in his conversation with Nicodemus. All that he wrote in the prologue, chapter one versus one through eighteen.

John is saying, "He who comes from above is above all. He who is of the earth belongs to the earth and speaks in an earthly way. He who comes from heaven is above all. He bears witness to what he has seen and heard, yet no one receives his testimony. Whoever receives his testimony sets his seal to this, that God is true. For he whom God has sent utters the words of God, for he gives the Spirit without measure. The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.

The crux of the matter and John is writing this whole gospel, so we won't miss it, it comes up again and again and again in several contexts through several conversations, according to several miracles. John wants us to see that unless we have Jesus, we do not have eternal life.

Now eternal life, John is not talking about a sort of everlasting existence. We die, we wake up, suddenly then we exist as though things were life as usual, business as usual, forever and ever. That's not what eternal life means. Eternal life isn't perpetual existence after death. Eternal life is a quality of living where we are rightly reconciled to God.

Understand, you and I were originally created to be temples of the living God. God dwelling in us as vessels of purity. But through sin, when sin entered the world, the spirit of God was ripped away from us, because the spirit of God is too pure to dwell sinful dwelling places. Which is why God began the world's greatest renovation project. A project that requires not just that we make incremental improvements on our theology or that we make incremental improvements in managing our behavior, but that God actually has to give us a brand new birth that Jesus talks about, by the power of the spirit so that we can become a new creation in which God himself can dwell.

Jesus, when he's praying to his father in John 17:3 defines eternal life, he says, "and this is eternal life", to his father, "that they may know you the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent."

Life is living in reconciled relationship to God. If you don't have that, you're missing. You're incomplete. You're falling short. You don't have the bearings you have to live out life to bear the weight of challenges and trials that come your way. You continue to cling to things that are fragile and fractured and will break under your weight and disappoint you again and again.

If you have life in Jesus, if you come to him through faith, recognize that he is the Son of God, that his life, death and resurrection were not just a temporary tour of Earth, but it was God's plan to redeem the heavens and the Earth. If you look on Jesus in that way and come to him in faith saying, Jesus, I'm a broken wretch saved me. He'll do it. He will do it. That's the promise of the gospel. Not to those who have the perfect theology, not to those who manage their behavior well enough. Rather to those who come to Jesus Christ in faith, renouncing everything they have in order to gain him.

Do you know, Jesus? Do you love him? Maybe the better question is, what is he squeezing right now in your life? I don't want to make light of anyone suffering. But I'll simply ask this, do you recognize that even the suffering Jesus brings into your life is not a waste of time? It's not a false step. It's not him losing control or grip over the cosmos. It's his gift so that you will love nothing, cling to nothing, choose nothing more than him. Jesus loves you and he wants you body, soul, mind, spirit, the totality of your personhood. He'll stop at nothing to gain it, not even his own death on the cross. Which is for you, for the forgiveness of sins. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life. Whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.

Pray with me. God, we have real pain in our lives. But God, we ask that you would teach us by your grace to see the ways in which you are leading us through that. To see the ways in which it's all measured, nothing comes from us that doesn't come from your hand. That what you are doing now is a comfort and a blessing to give us Jesus and not mere torment. Father, we know that this is sealed in the blood of your own son, that Christ himself suffered fully for us. We pray, God, that you would give us the mind of Christ. To seek the joy beyond the suffering in eternal life that we have in reconciled relationship with you. We asked this in Christ's name. Amen.