The nature of the Baptist’s ministry…

“What then did you go out to see?”

This half verse is from Luke chapter 7 where Jesus is addressing the Jews concerning John the Baptist. He’s asking them what they expected to find when they went to John in the wilderness. Note this, John was in the wilderness.

John was a messenger of Christ’s coming, and he was in the middle of the desert. He was not in King’s palaces or in synagauges or on street corners or in a foreign nation. He was not “where the action was” so to speak. He was mostly alone and isolated. He went away from everything, which is saying a lot if you understand the cultural context and what was currently going on in Israel at that time. John spent years alone in the wilderness preparing his own soul for the coming of the Christ and he spent these years in fasting and prayer. John never went to anybody. He didn’t start a new cell group, he didn’t start a different congregation. From what the Bible has to say about him, it seems like he didn’t even have a community. He wandered in the wilderness, praying. The nature of the ministry of the greatest man born of a woman was, to our standards, fruitless for the most part. He had no members, no staff, no money, and little by way of conversions.

John never went out to see anyone or to do anything. He stayed in the wilderness and cultivated a relationship with the coming Messiah. He neglected the good and common in order to more fully embrace the unseen and the eternal, the promise as yet unfulfilled. John was the greatest man ever born of a woman because he had no other portion than the Christ, nothing else stole his attention or affection.

In this day and age it is rare to even hear of fasting in times of trouble, much less as a lifestyle. But this was John’s primary mode of being, and he was praised by Jesus for it. I wonder when the people of God might see these implications and wake up to the reality that prayer is God’s way of establishing the kingdom. As a kingdom of priests we are required to pull away from the spirit of the world whilst still being and operating in it. I fear we have lost our grit for spiritual things in an age where our five senses are constantly inundated with advertisements and promises of comfort.

If we desire true Christian living, life in the spirit, power in our inner being, and clarity on doctrine that has been so out of reach for a majority of protestants for so painfully long, then I would challenge us to stop doing so much in our own strength and to embrace the life the baptist did. The weakness of God is far superior to our strongest efforts at church growth and evangelism. No one is drawn to cold dead things. But burning fires always catch peoples attention. Will we be burning and shining lamps again, like the apostles and prophets of old? Or will we continue to wrestle with the fear of man and to submit to the worlds sub standard critique of our empty denominationalism??