Today we're going to be looking in Luke chapter one, and I'm going to read that in a little bit. But to tell you that story, I have to back up. Like, I have to go backwards, like way back. Like, we have to go back a thousand years to understand this because we read this Christmas story and all the stuff surrounding it and we look at all of that and it gets kind of familiar over time. Sometimes, like I look in my scripture, I usually put little marks around the edge of the passage so I don't like get lost when I'm up here trying to read it.

And I mark it in my Bible, just these little brackets. And around the Christmas story, it's just lines everywhere from years of using that same Bible for preaching. And it's like, none of them make sense. I'm like, I don't even know. I'm going to have to make sure to stay in my markers.

You know, there's just marks all over the page. Like, I've preached these passages multiple times. Both Christmas and Easter get more airtime from pastors and their sermons than pretty much any other passage in scripture. And so every year we come to this and it's like, well, what, what, what's not like the new angle to show. But Lord, how is this fresh and new in my life today?

And how can I bring something to those people that you've called me to preach to and to share the message with? How can we look at it in some new way that it would show us what God is doing today? So to look at this story and the way I've been reading it and studying it coming up to today is I realized that there's some deep rooted history that was happening at the time of Luke chapter one. So going a thousand years back, you had King David. We looked at him a few weeks ago.

He is a second king over the nation of Israel. And his son Solomon, the third king was the one that built the temple to God. Before the temple, they had been worshiping God at a thing called the Tabernacle. There was a time before the kingdom was established. The nation of Israel was kind of mobile.

They were nomadic. They were moving from through the wilderness. After they had been slaves in Egypt, they left Egypt and God brought them out. With his miraculous and mighty outstretched right hand, he brings them out of Egypt and then they immediately lost faith in God. They immediately said, well, God was strong enough to do that, but I don't know if he's strong enough for what I'm going through today.

Have you ever Been there. I've seen God work in my past. I know that he's real. I just don't know that today he's really going to come through for me than the thing that I need today. I know you don't want to raise your hand and admit that, but you've probably been there at some point.

We say it in things like this, lord, could you please heal me or this person of this thing. But if you don't want to, nevertheless, may your will be done. We're not really praying a prayer of submission to God's will. We're actually praying a faithless prayer of doubt. Many times, I'm not accusing everyone that's ever said that, but many times you are truly being submissive to the will of God.

But so many times we just say, I don't know if God's going to come through on at this time. And so we just kind of give him an out clause. So that, that way we say, well, I still protected my faith. You know, God didn't. He didn't not answer the prayer.

He didn't not do it. It just wasn't his will. Sometimes we don't actually have enough faith today to believe that God is going to do what he said he'll do. And so the Israelites were living that out. They were living that story.

They had seen his miraculous outstretched right hand through the different plagues in Israel, through the parting of the Red Sea, through the covering up of the Egyptians that were following them. They were covered up in the water and they were protected from them. They had seen all of that. And then immediately they step into this land, they send scouts into it and they send scouts there and they say, look and see what the land looks like. And they go there and they say, hey, it's really good.

But there's giants there. They're really strong people, they're really tall, they're really mighty. We looked like grasshoppers to them. That's how small we were in their sight. And we felt that small when we looked up at them.

And so we're not sure we can do it. We're not sure that God has the strength to do that job of getting us there. And so for 40 years they lived in the wilderness and they had this tabernacle. The tabernacle was beautiful. It wasn't just a tent.

I mean, it had like five different layers of different materials. There were gold and bronze and all these different things. And it was set up so that the people could meet God there, offer their sacrifices and Offerings and worship God at the tabernacle, the house of the Lord. But as Israel became settled into the land and they went through what we had gone through, a couple of them before the period of judges. They had the period of judges where somebody would kind of call Israel back in a revival of sorts.

They would call them back to worshiping and following God. And they would also bring a military victory over their oppressors. And as they would do that, they would return to worshiping God properly for a generation or so. Well, then they decided they wanted a king. And so God gave them King Saul and then King David.

And as King David is there, he says, I'm living in a house, a palace. It's paneled, it's decorated, it's nice. It's kind of not forever, but permanent. It's long lasting. And God's still in a tent.

That's not okay with me. He says, why should I live in a glorious palace? And we're moving God around in a tent still. Let's give him a house. So it was seen that David had this desire, but I believe it was a desire that God had put in his heart to say, you know what?

I want to show the honor and respect to God that is due to him. And so David builds. He sets out to build the temple, but God says, not you. Like I want to do this, but not you. You've been a man of bloodshed, a man of war.

Even though he was a man after God's own heart, God said, I want a man of peace to be the one to build my temple. God, even though at times he sends his people into war, in the scriptures, he's a God of peace. He's a God that desires his people to live in peace. Jesus said, blessed are the peace makers. Not peacekeepers, not peaceable people, not people that kind of like shy away from any conflict and say, no, I just want peace.

It actually takes work to achieve peace. And God said, blessed are the peacemakers. So the people of Israel, David, he wants to build a temple. But God says, you won't be the one to do it. Solomon will.

So what David does is he begins stockpiling materials, stockpiling precious metals that they will need for some of the different utensils and things. He piles up money, gold, all this stuff to make to pay for the work that's going to happen. He designates different people for it. He specifies people that would be used as craftsmen and artisans to do different things within the building of the temple. And then he gets it all Ready.

And he tells Solomon what to do. And he's like, here's the plan, I've set it all out for you. In other words, the permits are pulled and the drawing, the blueprints are drawn, all that stuff, it's ready to go. You're the one to do it, Solomon. But one of the other things that David did, and we kind of miss this sometimes.

If you've read through the scriptures in the Old Testament and you've looked at this is one of the things David did was he re tasked the Levites. The Levites was one of the 12 tribes of Israel. And he retasks them for a new role or new task, new jobs that they'll have to do. Because up to this point their job has been to, to pick up camp for the house of God. The biggest part of their job is to disassemble the tent of the Lord when it's time to move it to a new place and to care for the articles of it, to carry the Ark of the Covenant.

By the way, I caught my own typo. Before any of you gives me some background on it, I just want to tell you I caught it too. I said that Zechariah was ministering with where in the inner, near the tent where the Ark of the Covenant would be. There was no Ark of the Covenant at the time of the temple. I was just throwing that out there just to mess with you guys.

No, I'm just kidding. I typed that in there probably early in the morning sometime when I was writing this book as my guess. But anyway, the Ark of the Covenant had been gone for a while at this point, so just wanted you to know I caught it too. And if you didn't catch it, you need to be more of a Bible nerd. I don't know.

So anyway, the, the Levites had been moving the tabernacle and setting it up and taking it down and setting it up. And that was their job. But now when there is going to be a temple, a permanent structure with kind of fixed items and articles in there, they need a different job. They're still important. Their job is still ministering in the house of the Lord.

So what David says is you're still going to do the ministry that God designated your tribe to do. The Levites see, they were prepared for by the tithes and offerings they were provided for. I mean by the tithes and offerings, they were provided for by the sacrifices that people would bring and all these different things the Levites were provisioned for so that they didn't have to work their own fields. They didn't have an inheritance among the people as far as having fields or land for their flocks to graze. Even though they did have work that they did, that wasn't their primary livelihood.

The people of Israel gave so that the Levites were able to devote themselves in ministry in the house of the Lord. In fact, one time we had looked a few months ago when we were going through the Nehemiah series, we realized that Nehemiah had gone back home. We talked about this last week. He had gone back to Babylon for a while and then he. As he was gone, they had failed to bring in their tithes and offerings and the house of the Lord was falling into disrepair.

Already within that first generation after the temple was rebuilt, and namely the Levi, or I mean, yeah, the Levites, including people that worked there, the gatekeepers, the temple guards and the singers. The people that were singers and songwriters, like David was a singer songwriter. We use that term today for people that usually it's just like a. A guy or a gal with a guitar and they write weird songs. You know, you're like, yeah, they're a singer songwriter.

That means they're never really going to have a record deal. That's what singer songwriter means. They might be really fun to listen to, not going to have a record deal. LAUGHTER APPLAUSE Ha, ha, ha. Okay, got it.

So that's a singer songwriter, but David was a worship singer songwriter and the Levites were as well. And that was part of some of their job, was to be these people that dwelt, marinated, just lived in the presence of God. They wrote out of what God had given them in their soul, and they wrote it out and they taught the people to sing songs of worship to God. And one of the things that's happening here in Nehemiah's time is they hadn't been provided for, so they had to go back to work. They had to go back to.

They had to find some field to work in, to provide for themselves. Well, David had set it up where they would have provisions, where they would have their primary job to be in the house of the Lord. Now, that was 400 years before our narrative in Luke. But in Luke, what is going on at the time is it's been another period of 400 years. David had.

Sorry, it was a thousand years. How long ago? David was 400 years before. Our story in Luke was when the last prophet spoke. We saw him last week in Malachi.

Malachi was the last recorded prophet of God. And it's been 400 years since Malachi ministered. David was a thousand years ago. I don't know if I kept saying 400, I don't know why. If I messed you up, I apologize.

Let me set that record straight. I don't remember what I said. A thousand years before Luke, before Jesus is King David. Now, 400 years before the Gospel of Luke, the time of Christ was the last prophet, Malachi. Malachi spoke the words of God to the people of Israel.

And he's the last prophet that God has given a message to speak. Malachi is the last prophet that speaks. And then after Malachi is what we call the silent years. We don't have any word from God during that time. And during that time, the people still continued on, sometimes in strong faith, sometimes in lapses of faith, but the people still continued on worshiping God.

And one of the things they're doing during that 400 year period, which is after they've been taken into exile and brought back, after all that's happened, there's 400 years where God doesn't give them a new message. And during that time, they start building, building synagogues.

These synagogues were local houses of worship, much like we have local church congregations. And the synagogues were a place where they could come and meet and worship God. The synagogues were a place where they could hear the word of God taught on the Sabbath day every week. And they would recite different prayers and things. But it was also a place where the children would come to learn, where they would have their religious education and their schooling.

And so the synagogues became an important part of the local life. Yet the temple of God was still in Jerusalem, and that was primary. And so there were people that had been designated from the Levite tribe to still come and minister at the Temple. And what they would do was they would come on a rotation. They would come, each family, group or clan would come one week at a time.

And then 24 weeks later, they'd come for their second week. So there was 24 groups or courses of priests. And so they would serve two weeks a year, one week at a time. And that brings us to our story in Luke. It's been 400 years.

It's been silenced from God. But the people are still continuing on in their faith. They're meeting in synagogues, they're coming to the Temple for worship, for sacrifices and offerings. They're coming to celebrate the different festivals that God has laid out. Religious life is still going on in Hebrews, by the way.

In Hebrews Chapter one, verses one and two. We're told that God has spoken in different times through various methods, various means, various ways. We see that in the Scriptures where God has spoken both through prophets, sometimes through the visit of an angel, sometimes through dreams and visions, that God spoke through his scriptures, through His Word. Sometimes God even met face to face with. Face to face with somebody, like with Abraham, with Jacob, with Moses, with others.

God would meet with them face to face. So God has spoken to his people in different times, through different ways, but for 400 years, they haven't heard from him. And now God is ready to break this silence. God is ready to speak again. And the people were ready for it.

They were ready to hear from God. They've been maintaining their kind of religious fervor, their religious observance. At the time when Christ was born, people were expecting that God was going to do something.

Have you experienced that in your lifetime? A period, a time period where you say, I think God's on the move in this generation. Have you been there? Are you guys still on vacation? Are you somewhere else?

All right, he's moving all the time. But there are times where God has absolutely like, just like lit a fire under a generation. We saw it with the Jesus movement in, you know, about 40, 50 years ago now. We saw it in revivals that were happening in the 70s all over the country. We've seen different periods of revival.

There was a movement of God then. We've seen it in the, the great reformations. We've seen it in the great awakenings. We've seen it in these different times. And there's many of us that are looking around and we're sensing, we're feeling that God is on the move again in a big way in our world today, that the new generation is coming up, the Gen Z generation, that they are the ones that are leading a charge for a return to Jesus Christ and is happening.

And, and so as we're looking at that, we're getting a sense of what was going on in the, in the Jewish community during the time when Jesus was born. There were people that were ready for it. There was even, we'll see in a few weeks, the two different older folks, that one was named Simeon and one is named Anna. And they were waiting. They're like, I won't die until Jesus comes.

Well, they didn't know his name would be Jesus, but the Messiah. They're like, I won't die till the Messiah comes. Because God had promised them that. And they hung on a long time. And then they received the beautiful fulfillment of that promise.

Well, during this time, there were many faithful servants that are going that are living at the time, and one of them is named Zechariah. Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth were. The scripture tells us, they were faithful. God honoring people like they were righteous and steadfast. Have you ever met a really steadfast Christian, Somebody that you can always count on?

And they never waver. They never waver in their faith. They're always steadfast in their faith. Now add to that righteousness, somebody that's actually, like, godly, you know, like, there's some people that are really steadfast in their faith. They don't have much, and they stay that way their whole life.

Nobody's looking to them for the example. Have you met any of them? Have you sat next to him in church at some point in the past? Have you been that person? Nobody wants to raise hands.

It's good. Okay? Snitches get stitches, I heard. So, you know, you don't want to snitch on people. Like, no throwing elbows, whatever.

But you've seen these folks. They're not the people that are, like, ever excited. They don't raise their hands in worship. They don't. They don't, like, say, all right, praise God, I got a testimony to share.

Pastor, any of this stuff. They're people that are just, like. They're steadfast, all right? There's no excitement in them. There's no religious fervor.

There's no real, like, passion for God. They never share their testimony with their neighbor, their friend. Maybe that's a good thing, because their friend would be like, okay, and why should I care about that? Like, if Jesus is such a big deal to you, show it in your life. Have something exciting about you.

Spiritually speaking. Is that landing? Is that making sense? All right, cool.

Speaker is going to drive me nuts.

It's like Jesus saying, if the children won't be allowed to cry out, you know, he'll have the rocks cry out, you know, I guess, like, if you guys won't get excited, the speaker will speed back. I don't know. I don't know how that works. I guess God can make that happen.

I want to read to you the scripture about this man named Zechariah and his wife Elizabeth and what God was doing. Zechariah is one of these people that I laid all that background out to tell you about him. All that background about what God was doing in the time of David and ever since then, how David had set up for this day. And David didn't know exactly what he was pointing to. But.

But God knew. And God knew that the work that David was doing in organizing the Levites for service in the temple that Solomon would build that one day that God's son Jesus would come to that temple. But before Jesus was born and presented at the temple, that there would be a man that came there to serve all the way back long before David, from the time of Moses and Aaron. Aaron was the one that set up the divisions of the Levites. David was the one that retasked them.

And now it all comes together here in this one place. Let's read. I'm going to be in Luke, chapter one, starting in verse five. During the during the reign of Herod, king of Judea, there lived a priest named Zechariah who belonged to the priestly division of Abijah. And he and his wife, he had a wife named Elizabeth, who was a descendant of Aaron.

That's Moses, brother Aaron. They were both righteous in the sight of God, following all of the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blamelessly. See, they were steadfast, they were righteous, and they were following God. Verse 7. But they did not have a child because Elizabeth was barren and they were both very old.

Now while Zechariah was serving as a priest before God, when his division was on duty, he was chosen by lots of, according to the custom of the priesthood to enter the holy place. To enter the holy place of the Lord and burn incense. Now the whole crowd of people were praying outside at the hour of the incense offering. An angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense, appeared to him. And Zechariah, visibly shaken when he saw the angel, was seized with fear.

But the angel said to him, do not be afraid, Zechariah, for your prayer has been heard and your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son, and you will name him John. Joy and gladness will come to you, and many will rejoice at his birth, for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. He must never drink wine or strong drink. And he will be filled with the Holy Spirit even before his birth. He will turn away many of the people.

He will turn many of the people of Israel to the Lord their God. And he will go as a forerunner before the Lord in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers back to their children in the disobedient to the wisdom of the just to make ready for the Lord a people prepared for him. Then Zechariah said to the angel, how can I be sure of this? For I am an old man and my wife is old as well. The angel answered him, I am Gabriel, who stands in the presence of God.

And I was sent to speak to you and to bring you this good news. And now, because you do not believe my words, which will be fulfilled in their time, you'll be silent, unable to speak until the day these things take place. Now the people were waiting for Zechariah, and they began to wonder why he was delayed in the holy place. When he came out, he was not able to speak to them. They realized that he had seen a vision in the holy place because he was making signs to them and remained unable to speak.

Speak. When his time of service was over, he went to his home. After some time, his wife Elizabeth became pregnant. And for five months she kept herself in seclusion. She said, this is what the Lord has done for me at the time when he has been gracious to me to take away my disgrace among the people.

Been 400 years and. And now God broke his silence. He broke his silence by sending an angel named Gabriel. Anybody want to shout out the last time we saw the angel Gabriel in Scripture, who he appeared to?

No, this is first before this. When is the last time before this that he ever showed up? He appeared to the prophet Daniel. We see Gabriel talking to Daniel, and then we don't see Gabriel again. Until now, when he talks with Zechariah.

I don't know what God had him doing. Like, maybe he was on holiday during that time, I'm not sure. But Gabriel shows up to Daniel, and then a few hundred years later, here he is talking to this man named Zechariah. He's an old man. He's a priest now.

He's a priest. But he also has something that he does throughout the rest of the year because he only serves two weeks, one week at a time as a priest. So other than that, he's a regular guy, so to speak. And he and his wife lived in a place probably that tradition holds is called Ein Kerem. It's in what's called the hill country of Judah, which is south of Jerusalem, geographically speaking.

We think perhaps that he and his wife had two different homes. You might hear a little bit more about that next week. But one that's kind of down in the village and one that's up in the mountains, where you can kind of go in seclusion like. Like a cottage or a cabin and maybe stay there during the summer where it's a little bit cooler. And so this man, Zechariah, he's a man that's been following God faithfully.

He's been following God with a sense of expectancy, but they don't have a child. I think it's been a long time since the last time he prayed for his son. I don't think he had been praying to have a child. I think when the angel tells him that God has heard your prayers, if you'll notice the verse right around that or later on, it says that the people, while he was inside, detained, he was just supposed to be burning some incense in this area, and then he was supposed to come out of there. But as he's doing that, there would have been traditional prayers.

He would have been praying for the welfare of the people of Israel. And so those are some of the prayers that he was praying right at that moment. And it says while he was in there and detained for a long time, the people were outside. There was a gathering of people early in the morning that came to to pray, and they came to seek the God of the children of Israel. And so as these people were there, they're outside praying.

He's inside offering up incense and getting not just a vision, but meeting an angel, the angel Gabriel, one of the highest angels there is. There's different types and classifications of angels, and Gabriel's at the top. In fact, when he says to Gabriel, how can I even be sure of this? See, he's like the Israelites that. That went and they saw themselves in the eyes of the giants and said, how can we know that God's going to help us here?

And he says, how can I know that this will happen? And Gabriel says, well, for one, I'm Gabriel. He's maybe thinking, you should have led with that. You know, like, if you had told me that, I would have known who you are. You're faithful.

Your word is trustworthy and true. But Gabriel says, I'm Gabriel. In other words, like, I don't lie. I'm not making stuff up. And I don't get sent on, like, little errands, okay?

God sends me for the big stuff. If I'm here talking to you, you can rest assured that something big is going to happen. And so he says, now, since you didn't believe God when he sent his word to you by an angel, like, seriously, if an angel shows up, I would probably try to believe that. Although there was a guy named St. Martin of Tours, and I think I shared this recently, but I Just love this story so much. There was a vision that he had.

He believed at first that it was Jesus Christ. And Jesus, the guy that appeared as Jesus to him said, bow down and worship me. And he was about to. And then he says, wait a minute. Where are the nail prints in your hands?

Where is the wound in your side? Where are the wounds in your feet? When I see the marks of the nail prints, I will know it's my Lord. And then it disappeared because it was Satan who had disguised himself to look like Christ. So we have to be on guard for certain.

We have to be aware that sometimes Satan comes as what the Bible calls an angel of light. He looks righteous, he looks pure. But you have to be wary and say, is this truly of God or of the devil? And so Zechariah, he'd had this vision of an angel, and yet he didn't choose to immediately accept the Word. He questioned it.

And he says, how can God actually do that? You see, we're old. We've prayed for a long time for this. But truly, what was going on was something longer than just he and Elizabeth praying for a child. He had been offering prayers in that moment for the consolation of Israel, for the redemption of Israel.

And the angel was saying, God has heard your prayers for Israel. And so as God breaks his silence to him, the interesting thing is that Zechariah doesn't believe him. And so the angel says, now, since you don't believe me, you're going to be silent for a while. God's silence is broken, and Zechariah's is just beginning. For at least 10 months.

Zechariah doesn't talk. It doesn't say exactly how long. But sometime after he came home, his wife was pregnant. And, you know, he probably said, well, God told us we had to, you know, so you can't say no. Anyway, it's my only joke I'll make about that.

I'm sorry. But he. He, like, he does that, you know, she's pregnant. He's silent the whole time. And.

And like, the whole time she's pregnant. And even after the baby is born, he still isn't speaking until. Until they said, hey, we want to name this child Zechariah. And he's like. He writes down his name is John.

And as soon as he did that and affirmed what the angel had spoken, that his name would be John, his lips were loosed. Now, here's what I love about this. He'd been silent against his will, silent for 10 months. He'd been silent for 10 months.

And that means he has a lot of time to listen to God. If he's silent for 10 months, he has a lot of time to hear from God. And so I wonder about this. Like, what would you do if you didn't speak for upwards of a year? Would you just spend time scrolling social media apps and news sites on your phone like you do every day anyway?

And don't say, oh, that's just what the kids do. I've seen some of you guys, I go to restaurants and I see, like, it used to be a few years ago that there was people that be older than me and different generation be like, look at all these people on their phones. They don't talk to each other anymore. I can't go to a restaurant right now and not see somebody at their table just ignoring whoever's with them and just looking on their phones, just playing around. I don't even know what you guys are doing at these things anymore.

I'm so ashamed of your generation. So some of you older people with earphones, sorry, I just turned it back around. Anyway, seriously, like, we just so addicted to that. And if it's not that, it's some other thing that's just pulling our mind, our attention, our focus away from the things of God. But Zechariah spent time, like, paying attention to what God was doing.

That was like the price that he paid for not believing that when God broke his silence to him through the angel Gabriel, his price to pay was that he got the gift of focusing on who God is and on what God was doing. As he's doing that, he begins to meditate on it. And the first thing he says when his lips are loosed, when he's able to speak again, is he begins praising God. And if you read it, it's at the end of chapter one. If you read what he's doing here, you see that he also begins to prophesy a little bit too.

God has given him the prophetic utterance to speak about the things that would soon come to pass. He speaks directly over his son and speaks what God is going to do through him. It's beautiful. He's telling him how great and mighty he will be in the sight of God. And what God's going to use him to do is to prepare and proclaim, Prepare the way and proclaim the actual appearance of the Messiah.

Now, Jesus would be born just a few months after John. They're related. They're cousins of a sort. And. And yet it's John that goes into ministry first.

And he ministers and he starts not only mending the hearts of people, but he begins mending generations. You see, what it said that he will do is draw the hearts of the fathers to their children and the children to their fathers. No more will they look in disdain from one to the other and say, well, it's your fault about this. And I can't believe you do that. By the way.

I was sitting in a barber shop one time and I heard a guy complaining about his kids receiving participation trophies for sports. And I looked at him, I'm like, and whose generation gave them to them? You know, like, they didn't ask for these. You gave them to like, like, you know, I'm like, well, can we stop just like pointing fingers across the generational lines and saying, well, it's you guys fault, you know, that nobody, you know, millennials don't have money to buy a house. It's the boomers fault.

Well, you know, it's the, it's the, it's the generation, whatever, that's ruining stuff by taking all this welfare or whatever. I don't know, you know, it's just like we're always constantly doing that. What John came to do is actually to start saying, you know what, we need each other. Older people need younger people, younger people need older people. And not just like to borrow money from you guys, you know, like, seriously, like it's, you know, anyway.

And so we do all these. We see this need for a generational healing as well. And that's one of the things that John would do. And Zechariah prophesied that over him and said, not only will you do that, but you will point us to the true salvation of God. And John did that.

In fact, one of the things that he did besides calling people to repentance, was he also was on the lookout for the Messiah. He says, at first I didn't know who he was, but the one who sent me on my mission told me. And he's talking about God. The one who sent me on my mission told me that when you see the heavens open up and God descend on him, that'll be the one. And so as John baptizes Jesus, he's aware that that truly is the Son of God, the Messiah, the savior of the world.

And so he points him out to everyone. He says, look, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Everywhere John goes as an adult, after he knows that Jesus is the Messiah, he just starts pointing it out to people. What would the world look like if you and I did that, did you see Jesus at work in that person's life? Did you see Jesus heal that person?

Did you see Jesus bring deliverance to that person struggling with an addiction to drugs or pornography? Did you see what God was doing? Do you see Jesus at work? If we would point those things out, if we would get excited about it, not just be faithful, but actually be an excited Christian, can you imagine the difference that would make to bring the generations together to heal people, to drive them to repentance?

Zechariah and Elizabeth religion was on point and their faithfulness was solid. The devotion of the people in the day was 100%. Or as the young people say, they were keeping it a buck. If you don't understand that, find a young person and ask them what that means. If they don't know, I don't know what to tell you.

It's just something I heard online anyway. No, it's like when they put the little $1 sign, like, yeah, it's 1 00. I'm like, what does that have to do with anything? Now they're keeping it a buck, which is 100. 100%.

That's what it means. They also say no cap a lot.

It means it's true. That's. It's that simple. They didn't put a cap on it, you know, they didn't cover it up. Yep.

So there's your. That's my work to kind of blend the generations together. We're healing the language divide. Don't ask me about the stupid word skibidi. That's the really little generation.

I don't know where it comes from. It's some video.

I wonder how many times we spend time purpose purposefully in silence.

How many times do we spend time setting aside time to be silent before God? Zacharias was involuntary and yet he didn't put it to waste. Even though his silence was given to him by God, he spent that time dwelling on the presence of God in his life and seeing what God was doing in the world. I wonder, I wonder this in my own life if I would spend more time turning off everything in the world, forgetting what's going on and just saying, God, what are you speaking to me today? Remember, God speaks in many different ways.

Speaks through his scriptures. Sometimes he speaks through our traditions. Oh, we come to church. Oh, we have Advent calendar or Advent calendar candles. I'll get the word out eventually.

We have Advent candles, we have Advent wreaths, we have Advent decorations. We do all these different things. We have our different traditions that we follow. And sometimes those traditions can just kind of solidify us and entrench us in, like, being boring. But sometimes what those things do is they actually can keep us grounded in our faith and they keep us in a rhythm and a routine that we rest in that.

And then we say, okay, God, what are you doing today that's fresh and new? Even in an old tradition and an old hope, we find a relevance, a fresh faith and relevance of what you're doing today? And so we. We could choose to spend time turning off all this other stuff, this junk that's going on in our world and. And saying, God, I want to spend time rooted in you.

I want to dig into the traditions that we have. I want to spend time in your word. You know, the word of God is more relevant today than your life, than you've ever known it could be. It's always been relevant in every period of time. But I'm telling you, in your life, it is more relevant than you ever thought it could be.

The word of God, he speaks to you from it today. And as you read it, one of the things that we see is that what John came to do is call the people to repentance. I believe we need to repent today. We need to repent the fact that we might have been faithful to following God and yet so boring as Christians. So just kind of like.

It's just so plain and simple that we just kind of like, just live our faith out in such a bland way that it doesn't spice up the world at all in any way. I challenge you. I encourage you to spend time voluntarily, in silence. I encourage you to spend time just finding a time, maybe as a day, a week, to spend time in a quietness and solitude, in fasting and praying. You realize that fasting weakens your flesh so that you can have God strengthen your spirit.

Fasting is when you. You allow yourself to not be taken over by the physical things that you have become so dependent on so that you will depend spiritually on the God who saves you. You spend time fasting, it might be a meal, it might be a day, it might be several days. You spend time fasting so that you can pray, so that you can spend time spiritually being built up and that you can spend that time focusing on God and what he's doing in your life. As we spend that time, I believe that God begins to speak to us.

John, as he grew up, he knew one thing was true. He looked at his life, and as Jesus was, he pointed him out. And as Jesus is rising to prominence in the hearts and minds of the people, John says, I must decrease so that he can increase fasting. Fasting does that in our lives. It decreases me.

It pulls me down where I'm not focused on me so much. And I focus that on God. I encourage you to incorporate some of these things into your life, that you can draw closer to God, be more useful to him and his kingdom, and that you might, as you spend time dwelling on the things of God, that you would have a testimony to share with others, to point out the Messiah in this world and how useful he is in their life.