But how different John's life proved to be. Apparently his parents died before he appeared to the world as the preacher of repentance and he, we assume with good reason that he was an only child, lived his life from that point virtually alone. He was in the desert in the years leading up to his public ministry, living apart, eating a spartan diet, and wearing the simplest clothing. And then, after a meteoric rise to fame, he had a brief public ministry, perhaps only months long, probably not a year, and was thrown into Herod's dungeon for his public condemnation of the morals of that little man.

Apart from the one episode, when from prison John sent his disciples to Jesus to reconfirm his identification of him as the Messiah, we know nothing about John's imprisonment except how it came to an end -- unplanned, unprepared for -- nothing had been said to this point or implied about any execution! -- the jailer came to the door of his cell to tell him that his life was over. The king had moments before promised a dancing girl whatever she wanted and she had asked for John's head. What had he been doing in the hours, the minutes leading up to the sound of the jailer at the door of his cell? And suddenly his life was over, his head was on a platter being carried to the banquet hall.

Looking back on that life of 30 short years, it does not seem to have been an easy life at all, perhaps we wonder even how happy a life it was. Surely he had a warm and loving home in his boyhood, but once a man, for John it was the life of self-denial, solitude, apart from the comforts of human society, and then, at the last, of spiritual struggle and sudden martyrdom. In fact, there is almost nothing in the accounts of John the Baptist's life in the four Gospels that relieves this picture of sacrifice, struggle, and isolation.

I don't say that he was not, in his way, a happy man. I'm sure he was. The joy of the Lord was his strength. But the picture of his life we are given concentrates on those aspects that define him and his ministry, and those are they that remind us that the prophet's life was regularly a hard and difficult one. The hand of the Lord lay heavy upon him.

But, there is nothing unusual about that. Why, it almost seems that the nearer to Christ any man or woman comes, the more he or she must suffer. There are exceptions, to be sure. John did not go as heavily through this world as did Peter and Paul. But, when Augustine said "The world was not overcome by fighting but by suffering," and when A.W. Tozer said, "It is doubtful that God can bless a man greatly unless he has hurt him deeply" we hear, all honest and faithful men and women, hear the clear, bell-like tone of the truth.

The Bible spends a great deal of its time telling us why this must be so, why true faith and suffering must go together, why God's people and Christ's followers to a special degree must go heavily in this world, and why the gospel, the good news, the love of God and the hope of life eternal, carry with them such a burden, but our interest this morning is not to explain but to confess that it is so. And to see that if it were so in the case of a man like John, then surely it must be the case with us. And if it needed to be so in John's case, then we must never complain that it is so in ours.

If a man Christ himself admired so greatly and who served Christ so faithfully had a life so difficult, so taxing, then surely that is a reason not to avoid suffering as much as we possibly can but to wear it about our heads as a crown. I want to have nothing to do, nothing whatsoever to do, with this idea being sold -- I mean sold -- to so many in the church today, that if you have the right kind, their kind of faith in Christ you should go through this world healthy, wealthy, and carefree. Such teaching separates me from every man I want to be, from every life I want to live, not only in Holy Scripture, but in the entire history of the church.

To have the archangel Gabriel announce one's birth, might well have been taken as a sign that only great things were in store for such a boy and such a man. And, then, to have the child, while still in his mother's womb, respond with joy to the presence of the Savior when he was still in Mary's womb, surely would have suggested that a triumphant life lay ahead of this favored boy. Did not Gabriel say that many would rejoice because of his birth, that he would be filled with the Holy Spirit from birth, that he would bring many back to the Lord and that he would go forward in the spirit and power of Elijah to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children?

There is, perhaps, a certain ominous foreshadowing of things to come in Gabriel's instruction to Zechariah that John must not ever drink wine. We learn that there is going to be a particular degree of self-denial required of him. Still, almost every indication early on is of a life of joyful triumph leading on to joyful triumph.

You could never have predicted this life from the intimations given at his birth; never could have predicted when he was in the desert eating his strange food and wearing his strange clothes that in a matter of days his would be a household name in Israel, one of the most influential figures in the national life of the Jews -- so much so that he makes his way into Josephus' history, even though his day in the sun was very short; could never predicted how soon he would be done when the crowds were streaming out of the towns and cities to hear him; how soon he would be dead and by what means and for what reason when he was thrown in Herod's dungeon.

And how wonderfully John exemplifies the Christian life in all of that. How many of us, looking back, are astonished to see what has become of us and how little we could have predicted our present from our past and how little now we can presume to predict our future. John teaches us that God's ways are not our ways and are, in any case, past finding out. John teaches us that a life lived in faithfulness to God's Word will take many twists and turns that no one could have imagined beforehand, that the Christian life of discipleship and pilgrimage is a great adventure primarily because we must stick to a narrow path, full of twists and turns, and we never know what is around the next corner.

I think of all of this in regard to my sister. I will never forget that first call, three years ago now. I was sitting in my office, typing at my computer when the phone rang. She was calling to tell me that she had just got the news from her doctor that he had found something disturbing in a physical examination -- she was 47 at the time -- and that she was going off to another examination to find out if it were in fact cancer, as her doctor suspected. She wanted me to pray for her. And then the next call, saying that it was cancer and a very bad kind of cancer. No one suspected that any such thing would befall her a year before or a day before we got the news. No one imagined that her life in this world would be over before she reached 50 years of age. Or that Robert Murray McCheyne would die before he reached 30 years of age, or Pascal before he reached 40. Who would have thought that the greatest man who ever lived, by our Lord's own testimony, would die scarcely thirty years of age?

Oh, no. Christianity is not the proclamation of comfortable platitudes, it is the personal knowledge of a Sovereign God who does what pleases him in heaven and on earth. We are always wanting to turn it into some tidy ethical system of obedience and reward, but what we are really speaking of in the Christian faith is walking with the Almighty, the infinite, eternal God, who is so far above us, that what is amazing is not that life should be so mysterious to us, but that we should understand any of it at all!

We are not left in the dark, of course. We can understand it -- up to a point. John teaches us that. Our sin and guilt, the Lamb of God who takes sin away, trusting ourselves, our lives, our eternal happiness to him as the principle of life every day, this life as the path to either heaven or hell, this is all clear. What is not so clear is the way that we must walk, the way in which we must practice our faith, the way in which God must test and strengthen that faith -- following Christ when we cannot see what is ahead and cannot feel the touch of his hand -- that is what makes it all so unclear. But, we are walking with the living God Himself, who has his own holy purposes and who works his sovereign will in the pursuit of those purposes. No wonder life is so much more than we might have imagined! You don't know, nor do I know, as this year comes to a close, whether it will be our last; what if I soon learn what my sister learned; young people, what if your life is to be short, not long? Will it 'be crowded with the Master's service as John's was? Or when the day comes will you be found pleading "O, please, not yet; not yet! I haven't done yet what a Christian must do!"

Perhaps some of you are now, in one way or another, struggling with the fact that your life has not turned out at all as you had imagined or had hoped. I cannot explain these developments to you; no one can. The Lord is God! Let all the earth keep silence before him. But I can say this: on this path of completely unexpected twists and turns, you can see ahead of you the footprints of every truly great Christian who has ever lived in this world, even the print of that desert-worn, almost disintegrating sandal of John the Baptist.

III. Third, and finally, John's life is a pattern for our own in that its great meaning and its measure are compressed into short spaces, key moments, and the crises of his life.

This too is so typical of the biblical presentation of a believer's life. True, much that is said about walking with God in the Bible is said in the way of general principles that apply and are to be practiced always, in every time and circumstance of life. Faith, hope, love, obedience -- these are not to be our life only from time to time, but always.

Still, the Bible's entire presentation of the Christian life and, especially its many accounts of the lives of believers, indicates that the measure of a believer's life is more what he or she does in the key moments, at the key points of testing, at the great turning points, at the crises than what he or she is doing day by day and every day. A better way to put it might be to say that the ordinary in the Christian life finds its importance precisely in what it enables a believer to do in the extraordinary moment or period.

In this too John is so typical. We hardly know a thing about his life -- what he did, how he spent his time, what he was like. His whole life, as we can measure it and as the Bible measures it, is a period of some months in which at three critical points he gave glory to God. When the word of the Lord came to him, he got up and came out of the desert and began to preach in the strictest faithfulness to that word. And, then, when the Lord Jesus appeared, he pointed his congregations to him, his disciples to him, and uttered those words, some of the most beautiful, honest, strong, breathtaking words in all the Bible: "he must increase and I must decrease."

Have you ever wondered why John did not himself leave off his work and follow Jesus as one of the Lord's disciples? Wouldn't that have been the most unmistakable way to indicate that he was only the forerunner and that the Messiah had come? Why didn't John leave the desert and the Jordan and follow Jesus himself? I will tell you: Jesus never asked him to; never called him. Jesus came and was baptized by John and received John's salutation as the Lamb of God, and then Jesus took some of John's choicest disciples and he left and went his own way and, so far as we know, never saw John in person again. And yet, John, though seemingly left behind by the very man whose coming he had preached and whose appearance he had waited for so hungrily all this life, and perhaps not altogether sure how to proceed, simply kept on with the work the Lord had given him until, a short while later, he was thrown into prison.

And, the third critical moment, his death. We can only imagine how it was in the prison that night when the executioner showed up at the door of the cell to bring John's life so suddenly, so unexpectedly to its end. But I have no hesitation in telling you that John laid his neck down on that block with no whimper, no cries to be spared, no terror-filled pleas to the man who had been sent on that foul errand. His whole life, unbeknownst to him, had prepared him for that moment.

Perhaps he was given no time to write a note to his disciples, but if he had been, I am sure it would have breathed the same spirit of that note that the covenanter Archibald Campbell, Earl of Argyle, wrote to his daughter-in-law the day of his execution for his loyal service to Christ.

Or, perhaps even better, the spirit of such a man as Donald Cargill, the warrior of the Covenant who said as he approached the scaffold in Edinburgh, "The Lord knows I go up this ladder with less fear, confusion or perturbation of mind, than ever I entered a pulpit to preach." And, then on the gallows, "Farewell, all created enjoyments, pleasures and delights; farewell, sinning and suffering; farewell, praying and believing, and welcome, heaven and singing. Welcome joy in the Holy Ghost; welcome, Father, Son and Holy Ghost; into Thy hands I commend my spirit." [Fair Sunshine, pp. 191-192]

There is the life of John the Baptist. In those moments when he believed and obeyed under the greatest pressure. That is how the Bible measures his life. And it is how it measures ours. We must be everyday in the Word and prayer, in the love of Christ and of his people and in the work of the gospel for this reason before all others, so that when the day of testing comes we will stand and we will prove ourselves the followers of Jesus Christ. Anyone can speak about himself decreasing and Christ increasing when no great sacrifice is being demanded, when no loss of place stands directly before you, when no pain or suffering will be the price of uttering those words. But the man or woman who utters them and means them when they cost a great deal -- that man, that woman is a Christian!

If some of you now find yourselves in such a time, such a difficulty, such a test, such a crisis, take careful note: you have your life in your hands, and what you do now, how you live now, how you give glory to God or fail to do so now -- that is the key to everything. And take heart, my friend, God will count your loyalty now in this moment, for an entire lifetime of loyalty!

You see, this is Christianity, this is faith, this is love, this is true goodness. What we see in John the Baptist. An altogether different thing, an altogether higher thing and nobler thing than most people think Christianity to be. Not a comfortable system, a predictable scheme of life by reason of which we give our good behavior to God and he smiles upon us. But a rumbling, roaring, great adventure, life and death and danger everywhere, walking with a God who loves us and draws near to care for us but who never stops being the Almighty: "How unsearchable his judgments, and his paths beyond tracing out! Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who had been his counselor? Who has ever given to God that God should repay him? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever!"

Give me, my God! a heart as mild
And plain, as when I was a child.
That when Thy Throne is set, and all
These conquerors before it fall,
I may be found preserved by Thee,
Amongst that chosen company,
Who by no blood here overcame
But the Blood of the Blessed Lamb.

And among those who overcame the world and showed us how to overcome it in Christ's name, first among them all is John, son of Zechariah and Elizabeth, Elijah, the forerunner of the Lord.