Well, please turn with me if you will in your Bibles to the Gospel of John in chapter 3. It's page 888 in your Pew Bible, if you're looking for it, John and chapter 3. And if you've been with us for the past several weeks as we have explored John's Gospel, my prayer for you and for myself is that we have been able to see a sense of his glory, a sense of his beauty, and that that glory and beauty of Jesus would become something that's more than just interesting to us, but something that personally resonates within our souls. It changes us from the inside out and leads to a grace renewal in our lives that's spurned on because of what Jesus has done for us and because of what he has applied to us in the Gospel. So we're aiming at as we go through this exploration through John's Gospel. So with that in view, I want us to take a moment now to read the passage that we have before us this morning. John chapter 3 beginning in verse 22. John says this, after this, Jesus and his disciples went into the Judean countryside and he remained there with them and was baptizing. John also was baptizing at Anon near Salim because water was plentiful there and people were coming and being baptized. For John had not yet been put in prison. Now a discussion arose between some of John's disciples and a Jew over purification. 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. John answered, a person cannot receive even one thing unless it has given him from heaven. You yourselves bear me witness that I said, I am not the Christ but I have been sent before him. 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. He must increase, but I must decrease. 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. Amen. This is God's holy, inspired, and an errant word. And we ask that he'd write its eternal truth upon our hearts this morning. One of the things that you've heard me talk a lot so far as we've gone through John's gospel is the theme of joy. Joy is a prominent theme in John's gospel. I think it's a prominent theme in everybody's life. I think that's true whether you profess to belong to Christ and profess to follow him or whether you have absolutely no idea what you're doing in this church this morning. It's part of human nature, it's part of the way in which we're wired to pursue joy. Even the things that we don't particularly enjoy doing, we do it because the alternative would not bring us joy. You may work at a job that you don't particularly like that much, but you do it because it's much better than being unemployed and not making any money at all and having the alternatives of that. And so we cultivate some relationships and avoid others and we pay our bills and we do our responsibilities and we come to church where we don't come to church and we do it all because we're pursuing joy. And that's what we're made to do. And I don't think that's inconsistent with what Christianity is all about. Christianity is about, in large part, our joy. A lot of people have this view of Christianity that it's not really about our joy at all. It's not really about our contentment. It's about God's glory alone at the expense of our joy. Our joy is an irrelevant aspect of our Christian life. And there's something about God's glory and pursuing that in our joy which can seem to be mutually exclusive, like they have nothing to do with one another. That doesn't necessarily seem to be the case when we plumb the depths of Scripture. John the Baptist, one of the things that he's saying here in verse 30 is that Jesus must increase and he must decrease so that his life is to be all about Jesus blazing at the center of it. He needs to see God's glory. He needs to take great joy and contentment in that and that he needs to have his self-aggrandizement just die and die quickly to get over himself and to behold and to zero in on the glory of God. But the reality is this, that when we see Jesus Christ as He truly is in His glory, God gets the glory and we get the joy. That's the great thing about the Christian life is that we're about pursuing joy. We pursue it as we lay hold of Jesus Christ and who He is and what He has come to do. That's a major point in John's gospel. And I think it's a major point in this passage because joy and contentment and pleasure, all those things come to us and we become satisfied when we know how God has made us and when we accept where He has placed us in life and when we begin to make much, much more of Him than we make of ourselves when we begin to see Him as glorious. I was talking about this last week, our greatest problem in life and that problem is our sin. It's the sin that stuff that alienates us from God, the corruption in our hearts. The answer to that problem does not lie within us. It lies outside of us, it lies in Christ alone. And the same thing is true for our joy. Joy comes to us when we see the beauty and the glory of someone outside of us and that someone is Jesus Christ. Many of you know, I grew up in California. God alone knows how I ended up in Mississippi. But I grew up about an hour and a half drive from Eosimony National Park, born and raised there my whole life and had never once been to Eosimony until about two or three weeks before I left to go off to college. So a friend of mine and I decided to go up there. We went to Eosimony and I'll never forget it as we're driving into the Eosimony Valley. We make this corner and all of the sudden there is this spectacular view of Half-Dome and El Capitan that just utterly takes your breath away. I mean, I'd been to the mountains a million times and have seen plenty of beautiful sights and I'd seen nothing like this. It was astonishingly beautiful. And when I saw it, I was not complaining that there was no Starbucks nearby that couldn't meet my caffeine addiction or that the weather was five degrees too hot or too cold. I was just taken away with the beauty of what I had seen. And I think that's the heart of John the Baptist in this story. And we've already seen that. But John the Baptist sees who Jesus is and he's blown away with them. He recognizes Jesus for who he is, that he's the Lamb of God who's come to take away the sin of the world and in him is light and there's no darkness at all. And so what he's discovered is that the way up is the way down. The way to know and experience the joy that God desires us to lay hold of is to make much of him and not just to think less of ourselves but to think of ourselves less. I think that's what he's getting at here when he says in verse 30 that Jesus must increase and John the Baptist must decrease. And that's about the most mature set of words that has ever been spoken in human history. I can't imagine a more mature thing for someone like John the Baptist to say. It shows that the truth of who Jesus was and the glory of who Jesus was, it really taken root in his heart. It wasn't an academic exercise to him. He laid a hole in his person and it changed and from the inside out. He knows that the way to accomplish our chief and highest purpose in life is to do what? To glorify him and to enjoy him forever. So the pursuit of God's glory and the pursuit of our joy, they go hand in hand. They go together just like the great theologian forest gum told us, like peas and carrots. They're inseparable. Don't miss that. And the way that John the Baptist was able to speak these words with any measure of sincerity is because he knew who Jesus was and he knew what his own role was and he knew who Christ was and what Christ's role was and he was completely satisfied with that so his contentment rested. I don't know if you noticed this in this story. This story could have been a complete disaster. I mean, it could have been the biggest junior high drama that anybody's ever seen and it would have happened if jealousy would have cropped up in John's life. If he would have become jealous of who Jesus was and what he was doing and the people who were beginning to follow him because there are two baptisms happening here in this story. There's a John the Baptist baptism that's happening on one side and there's a Jesus Christ baptism that's happening on another side. And we look at verse 26 and John the Baptist disciples are coming to him and they're saying, look, all these people who used to be following you are starting to leave you and they're going over to Jesus. I mean, John's ministry is shriveling up. It's starting to die because Jesus' ministry is taking off and wouldn't it be our natural reaction to become jealous about that, to become envious, to become bitter and that's not John the Baptist's attitude at all. He's like, I'm not the group. I'm not the one that this is all about. I'm not the Christ. I'm just the best man in this story. Jesus is the groom. People need to be going to him because he's the redeemer. He's the savior. He's the glorious one. I'm just the voice calling out in the wilderness pointing you towards him. That's what my whole ministry has been about. My ministry exists so that people would leave me and that they would be pointed over to Jesus. There's a remarkable humility that comes from him. John the Baptist is the best man and the wedding isn't about the best man. In America, it's not even really about the groom. It's about the bride. The groom's just a prop. And the sooner the groom figures that out, the better off he is. The point is that the best man exists for the sole reason of supporting the groom and to point people's attention to him. And in this story, Jesus is the one who's the groom. John's gaze was constantly on Jesus and not on himself. That's why this didn't become a disaster. He sets his heart. He sets his affection upon him. And when Jesus' ministry takes off and his ministry begins to shrivel up, he doesn't throw a pity party. He doesn't really think about himself at all. He's lost himself in the glory of Jesus. He doesn't naval gaze. He doesn't wish that he was Jesus and he doesn't become discontent with his position that Jesus has called him to. You know, the number one way I think that we can rob ourselves of joy, have joy, just vanish from our lives, is to constantly think about ourselves and what we want and to gripe about what it is that we don't have. There's this great song back in the 80s by Rick Springfield called, I wish that I had Jesse's girl. You know what, right? I wish that I had Jesse's girl. How can a find a woman like that? That's not a joyful song. He's jealous. He wants this woman. He writes a whole song about it. And it's one of the most popular songs. You still hear it on the radio all the time, almost 30 years after the fact. And the reason why is not just because I have a catchy tune, but because you can resonate with that. You know what it's like to want somebody else's whatever and not have it. And how do you feel when you're in that position? You feel angry. You feel bitter. You feel like you're not getting what you deserve in this life. And it destroys your joy. I have to preach this to myself all the time. I have to preach this thing to myself all the time, because I lose sight of it. It seems like John the Baptist and John the Gospel writer, both of them in this story, what they're trying to do is they're trying to get us to see what the shape of joy looks like in our lives. And it doesn't come by wanting to be somebody else or wanting somebody else's stuff or someone else's marriage or job or body or social status or anything like that. It happens by getting rid of that mentality, by losing the phrase I deserve that has no part in John the Baptist life. It doesn't have any part in our life if we're to have joy either. So let me tell you something. There's one thing, there's only one thing that you and I deserve in this life. And I'm pretty sure that we don't want it because I have this tendency to tell myself that I deserve a lot of things in this life. And I have to fight that all the time. And perhaps you have to fight that all the time because everything that we see in life is being advertised to us and sold to us as if we deserve it, as if we've done something to earn it, as if we don't have it, we will not have joy, we will not have contentment, and it's a big fat lie. But we're so prone to buy into it. The subtlety to which the I deserve mentality can creep in is astonishing to me. I mean, ask yourself, why do I get angry? Why is there a hint of bitterness within my life? What's driving my bitterness and my frustration and my feelings of discontent? More often than not, it's the sense that there's something out there that you deserve to have, that you don't have, and it's making you miserable. And when that becomes the theme of your life, it wrecks your life. It's amazing. The Apostle Paul says, that as long as he has food and shelter, or I'm sorry, food and clothing, he'll be content. Food and clothing. He doesn't even talk about shelter. Food and clothing, just something to eat, something to wear. It's so easy for me to grumble that when finances get tight, it gets under my skin. And yet at the same time, I've never had to live on the street. I've always had a bed to sleep in. I've always had three meals a day to eat. The Lord's provided me with an amazing family. He's provided much more than I ever deserve, not to mention salvation. And yet I can still imbibe this mentality that there's something within me that deserves more than what I actually have. And I have to preach this to myself all the time, as I said, because it sticks about as well as jello being nailed to a wall sticks. It doesn't stick well. John the Baptist here. He could do away with the I deserve self-exaltation, jealous competitiveness because he embraced Christ and he embraced the position that Christ had placed him in this world. And he stopped thinking about himself so much. He accepted what God gave him and he did so with contentment because he knew that in the presence of Jesus there was fullness and joy and at his right hands or pleasures forevermore as the psalmist says. So he didn't navel gaze. He thought less of himself because he knew the corruption of his heart. When he says that Jesus is the Lamb of God who's come to take away the sin of the world, he was including himself in that world that he was a sinner, that he was in need of God saving grace in Jesus Christ and so he was humbled by that and he thought less of himself but he also thought less, thought of himself less because he thought of Jesus more. That meant that Jesus's grace and the work of Christ for him gave him security in this life. He felt safe and he didn't have to seek his own glory. He didn't have to upstage Jesus or anybody else for that matter. He meant that the love of Christ was something real for him. It was something that personally when the inside out had changed him and made him a different person. It was deep and so he didn't have to go out and seek a bunch of cheap, plastic, biodegradable things in life to give him contentment and to give him joy and upon which he could build his identity because his identity was wrapped up and who Jesus is and what he had come to do for him. And he could just lose himself in Christ just like I lost myself in the sight of Yosemite and right there is the key to joy. That's it. That's the answer right there gazing upon Christ adoring him for what he is for what he's come to do for what he's applied to you and to take great contentment in that. That's why John has joy here. He remembers that he's the best man his joy is wrapped up and the uniting of the bride to the bridegroom. You know there are these unambiguous distinctions that John draws in this passage that Jesus is the groom, John's the best man in verse 31, Jesus is from heaven is above all and everybody else is from earth and speaks in an earthly way. So it's not only part of our nature to rebel against God but that there's this distinction between God and us. He is holy but he is also holy other than us. And so it reminds us that our need for him is not simply based on the fact that we're sinners but it's because Jesus is so vastly superior to us in every manifestation. In verse 34 we see another distinction. That the words of the Father are spoken by Jesus infallible, infallibly, without error. And it's because Jesus has received the full measure of the Holy Spirit. So Jesus reigns He's the king and He rules through His God-breathed words. Here's another distinction. This is the really important one verse 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. There are only two options. There's either life or there's wrath. There's life through the Son. There's wrath through another God that we worship that is counterfeit and fake. You heard this message last Sunday. We've already looked at this. If you look back in verse 18, chapter three, John says that whoever believes in him is not condemned but whoever does not believe in him is condemned already because he is not believed in the name of the only Son of God. The thing I love about John is that he not only wrote a gospel but he wrote letters and he wrote Revelation. And then first John, one of his letters that he writes can't make it any more clear than he does. He who has the Son has life he who does not have the Son does not have life. There's no ambiguity whatsoever and he's just reiterating the words that Jesus Christ himself said.