Sunday message · Good News (2020) series
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Message Summary
In the second message of the Good News Christmas series, Pastor Phillip Santillan turns to Mark 1:1–8, not a Christmas passage, he admits, but one with the gospel in it. Building on last week’s challenge to set our sights on the good news, he adds that when news is good, it needs to be heard. He recalls singing Go Tell It on the Mountain almost every week in kids’ church, and says the good news of Jesus is without equal.
Mark opens with “the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” and most scholars agree that Jesus himself is the good news Mark means. Unlike Matthew and Luke, Mark skips the birth of Jesus; as one scholar puts it, his concern was the saving facts, not biography. If good news is to be heard, it must first be told. Mark quotes the prophets Malachi and Isaiah, and through the prophets God promised a child who would save his people from their sins. So the good news of Christmas is not simply that Jesus was born, but that he fulfilled God’s promise. “The gospel is rooted in promise,” Phil says.
That raises an honest question: do we want to be saved? Some who doubt their relationship with Jesus, Phil suggests, do not really want to be saved or do not see their need. Mark then introduces John the Baptist, who prepared the way of the Lord by proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. John wore camel hair and ate locusts and honey, hardly a glamorous ministry, yet he pictures how we can prepare the way of the Lord in our own lives and circles of influence. If the good news is rooted in promise, Phil says, it is received through repentance and humility. Repentance simply means turning.
He illustrates with a story from his first year of Bible college, when pride and anger strained his relationship with his father for months, and how healing began when he finally went to his father and said he was sorry. A strained relationship is not a broken covenant, Phil says, but it does need to be restored, above all our relationship with our heavenly Father. Repentance is the doorway to a life transformed by the gospel, and it takes humility. The question is not how well we are doing, but what still needs to be submitted to God.
John the Baptist shows that humility. He said he was not worthy to untie Jesus’ sandals, and when one of his disciples was jealous of Jesus’ growing following, John answered that Jesus must become greater and he must become less (John 3:30). After quoting a Christian author on preaching the gospel to ourselves every day, Phil closes by saying that celebrating Jesus’ birth is wonderful if we remember why he came: so that we could embrace his gospel with repentance and humility.