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1. It is unnerving to feel or be unprepared!
2. When it comes to life and what happens after this life is over, God does not want us to be unprepared.
3. In Matthew 3:1-17, we will discover what the Lord has done to “Make Ready the Way” so that we will be ready and rejoice when we stand in His presence.

Matthew 3:1-17

Context
1. At the end of Matthew 2, Joseph, Mary, and the Child, Jesus, lived in a town called Nazareth.
2. The Apostle Matthew skipped over the years that Jesus was a child, teenager, and young adult to focus on the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.
3. But in an interesting twist, we are not immediately introduced to Jesus as an adult, but to a man we know as John the Baptist.

I. John Prepared the Way for Messiah (1-12)

• God promised Israel that He would raise up a prophet, like Moses, to lead His people.

Deuteronomy 18:18, I will raise up a prophet from among their countrymen like you, and I will put My words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him.

• God faithfully raised up prophet after prophet to direct Israel just as He said.
• But after the prophet Malachi, there were 400 years of silence because there was no prophet in Israel.
• What were some of the last prophetic words that Israel heard through Malachi?

Malachi 3:1, Behold, I am going to send My messenger, and he will clear the way before Me.

Malachi 4:1-2, 5, “For behold, the day is coming, burning like a furnace; and all the arrogant and every evildoer will be chaff; and the day that is coming will set them ablaze,” says the LORD of hosts, “so that it will leave them neither root or branch. But for you who fear My name the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings; and you will go forth and skip about like calves from the stall. Behold, I am going to send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and terrible day of the LORD.”

• Why did God allow 400 years of silence?

Amos 8:11, “Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord God, “When I will send a famine on the land, Not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, But rather for hearing the words of the LORD, But they will not find it.”

• Then a man dressed in a garment of camel hair with a leather belt fastened around his waist, whose diet consists of locusts and wild honey appeared on the scene.
• According to 2 Kings 1:8, the prophet Elijah “was a hairy man with a leather girdle about his loins.”
• God called Elijah during a very dark time in Israel’s history with a simple message, “Repent!”
• Now John, who came in the spirit and power of Elijah, appeared in the wilderness of Judea preaching…

A. Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand
1. The 400 years of silence were over!
2. All four Gospels link John the Baptist with the prophecy of Isaiah given 700 years earlier.

Isaiah 40:3-5, A voice is calling, “Clear the way for the LORD in the wilderness; Make smooth in the desert a highway for our God. Let every valley be lifted up, And every mountain and hill be made low; And let the rough ground become a plain, And the rugged terrain a broad valley; Then the glory of the LORD will be revealed, And all flesh will see it together; For the mouth of the LORD has spoken.”

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