He Must Increase, I Must Decrease

Alright… let me tell you a story about Ben when he was in High School. One thing that I was really proud to be a part of at our school was our Student Government Association. I was a freshman and sophomore class representative, in my Junior year I was an officer and I really enjoyed the time that I spent on Student Government tasks. In the second half of my Junior year, I began campaigning amongst the other members of SGA to be the next President. I was the only candidate who had 3 years of SGA experience, I had officer experience, and I had worked hard to foster relationships with the other representatives who would be voting for me. Truthfully, I thought the presidency was mine and there was no chance I could have lost. 

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All that to say, the election came and went on a Thursday and that afternoon the outgoing Vice President called me and said that she had counted the votes, and I had won by a significant margin and that it would be announced the next day that I would be the new SGA president. I was really excited, quite relieved and felt really good about the things that we could do the next year for the student body. The next day, I go to school and the whole Student Government was called into our principal’s office and the principal told us that since we were missing two members the day before for the vote, we would need to vote again. I was frustrated, but I wasn’t worried because I knew these two members well and was certain I had their votes. Coupled with the fact that I had been told that I won by a good margin, I felt like there was no way that I could lose. So we revote, and they call us back in, and I didn’t win. This has nothing to do with the other candidate, she was great, but I was absolutely crushed. I felt like I deserved it. I felt like I had the best resume and that I could have done the most good, I had some frustrating history with the administrators that showed they treated some people with favoritism and I wasn’t one of the favorites. Truthfully, I felt like this was something that was stolen from me.

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I felt myself decreasing, it was putting a damper on the prospect of my senior year, I felt myself losing a platform that I was really excited to be on. I had put so much hope into something and then it disappeared. It was a horrible feeling. I had put my hope in something that didn’t deserve my hope and when it disappeared, I didn’t know where to go or what to do. I think what I was feeling was kind of similar, definitely to a lesser extent, to what John’s disciples were feeling here in our text today. This feeling though, gets me (and I hope you) into the emotional state of John’s disciples as they felt their influence and platforms were decreasing.

Here’s the big idea this morning that we see at play with John’s disciples and John the Baptist: you can decrease without fear when you know who you are and who Jesus is. At the beginning of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, he debates where he should start writing. He asks the question should we start by thinking about knowledge of God, or do we begin by thinking about knowledge of man. When we go through life, and we face periods of change, uncertainty and what might look like certain decreasing, we have to have a great understanding of both. And even in the opposite! When things are going well, and the way that we hoped that they would, we still have to have the right understanding of God and man. When your identity is settled and your Savior is the only primary thing, you don’t have to panic when your influence shrinks.

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In the text today, we see John’s disciples express an emotion that I can only read as them perceiving a threat coming at them. Something about what they know to be true, something that they love and care about, is being challenged. And they go to John the Baptist and express this, and instead of echoing their concerns, John the Baptist shows them that he doesn’t feel threatened, but he’s actually rejoicing over the thing that they are concerned about. So as you think about this idea that you can decrease without fear when you know who you are and who Jesus is, I want us to see that through two ways. 1. The disciples’ fear at the threat of loss, and 2. John’s joy at magnifying Jesus.

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1. The disciples’ fear at the threat of loss

In this passage, we get an update on John the Baptist, his ministry is continuing, he’s made his way to Aenon and people were coming and being baptized. Then Gospel Writer John tells us that John the Baptist’s disciples get into a discussion about purification with a Jew, since these are all Jews this is most likely a Jewish leader or scholar, over purification. Somehow this conversation about purification leads the disciples to come to John and give us our first clue about what they’re feeling. “Jesus and his team are over there and they are baptizing - and everyone is going to him.” Translation - we are over here baptizing and not everyone is coming to us. And John’s answer - we can only receive what we are given from heaven. Translation - our time is up.

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John’s disciples here seem troubled! They have fear that they are losing something. They are losing their influence! Not everyone is coming to them to be baptized anymore. Consider what’s running through their minds right now! Are Jewish leaders going to stop coming and having discussions with us about theology now? Did we hitch our wagon to the wrong person? Will people listen to us anymore? Am I running out of clout? Am I becoming irrelevant or unnecessary? 

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Do these questions sound familiar to you? They’re familiar to me. Our lives are not as steady as we would like them to be. Our emotions and our responses to changes throughout life aren’t as steady as we would hope that they would be. I can be so short sighted when I’m made to feel less than someone else. We get jealous quickly for the wrong reasons. What we see in John’s disciples is a very human thing, no one really loves how they feel when they perceive their influence to be shrinking.  And underneath shrinking influence is often a deeper fear: shrinking identity.

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Humanity tends to buy into this idea that our significance is tied to our production and our production is our influence. And there’s truth to it, it’s good that Christians can work to enact change in the world. We should be using what influence we have for Kingdom purposes, but at the end of the day, we are just stewards of what God has given us. This is the exact point that John the Baptist makes! You’re not losing something that you worked for–the Father is giving something to someone else to receive. If you identify by your achievements and the things that you have accomplished, you’ll never find satisfaction because they can disappear as quickly as they come.

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I love golf. Love to play it, turn my brain off for four hours and be outside in the sun. Allison loves to play so it’s something that we get to do together. I love golf so much that I am someone who likes to watch it on TV. In fact, it’s almost all we have on the TV from Thursday until Sunday this time of year. But there’s a guy dominating golf right now, named Scottie Scheffler. He’s the number one golfer in the world and the gap between him and second is not close. Scottie wins. A lot. At the top level of competition. And at the end of the day, he’ll tell you he doesn’t care about winning or losing. He doesn’t find his identity and value in whether or not he wins a tournament. He was asked, before winning his second Major championship of the year how he doesn't crumble under the pressure of being the world number one. Listen to his answer:

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“This is not a fulfilling life. It’s fulfilling from the sense of accomplishment, but it’s not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart. There’s a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life, and you get there, you get to No. 1 in the world, and they’re like what’s the point? What is the point? Why do I want to win this tournament so bad? Because if I win that’s something that feels great for about two minutes” And then he continues, “This is a job. My faith, my family come first before this job.”

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Identifying by your achievements, identifying by your influence, by those under you, by those who don’t have what you have, focusing on these things does not lead to satisfaction. It can’t and all it creates in your life when you identify by those things is a fear of losing these things. This is what we see with John’s disciples. They are scared that they might be losing their influence because they have placed their identity in the wrong things.

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There’s one more thing at play here with John’s disciples though. They are feeling fear at the threat of losing an idol. Our hearts are so incredibly talented at creating idols. We misplace our worship often. That’s what idolatry is, it’s misplacing our worship. Taking anything that isn’t a primary thing, and making it the primary thing. John’s disciples had forgotten what their ministry was supposed to be and had begun idolizing John as the ultimate thing. We see this when they point out to him in verse 26 when they remind John the Baptist that he bore witness about Jesus! It’s like they’re saying, “John! You told people about him! And now there’s more people going to him then are going to the source”

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Have you guys ever found something? And I don’t mean like you found your wallet… I mean have you ever felt like you found a restaurant and discovered its greatness, or have you ever been the first person to watch a show and then you successfully get people to watch that show or eat at that restaurant and they really start to love it?  Or maybe a singer or a band? It's a great feeling to feel like you’ve discovered something and then given it to someone who it has provided joy to as well, but if you’re a sinner like me, you might always feel a tinge of jealousy, or like ownership, like this show or restaurant or band was yours before it was anyone else’s and even though you want other people to enjoy it, you also feel like they aren’t allowed to enjoy it more than you because it was yours first? I think this is the tension that John’s disciples are feeling. “John we were first! And now people are going to this guy, the guy who you told everyone about?”

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The disciples have in their mind, that since John told everyone about Jesus, why wouldn’t people want to be around John instead of Jesus. They don’t understand why John the Baptist is telling people about Jesus. They are thinking that John is the source! They don’t realize that Jesus is really the source. It’s John who is the voice in the wilderness crying out, but it’s Jesus who created the wilderness with his voice. It’s Jesus who created John. It’s Jesus who sustained John. It’s Jesus who gives John his purpose. John doesn’t see the competition that his disciples see, but that’s because John knew what he was and what he wasn’t. John has the right response because he has the right perspective. So what made John see things differently? John had joy in magnifying Jesus.

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2. John’s joy at magnifying Jesus

John displays his right perspective here in two ways. He knows his place, and he knows the Savior. He says two things in his response that shows us that he knows his place, that he rightly understands who he is. Verse 28, John reminds them “Hey you’ve heard me say I’m not the Christ! I’m the one coming before him.” John has joy because he knows that his role is not being stolen, rather his role is being fulfilled. John didn’t think that he was supposed to be Jesus’ understudy, and he didn’t think that Jesus was supposed to be his understudy. They had two unique roles, and John could never have accomplished Jesus’. He knew what his ministry was and who he was.

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John can have joy knowing that he’s here to magnify Jesus because he knows he’s not Jesus. There was always supposed to be someone after him, so for him there is no expectation that he be Jesus. In fact, John’s whole life is looking for the one who was supposed to come after him. Maybe you’ve heard it said that the gap between expectation and reality is named disappointment, but there’s no disappointment here for John. John doesn’t have misaligned expectations. He knows that his decrease doesn’t mean failure, it means completion.

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So John knows that he’s not the Christ, and reminds his disciples of that, but he also knows that he’s not the bridegroom, he considers himself a friend of the bridegroom. Imagine with me for a second that you’re just relaxing one day and the King of England calls you and he invites you to a royal wedding. How are you going to act while you’re there? Are you going to do something to make the wedding about you and try to be the center of attention? Any chance that you go and try to stand on the altar and ask to marry the bride? Are you going to object to the wedding?

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John knows that as a friend of the bridegroom, his role is not a role at the center of attention, his role is not to marry the bride, or to officiate the wedding. John’s role is one where he gets to rejoice as his friend gets married to the bride who he loves. I’ve been a groomsmen in a good amount of weddings, and there is so much joy in getting to be at a wedding with a friend and rejoice in their joy. This is what John is communicating. He doesn’t feel fear here. He feels joy because he knows who he is. The friend of the bridegroom doesn’t grieve when he’s not center stage, the point of the friend of the bridegroom has always been to point to the bridegroom.

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There is another reason why John is able to feel joy in this moment and not fear, and that’s because he knows who Jesus is, the Savior. And we know this because in the first chapter of John’s Gospel, John the Baptist sees Jesus coming towards him and says to those around him, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” But in this passage too we see John’s confession that he’s not the Christ and that he isn’t the bridegroom. And it show us that he knows Jesus is the Savior and the bridegroom because of where he places himself. He says “I was sent before the Christ.” 

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But then John also declares that Jesus is the Savior when he says the friend of the bridegroom rejoices when he hears the voice of the bridegroom and then he follows that up with his declaration that his joy is now complete. The bridegroom is here! So he’s saying, “I’m not the bridegroom, but when I hear the bridegroom, then my joy will be complete… my joy is now complete.” So he’s reminding his disciples in a couple of different ways that he has lived out his purpose. He’s not the Savior, he knows Jesus is, and he is pointing people to that Savior. So John can rejoice and he can rest in the fact that Jesus must increase and John must decrease. In fact John rests in the fact that he can only find joy in Jesus increasing and him decreasing.

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If he looks anywhere else for satisfaction and joy, he won’t find it. If we look for satisfaction anywhere other than our decreasing and Jesus’ increasing, we won’t find it. Life with Christ means that our decrease is for Christ’s increase. This makes me think of the Garden narrative. Adam and Eve have everything that they need, but the second they hear that they have a chance to increase, they forsake what God has told them and sin against him. Their desire for increase led to the greatest decrease humanity has ever seen. The beauty of the Gospel is that our decrease and Christ’s increase is not the end of the story for us. And John the Gospel writer begins to help us fill in the blanks here. John the Baptist knows the Savior, and he knows what the Savior increasing means for him, and for his disciples once they understand what he understands. John knows that the Savior’s increase leads to his own increase. There’s three things that John knows Jesus’ increase means for him.

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John knows the Savior so he knows that Jesus’ increase leads to eternal life. We can’t find true life and eternal life apart from believing in the Son. We can look and look and look for something that makes us feel like our lives are whole but we won’t find it until we rest in the truth that God has created us, and he has created us to be with him forever. We can face anything that comes at us in life because of the truth that Christ’s increase has secured eternal life for us.

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Second, John the Gospel writer explains that John the Baptist rejoices because Jesus’ increase leads to wrath being escaped. John the Baptist is rejoicing at his decrease and Jesus’ increase because it means that he is escaping what would be certain wrath. And he’s trying to show his disciples that their story does not have to be one of experiencing the wrath of God. John the Gospel writer says that the wrath of God remains on the one who does not believe in the Son. So in God’s son, we have an escape route from the wrath of God. And while the wrath of God is a very real thing, and a very sobering thing, it doesn’t challenge if God is loving or not. Wrath has to exist because of his love. But in love, he gives an escape route through his Son. 

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And this perfectly takes us to the third thing: John rejoices because he knows that Jesus’ increase leads to the Father’s love being displayed. Wrath is escaped. God’s people live eternally with him. These things display the Father’s love for his creation. And these things can’t be done without Jesus increasing in his Earthly ministry, but also increasing in what his Father has given to him to accomplish. Jesus being on Earth, accomplishing what he accomplished, living a perfect life, dying a sacrificial death, resurrecting as the first fruit and ascending to the right hand of the Father, all of this is done because God has great love for his creation and desires to live with his creation for Eternity. Great love is shown through a great demonstration of love, and we see this most clearly on the cross! Jesus’ glory increasing throughout the Earth is such a great demonstration of love that it takes our minds and eyes and hearts off of our glory decreasing and puts them on the glory of Jesus increasing.

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With these three things in mind, who would be threatened by Jesus’ increase? Eternal life, God’s wrath being escaped and his love being displayed… these aren’t threatening things! John’s disciples let their fear and their misunderstanding guide them in this moment, but John rejoices because he understands the Kingdom.

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As we wrap up today, I want us to consider this: when we feel threatened, what if we are actually feeling grief. Grief that manifests itself in fear, or anxiety. Maybe grief that leads to misunderstanding what is going on in life. I think John’s disciples were grieving that their season of ministering with John was coming to an end or it looked very different from what they had imagined. They became fearful that they were losing their influence, they became fearful that John was becoming irrelevant and they had wasted their time with him. They were grieving the change that was happening to them.

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We grieve similar things. Whether it be losing an election for Student Government, or not getting into the college we want. Not having children on the timeline we want. Maybe we are grieving the changing of a season at work or at home, maybe your ministry doesn’t look like you had hoped that it would when you were younger. You can grieve missing out on a promotion or you might be grieving becoming an empty nester, feeling like you’re not sure what to do with your life without your kids in the home.

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To those grieving today, in big or small ways, you’re not alone in your grief. To everyone for whom life doesn’t look like what they imagined it would, and it’s safe to assume that in some way to varying degrees we all feel this, who feels like they’ve been passed over, God is not done with your story. I hope this doesn’t sound cliche or corny, but God is bringing you the thing that you desire, or something he knows is better for you.

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The thing that you have lost, or missed out on, or the change that you are experiencing isn’t the thing that defines you. What defines you is that you are a friend of the bridegroom. Your joy is set in the fact that your decrease is his increase, and the beauty of the Gospel through the cross is that his increase will lead to your increase. 

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You are not your achievements, you’re not your influence, you’re not what you produce or what you consume. If you are united to Christ through believing in him then you identify in him. He gives you his perfection and he takes away your imperfections. He takes away your fears and gives you peace of mind. He takes away your desire to have platform and influence and he brings you onto his platform. A beautiful thing that we gain when we gain Christ is that we can decrease without fear because we know who we are and we know who Jesus is. Let’s pray.

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