Christ Must Increase

A question that I think will help us think through our text this morning. Do you want your life to matter? Do you want your life to count? Now, I'm looking at Christians smiling and of course, Christians are going to answer. Yes, I want my life to count. I want my life to matter. I believe most non-Christians will say that they want their life to have a purpose and to count for something. One of the key questions is how? How can my life matter? How can I best use my years, my months, my weeks, my days, my hours, my minutes? Many will answer the question, how can my life most matter? How can my life best matter? By saying it's by serving other people. This is a philosophy that says the more one serves the needs of others and does the most social good, the more his life has met and counted. Now, I think for a Christian, this is true at some level. It's important that as Christ calls us out to serve others, this is an important part of making our life count is serving others, serving the needs of the body and serving the community around us. But it's not the most important question. There's a more important and primary question for Christians, and it's this. How can my life best exalt the risen Lord Jesus Christ? How can my life best, how can my life exalt the risen Lord Jesus Christ? That is the key question. If we believe that Christ has died for our sins, if he has risen, our life is all about, must be focused upon exalting him. How can I magnify his glory and his grace? There's so many good things we can do. There's so many good things we can do in this world, but that is the most important thing. And we want our life to count the most. We have to make sure our life is focused on doing the most important thing. Now, of course, As we are seeking to exalt Christ above all else, we will be serving and caring for others more than we would if that were our primary focus. We approach this life, we have to be committed to the kingdom of Christ, building up his kingdom. Now, here's the primary problem. By nature, as sinners, we are already prone to building up our own kingdom. We have to recognize that if the primary purpose or the way our life can matter most is by exalting the kingdom of Christ and building up his kingdom. Our main problem is that we're so prone to our own kingdom. If we look back. To scripture, we see this, it's the first temptation in the garden, you can be like God. Don't worry about his kingdom. Don't worry about his rules. Don't worry about his glory. Look what you could do for yourself. You can become like God. Throw off his rules, throw off his worship, throw off his righteousness and look at what kind of kingdom you can have. And of course, as soon as as Adam and Eve obeyed this lie, they lost everything. It's the pride of life. It's us seeking some worth and significance apart from God and what he does for us. This morning, the primary point that I hope we see for a passage as we're going to be back in John chapter three. The primary point I hope we make over and over again from the text is this. We must rejoice in Christ and his kingdom so that we are protected against building our own. We must rejoice in Christ and his kingdom so that we are protected against building our own. And there the assumption already is set. We're already trying to build our own kingdom. That is what we, by sinners, are trying to do. And seeking to rejoice in Christ and his kingdom is the only correction. Turn in your Bibles to John chapter 3. We've been following Christ's teaching. He's been speaking to Nicodemus. He has told us what it means to be born again and that you must believe in Him. We saw the teaching that God so loved the world last week, and now we're getting back into John the Baptist and his relationship to Jesus Christ. We're in John chapter 3, beginning in verse 22. After this, Jesus and his disciples went into the Judean countryside and 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 the John's disciples and a Jew over purification, and they came to John and said to him, Rabbi, He 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 is given him from heaven. You yourselves bear witness, bear me witness that I said I am not the Christ, but I've been sent before him. The one who is a bride is the one who has a bride is a 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, we pray with me. Father, as you looked to your word, As we look to how Christ is being exalted here in this passage by John the Baptist, the forerunner. Help us, Lord, to see how our own sin is being confronted. Our sin of jealousy, our sin of selfishness, our sin of longing for our own kingdom and reputation and worth. And help us, Lord, to be corrected in seeing the glory of Jesus Christ. The one who has died for us, the one who is risen. The only one who is to be exalted above all else. Help us, Lord, to worship you. In the name of Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen. It's important that as we look at this passage, we we notice here something very important is happening with regard to the entire storyline of the Bible. We can see from the entire story of the Bible that God created us for himself. We rebel. And God set, determined, to say He's going to reconcile us, He's going to bring us back to Himself, and He's done so by sending His own Son to die for us. The entirety of the Old Testament is building up the plan of God that Christ fulfills. And John and his gospel has already been setting this up for us over and over again. He's been pointing out that all of the old covenant was promising it's being fulfilled here in Christ at the wedding of Cana, the purification jars. They were pointing to the doing away of the old covenant because the bridegroom has come. Christ speaks of the temple. He says, destroy this temple and I will build it back in three days. The old temple is done. Now Christ and his resurrected body. It's the new temple. He corrects the Pharisee Nicodemus, showing that he doesn't understand what scripture has been saying. But now the true prophet, he has come and he is the one who's teaching us what it means to be regenerated, given new life. This is all on top of John the Baptist being sprinkled throughout the gospel as the one who says he's coming and he's here. Look, behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. John the Baptist represents the entirety of the Old Testament. He's the last Old Testament prophet. His uniqueness is this. He doesn't just say he's coming. He says he's here. John's gospel is building up the end of the old covenant, the beginning of the new, and it's all about Christ and what he's coming to do. Now, it's also a significant turning point here because chapter four, you start seeing the gospel spread. John 316, we mentioned it last week. God so loved the world. It's significant that there it doesn't say God so loved Israel. That was the old covenant promise. No, in the new covenant, God so loved the world, every nation, every tribe, every kind of person that hates God. God loves them all. And then we see that actually practice because he's going to speak to the Jew first, Nicodemus, and then he's going to speak to the Sumerian and then he's going to speak to the Gentile. You see the gospel spreading to all the different people groups as we see God planning that in the book of Acts after the resurrection. This is what we call redemptive history. God is working out a great plan of salvation, and we get to see a big part of the hinge here. Christ, the center of all of history. Now, if you look at this text, there's two questions we must ask. What is this text teaching us about Christ? How is this text telling us how we can worship Christ? What is this text telling us about Jesus Christ so that we can worship him and rejoice? And then the second question. How does this text confront my sinful tendencies? How does this text confront my sin? First, Jesus is to be exalted and followed above all. Jesus is to be exalted and followed above all. Let's walk through our text and see how Christ comes out of this text as the one who is to be exalted and rejoiced above all. We first see our setting. John's moving chronologically after the conversation with Nicodemus. We now have them moving into Aenon near Salim. Now, Aenon means many springs. That's quite good real estate for someone who has a baptism ministry. For those of you who are from the Carolinas, many of the churches are named after creeks. It's no coincidence that Baptist churches were oftentimes built near creeks for obvious reasons. So here he goes to a place called many Springs. We don't know where Salim is. There's a couple options and they're all north. They're all in Samaria. So you already start seeing his movement towards the other people groups. So there's a setting there. They've gone. They're baptizing. They're in a non your Salim. They're moving north. And then there's this really interesting parenthetical that John gives. John likes to give these, these parenthetical comments, verse 24. For John had not yet been put in prison. Why did John say this? Why did John the Evangelist, the writer of the gospel, why did he tell us that John the Baptist had not yet been put in prison? Well, I believe it's because the gospel of John is written later than the gospel of Mark. And John the Evangelist is aware of that other gospel. And that other gospel implies that as soon as Jesus' ministry ended, John the Baptist was put in prison. And John the Evangelist, knowing of that gospel, and wanted to make sure that people didn't question his gospel, he says, There's a few more events that happened before John the Baptist was put in prison. It actually shows us how historically accurate and how historically convincing the Gospels are, especially when you have Mark and John, who are never at odds with another, but report very different things about Jesus' ministry. So there's a parenthetical comment. Verse 25, this begins the tension in our story. Now, a discussion arose between some of John's disciples and a Jew over purification. This is one of those moments we wish John would tell us a little more. OK, there were purification. We're not quite sure what's going on here. We're not quite sure who the Jews are and what the challenge was. There's two possibilities. One would be these Jews are wanting to compare and contrast the Jewish rites of purification with John's baptism. There was a baptism of purification and the Jews were practicing a baptism of purification, so there could have been a contrast comparison of those two. Based upon the context, I think there's a better option in that this Jew was asking, what is the difference between the baptism of John and the baptism of Jesus? Because you see immediately what these disciples do after this conversation. They go to John the Baptist, and this is where the tension really picks up. John, they're all leaving. They're all going to the one that was with you across the river. Let's look at this higher point of tension. Verse 26, And they came to John and said to him, Rabbi, which means teacher or master, he was with you across the Jordan to whom you bore witness. Look, behold, watch out. He is baptizing. And all are going to him. Now we see something here, I think that there's some fear. There's some unhelpful and irrational fear that they're embellishing. All are not going to Jesus. John has many disciples that are still with him. They're embellishing because they have this unhelpful, irrational fear that their ministry, the one they're committed to, is dwindling. And so they're coming to their master and they're They're they're they're wanting to put the alert on the yellow flag or the red flag. But Rabbi teacher, he's getting all the attention. People are leaving our ministry and going to his or people are are skipping over ours and going to his. And this is where we get to see the beauty of John the Baptist and his right perspective on who God is and what he was called to do. John answers with three clear points. First. Only God can establish a ministry. Notice first that John, before giving a very precise correction to this irrational, unhelpful fear, he gives a very general good rule to help guide them think through what ministry is. Verse 27, a person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven. So John first says, it doesn't matter who gets what. If we're serving God, what matters is who God is lifting up and who God is blessing and how he's blessing you. It's just like salvation only comes down from above. The blessing of a ministry only comes down from above. A fruitful ministry is only fruitful if blessed by God. A ministry is only as powerful as God makes it. And so he's given to this very clear rule. It's out of my hands. If God is drawing everybody else to Jesus, so be it. It's he alone who is able to lift up the minister and call people to him. We see here that a helpful thing when we have different ministers, we can call them programs. We try to avoid that word at some level because programs run amok. Oftentimes in Baptist churches, we, we start a program and we have no idea how to kill one. Ministries are only empowered by God. We also remember here, ministries have expiration dates. John the Baptist ministry has an expiration date. He knows it. He knows his role. He knows his timing and he knows that he is supposed to be trumped. We have to remember, God builds up ministries for a season, for a purpose and for a time. And sometimes ministries have to dwindle and cease. But the general rule here is very clear. God alone empowers a ministry. Secondly, Christ should gain more disciples. God has no problem with everybody going to Jesus because he knows who he is and he knows his role. Christ should gain more disciples. Look at verse 28. You yourselves bear witness. I've been saying this from the beginning. When are you going to get it? I'm not the Christ, but I've been sent. Before him, the implication being, yeah, Jesus, I'm glad they're going to him. He's the one I want to point them to. He is the one who's saying, look, here's Jesus Christ. Don't follow me, the voice. Follow what I'm saying and follow what I'm pointing to. He alone is the Lamb of God who can take away the sins of the world. He knows his role. He knows what he's supposed to do, and he's pointing to the one who alone can say. As we just read in John 3, I believe this naturally flows. Jesus Christ must be exalted. Jesus Christ must be believed. Therefore, he must. He must gather the disciples. We see here a model of what discipleship looks like for the church. A model of discipleship is that the person who's trying to teach you about the gospel in the Bible, they're always pointing you to follow Christ more. They're always talking about Jesus Christ. They're not wanting you to follow them. They're not wanting you to think much of them. They're wanting you to think much of Christ. This is what discipleship is. We're not making disciples of ourselves. We're making disciples of Jesus Christ. The third thing we see, and it keeps getting more intense and more focused. First, only God can establish a ministry. Second, Christ should gain more disciples. Here we see we should rejoice that Christ is gaining more disciples. Not only should he, we're going to rejoice that Christ is gaining in popularity. Verse 29, the one who has the bride is a bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom who stands and hears him, he rejoices greatly at the bridegroom's voice. Therefore, this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase. But I must decrease. He's not concerned that Jesus is gaining popularity, he's rejoicing. He's rejoicing because he knows Christ alone saves. He knows Christ alone is a true bridegroom. Now, it's important for us to consider what the role of the friend is here. The best parallel we have to the friend that John calls himself to the bridegroom is the best man. But the friend had a lot more responsibility than the best man. The friend was the one who was to secure and establish and make sure that the marriage union takes place. He's the one who made sure that the bride and the bridegroom are able to meet together to make the vows, to make the promises. He's the one to make sure all the things roll out together. And he's the one who rejoices. when this takes place. He has the responsibility to connect the bride and the bridegroom at the wedding. John rejoices in Christ and he's using a very powerful metaphor that we see throughout Scripture. God likens himself to a husband seeking a wife or a bride who's unfaithful all throughout the Old Testament. This is a strong, powerful metaphor. God is taking the most intimate relationship we know on earth, marriage, and applying it to the way he loves us. Only, he actually says, marriage was designed prescriptively to reflect the true love and the true marriage that I have planned for you. God didn't look at marriage and reflect and say, wow, that would be a good metaphor. No, he designed marriage already to reflect the true marriage that's going to be forever with Christ in the church. It's the most intimate and loving relationship among humans. And that's how God is trying to convey to us what it means that he loves the world. He's like a husband pursuing a wife. The problem is that that wife is never faithful. The wife doesn't want to be faithful and he continues to pursue her. This is powerful in the passage that had been read. The marriage supper of the Lamb, what we're all longing for, what we should be expecting for constantly. But I want you to notice it's the marriage supper of the Lamb. We will forever know him and praise him as the one who died for us. We will forever know him and praise him as the one who died for us, because that's where we see his love. If you question God's love, that's where you see it. He's the one who became like us in every way and died for us. The metaphor is powerful. It teaches us of God's love. It also puts a finger on our problem. It's very, it's a very powerful metaphor as we think about who we are. We're the adulterer. We're the adulterer. We're loving everything other than the one we're meant to love. We're like the prostitute. We continue to pursue every other thing to worship and love it rather than the one who loves us. John states it more straightforward. Finally, he must increase. I must decrease my ministry was meant to diminish my John the Baptist ministry. It's meant to fold into John Jesus Christ. It's meant to stop so that Jesus is more exalted. We see this in Acts 19. John the Baptist had disciples that had not yet heard of Jesus and the baptism of the spirit, and they're there. They're following John the Baptist, and immediately they come across the gospel and they believe and they're baptized. into Jesus. Everything John did was leading into what Jesus was to do. A few application points before we move on. First, Jesus is worthy of our praise. Jesus is worthy of our praise. As we're making disciples As we're called to disciple one another, as we're called to be instruments in each other's lives, the number one goal, the main thing we're supposed to do is talk much of Christ. I ask, I challenge you, how much are we talking about Jesus Christ with one another? That is the main thing we're supposed to be talking about. If we're not making much of Christ, we're not making disciples of Christ. Our conversations have to be focused upon, geared upon, who Christ is, what he's done for us, and how we can worship him together. God alone is worthy of our worship, and Christ alone is our head. The second application is, I want to meditate for a moment on the fact that Jesus is the one true bridegroom. He is the one true lover of who we are, and we do not deserve it. He loves us. He is our love. He loves us perfectly and completely. It's the only satisfying love. It's so easy to fall in love with the idea of being in love. We're a romantic age. We have false ideas. We believe the lie, all of us. Now, some of us are more romantic than others, and I'm on the lesser side. You can pray for my wife. But we all have this idea of what love is supposed to look like. We have this idea of being in love. The truth is, the only one who truly satisfies and loves us perfectly and completely is God. He designed us that way. Now, if you're married, this is good news, because if you're married, even married for some season, you know how much you fail, you know how much your spouse fails and you recognize, yes, this isn't the end of all love. Praise God for Christ, the one who truly loves me perfectly and completely. I actually think this is probably one of the main causes of marriage problems. We put expectations and obligations and responsibilities on our spouse that only God can fulfill. We expect too much. We expect them to do that filling and that completing that only God can do, because that's how he designed us. Now, yes, God designed us to love us and God designed marriage to be good for us. But we're sinners. We corrupt every good thing he gives us and we corrupt marriage and we make our spouse. We try to force our spouse to fill us in a way that only Christ can. Our spouses will let us down. Christ will not. Our spouses will let us down. Christ will not. This is why forgiveness is so important in a marriage. A Christian marriage must be marked by grace because I know I'm a sinner. I know my wife's a sinner. You should know you're a sinner. Your spouse is a sinner. And there has to be a quickness of grace. That's why The Bible teaches one reason the Bible teaches not to be unequally yoked. If you're married, if you're a Christian, you marry a non-Christian, you don't get the basic problem together. You don't get the solution together. You don't understand how to live together. So Christ is the one true bridegroom. If you're single, this is encouraging for you as well. Christ is your one true love. The spouse you want to have, he or she, they're never going to satisfy you. God designed you for himself. Do not believe the lie. Your spouse will not complete you. Do not believe the lie. Your spouse is not going to complete you. If you're not content in singleness, Don't seek being content single. My advice would be not to seek content in being single. I don't think you'll find it that way. I think you'll find contentment when you seek Christ in his love and the joy and satisfaction he alone brings. If you're looking for contentment of being single, you're not going to find it. But if you look for contentment in Christ and what he does, you will find it. A third group of people I want to apply this to. If you've lost your loved one, I pray that you'll be overwhelmed with the love of Christ. I don't want to dismiss how hard it is to be lonely after being loved. How hard it must be to have that peace missing from you, your best friend, as we're wrestling with this now and trying to care for Ed as he has lost his wife of 65 years. Truly a beautiful picture of love. But if you've lost your love, I don't want to dismiss it's hard, I know it's real sorrow, but Christ is your true love as well. And I pray that Christ will demonstrate his love and you'll let us as his body come alongside and love you and care for you. Finally, as we've seen that no spouse is meant to satisfy only Christ, we're to long for the day been read about. We have to be expectant. If we're not expectant and longing for that day of true love and we see the bridegroom and we know his love without the taint of our sin and we love him back. We long for that, and that's the only way we're going to remain the faithful bride is for longing and waiting upon it. And we rejoice. We rejoice this morning because that's where Frankie Hickerson is. We were singing a song during VBS, Come to Jesus, and it was clear that Frankie was going to pass soon. And as we've been singing this at home, I can't help but think of every time with my final heartbeat, kiss the world goodbye and fly to Jesus. I keep thinking of Frankie just flying up to Jesus. She's leaving her pain behind. Yes, she's leaving us behind and we're sad about this, but she's now with the Savior. She has a new body, a new heart and new eyes, and she knows love like we do not. And so we rejoice in the resurrection. Finally, as we think about what this passage is teaching us. Jesus must increase. I find it interesting as we look at chapter three, there's three must. John, John, John is very intentional in the way he writes. We, we oftentimes find little clues like this. I actually believe there's, there's an interesting parallel between this conversation and the wedding at Cana. They both mentioned purification and they both mentioned the bridegroom. But here there's three must in chapter three. Jesus says, you must believe. You must believe in the son of God. Secondly, he must be lifted up. And thirdly, he must increase. The third one is the hard one, the hardest. Faith, it comes from God, and yes, it is a repentance and it is a belief, but the third one, that's the real hard one, I think, to actually say, I'm going to worry less about myself, my reputation, my worth, and I'm going to give it all to Christ. But that's exactly what faith and repentance is. I'm hoping I can assume this true. Men, when you got married, you quit calling the old girlfriends. Right, I mean, I'm going to assume that's a true practice. You don't call old girlfriends or boyfriends or talk about them when you're married. Why is it that when Christ commits himself in a marriage like love to love us, that we continue to flirt around with our old sin? Why is it that we continue to play around with that sin that he saved us from and that he called us out of? Why is it we think that's OK? Why are we thinking it's acceptable to commit spiritual adultery? We repent the sin we loved, we take the love we had for that, we give it to Christ. We stop loving that sin. As we think about the fact that Jesus must increase, John, John is a model for us. Remember how he cleared up? I am unworthy to untie his sandals. John said this of Jesus. Now, untying someone's sandals, taking their sandals off, that was something that was beneath slaves. Slaves didn't even have to do that for their masters. And John is saying that service, which is beneath slaves, I'm not even worthy to do that for this man because he's the God man. He's the Messiah. We see here just the beauty of a humble, a humble servant of Christ. He finds joy in serving Christ. And I think this is the key to humility. The funny thing about humility is all men applaud it, but none have it. We all love and want to praise the virtue of humility, but it's so difficult to grasp. And I think it's because of this. The Christian virtue of humility, we don't get it by seeking to go to cultivate it directly. You don't go after humility directly because. I speak for myself and probably for others, once we get it, we're proud. Look how humble I am, look what I did. You don't cultivate humility directly. I was indirectly. He cultivated humility by looking at the exalted, glorious Christ who humbled himself to come down to save us. When we see Christ truly, we see ourselves correctly. And that is what builds up and cultivates humility. In order to make more of Christ, we must see how great He is, how unworthy we are. Quickly, I want to ask our second question. How does this text confront my sinful tendencies? How does this text confront our sinful tendencies? And here, it's important as we look to a narrative text, we ask, how do I fit into the story? Where does this story confront me? We have to ask the first question, who do I identify with? Who am I going to identify with this text? And I have three simple rules. Rule number one is we're looking to interpret the narrative text and asking who identify with rule number one. It's never Jesus. You don't get to be the Messiah when you're asking who am I identifying with? It's not Jesus, because if it's Jesus, you're just going to build yourself up to be a moralist who's following a model. And Jesus came to say sinners. Not to help people be more moral. and maybe a secondary application, but the first person identifying with is never Jesus. Second rule. You should identify with the person you least want to identify with. When you're looking at a store and you're asking who to identify with, it's most likely the person you least want to identify with. It's the Pharisee, it's the rich young ruler. Ben did a fantastic job of this when he preached from Mark on the blind beggar. You felt like you were so in need you had to believe in Christ. You identify with the one you don't think you should. But in light of who God is and who we are as sinners, that's who we are. Third, sometimes there's a model of godliness apart from Christ that we should see it's being set up as a an ideal model of who we should strive to be. So let's give an example. The prodigal son. Most people know the prodigal son. The main person we should identify with is the older brother sulking in the garden. He's self-righteous. He's upset that the younger brother has been shown grace. He's upset the younger brother has been thrown a party. He's upset that the father loved the son who ran away. The story is designed for us to first identify with that self-righteous older brother. The younger brother is the one we're striving to be like. The one who says, I am unworthy to come to the father, but I'm going to come. And the father comes out and he ushers him in back into the home as if a son. I like a son again, renewing his identity in his place. You see there who we're actually like and who we should long to be like. Our story has two different parties like this. And what we see here, there's two ways to serve. There's two ways to live. You can be like the older brother, the younger brother here, you can be like John's disciples or you can be like John the Baptist. We will serve ourselves, which is our natural tendency, or we will seek to serve Christ. This is what the disciples got wrong. They embellish. Everyone's going. They have an irrational and unhelpful fear of losing their ministry. They've misunderstood the purpose of John. In John the Baptist's correction, again, God is the one who establishes ministry. Jesus is the Christ. We are to rejoice in him. He must increase. As we think about this problem that the disciples have, this unhelpful fear, I want to set the stage that we need to think about what this looks like within the church body. They're forerunners of Christ, we're followers of Christ. I think it's helpful if we think about what it's like to live as Christ's disciples following him and be corrected of the wrong mindset of the disciples and the right mindset of John the Baptist. The main problem, the main diagnosis I believe we could pinpoint in the disciples is that they have a jealous spirit. They're jealous. for the fame, recognition, and acknowledgement that Jesus is getting over against their own ministry. And we have to identify with this jealousy. They are jealous. They see someone else receiving what they want. They're wanting the ministry and the recognition that Jesus is getting. They're afraid of losing what they once had. In order for this story to really challenge us, we have to pray and ask, God, how and where am I jealous? We always want what others have. We're selfish, we're sinful. We typically look at other people's gifts and we say we wish we had those. We see other people are being recognized and built up in the ministry and we wish we were like that. Our society builds this into us unlike any other society. We have a competitive society. We're always supposed to be judging our own value and worth over against how well we're doing compared to others. This is what our society trains us to do. In the church, we must put away that competitive spirit. We must recognize that Christ is the one head worthy of all the glory and we're called to work and serve together. Friends, I want to give a warning here because Satan often will use jealousy to destroy a church. I hope I'm not wrong, but I see God moving here. I'm thankful that God seems to be building up the ministry of his support because non-Christians are constantly hearing the gospel. We're going out and sharing the gospel, and Satan will not like that. And the number one way I believe that he will want to destroy us is through jealous spirits. We need to be committed to growing, not growing at the detriment of other churches, not growing in losing our vision. We want to continue to establish and exalt Christ, but we must be protected in ourselves of jealousy. So I ask you this as application of thinking through how we like these disciples. Who are you jealous of? Who is it that when you think I'm jealous of this person for this reason? Who are you jealous of? Here's the challenge. Pray for that person. Pray for that person. If you're jealous of somebody, how God's using them, how they're gifted, how they're excelling in whatever aspect of life in the church, especially pray for that person. That's what we pray. That's one reason we pray for other churches on Sunday morning. to protect ourselves from ever thinking we're the only church in Charlottesville proclaiming the gospel and protect ourselves from ever being jealous of what God is doing down the street. We are working together with other churches for the glory of God, and we are longing for Him to glorify Himself through everybody of Christ that's proclaiming Him. Another cure for jealousy. Recognize that whatever good we have or the other person has, it's from God. It's not ours, it's not theirs, it's from God and has been given to us or to them for his glory, for his purposes and for the well-being of the body. Two quick applications. How can we overcome jealousy? How can we seek to have a right kingdom? I said, as John the Baptist says, first, know your savior. Know your savior. We must remember the chief in the man is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. We are not to build our own kingdom. We have been called out of the darkness into the kingdom of the beloved son, and we are about building him up and exalting him. John never loses sight of this primary purpose. His disciples do. We've been saved by God. God loved us. We are to continue to proclaim him because God loved us. Secondly. Know your role and your guests. Know your role and your guests. I believe this is why John I mean, John actually a little easier than us. He actually has his own proof text in Isaiah 40 that tells me exactly what his job is. It'd be nice if we all had that, but we actually we have plenty of job descriptions. We have plenty of clear role descriptions. We're servants of the Most High. We're blocks being built up into a grand temple for the glory of God. There's plenty of passages that actually tell us who we're supposed to be. We're supposed to have the mind of Christ, considering others more important. There's so many more clear descriptions of who we're supposed to be. You need to know your role and know your gifts and don't take spiritual gifts test to know your gifts. That's an individualistic way of looking at it, and that's kind of the whole problem. To know your gifts, to know your role, be part of a body, serve within a body and see how God magnifies himself through your service and see how others encourage you in that service. We think too individualistically. I'm going to discover my gifts and bless the church. No. The body comes together and we all use our gifts together. We're all sharpening one of those gifts. We help identify each other's gifts. How does the how is the body encouraging you by showing you this is where I see God's grace demonstrated in your life? We need to be a church that's constantly encouraging one another and how God is using one another. Finally, a key question. Two key questions. Why should you serve? Why do you serve? Why should you serve? Why do you serve? Because we're talking about being being servants in the body of Christ. We serve first because Christ has loved us. We love him because he first loved us, and now we love one another, and therefore we serve that great God who has loved us. Secondly, because Christ has called you to serve. No one's above any service in the kingdom of God. Christ has called us to serve. Third, we serve because Christ has equipped and gifted us to serve. And those gifts are not ours. They're Christ's, and he gives them to us to bless each other. He doesn't give them to us for our blessing. He gives them to us to bless others. Fourthly, related to that, because Christ has designed the body to need you. Christ has designed the body to need you and his gifts that he has given you. And finally, we serve Christ because of the pure joy we can have in serving the glorious King who saved us. Will you pray with me? We thank you, Lord, for your word. We thank you, Father, for sending your son to die for us so that we can know we are forgiven. We thank you for the resurrection that gives us hope. We thank you, Lord, for your Holy Spirit that is now with us to convict and convert and change us and equip us and gift us so that we can love you and love one another and and serve the kingdom. I thank you, Lord, for the way you've built up Jefferson Park Baptist. Continue to build us up according to your way and your pattern. May we always be submissive to you. Teach us to be submissive to you. May we exalt you. In the name of Jesus Christ, we pray. Amen.