What Does Repentance Look Like?
Every once and a while we talk about a preacher stepping on our toes. The preacher to whom we are introduced in our reading today was sent by God to prepare the way for His Son, and he didn’t just step on toes, he mashed feet!
And the interesting thing about this is that according to Matthew’s gospel, everyone kept going out to listen to him (Matthew 3:5). "Then Jerusalem was going out to him, and all Judea and all the district around the Jordan;"
If that isn’t enough, they did not have a nice comfortable building with padded pews and heat and air in which to listen, but a place out in the country where they either stood or sat on the ground.
It is there that the man we know as John the Baptist was “preaching a baptism of
repentance for the forgiveness of sins” (v. 3).