Who Are You?

This is the first of two weeks where we’ll be looking at the ministry of John the Baptist as we continue our series walking verse by verse through the gospel of John. John the Baptist was Jesus’ cousin who preached about the coming Messiah and called people to turn from their sin and the ways they rebel against God.

He was also kinda strange. Wearing camel hair and a leather belt while eating a steady diet of locusts and honey was just as peculiar back then as it is now. I mean, who was this guy? Why did he look the way he looked, and why did he say the things he said—and most of all, why were so many people intrigued by it and followed him?

That’s the question that motivated members of the Sanhedrin—here we see John mention priests and Levites (which would have been describing people that came from the tribe of Levi but weren’t descendants of Moses’ brother Aaron, so they couldn’t be priests; they generally assisted in Temple worship, often as musicians and security). From verse 24 it seems there were also a few Pharisees there who were religious leaders of the day—this whole group was sent to John the Baptist to ask a simple question in our passage this morning: Who are you? Actually, they asked it twice: both in verse 19 and again in verse 22.

And that’s a question we all face throughout our lives: both internally and externally. When you meet somebody new, questions like your name and what you do for a living and if you’re married or have kids—all those questions are trying to help the person figure out, “Who are you?” Internally, you might have seasons of wondering the same thing. Am I just the culmination of the responsibilities I have? Am I defined by my desires? What makes me, me?

Of course, whether you’re a Christian or not, that’s a nuanced answer. We’re complex, and each one of us is made up of a variety of interests, experiences, skills, and behaviors that make us distinct. Like a deck of cards, there might be one deck, but there’s a variety of numbers and suits that make it up.

But just because a bunch of things make us who we are doesn’t mean we don’t need to have a specific answer for that question. Chances are, if you ask yourself, “Who am I?” right now, it won’t be the hundred little things that come to your mind; it’ll be a select few. Every deck of cards only has 4 aces. Some things are more foundational than others.

And what this brief passage on the conversation between John the Baptist and the Sanhedrin spotlight for us this morning is that Christianity has an entirely different approach than the rest of the world to answering the question, “Who are you?” By default, our world tends to understand you in relation to external factors like your background or your actions. And that makes sense. People aren’t inside your head; they don’t know the desires of your heart, so they only see what comes out.

But this creates a problem because no one in their right mind wants to be understood only in relation to their behavior. For one, my behavior isn’t always great, so I’d love if there’s more that makes me, me than just the culmination of my good and bad choices. That’s a heavy burden for your identity, for your sense of self and your sense of worth to rely on your ability to maintain a good performance.

It leads to a culture of shame and hiding when you feel like your actions don’t measure up to expectations because it feels like you didn’t just make a bad choice; it feels like you’re being viewed now as a bad person. But also, you know that there’s more to you than just the things you do.

If you were ever teased for something you did back in high school, you know what I’m talking about. My parents were really generous to me growing up, but I was also an only child, which carries a certain stereotype. And that stereotype wasn’t made any better when you mixed my pride back in high school with the fact that I drove a Hummer H3. I was that kid.

Macie didn’t know me back then, but that’s a probably a good thing. She looked like a punk rocker back in high school, so I don’t know that we would have gotten along anyway. But even though she wasn’t there, she still likes to occasionally bring up to people that I was the kid with a Hummer in high school.

But I’m so much more than that! Yes, I might still have a Christmas ornament with a picture of me and that Hummer, but I’m so much more than that! I have so many other things that make me who I am, and I don’t want my identity to be determined by what’s happening “out there” when I know there’s so much else that goes on “in here”.

Of course, what goes on “in here” doesn’t feel consistent either, and if you let your identity be determined primarily by your desires then you’ll feel an urgency to meet those desires (which you can’t always accomplish, and so that leads to anxiety). You’ll also feel a confusion about who you are when those desires change, and it’ll feel like utter devastation when the people or things you desire hurt you or leave you (because it’s like your identity’s collapsed).

Neither our external actions nor our internal desires can handle the weight of being the foundation for answering the question, “Who are you?” But just like John the Baptist, we still get asked it all the time, and we might also be asking it ourselves. Now, for John, the Sanhedrin wanted to know whether he was the Christ, or the prophet Elijah returned, or the prophet that was promised back in Deuteronomy 18.

But the way that John answers this question helps us understand the unique foundation for a stable identity that’s offered in Christianity. Just like the religious leaders with John the Baptist, the world tries to understand you in relation to what you do, but Christianity says you can understand yourself in relation to Jesus. And this is practically beneficial for us in a variety of ways:

• What you do can change. But Jesus never changes.

• What you do can struggle. But as we’ve seen throughout the prologue of John’s gospel, Jesus is the all-powerful Word of God. He will never struggle or fail.

• And finally, like we’ve already said, what you do doesn’t always bring you peace. But because of what Jesus accomplished for you through his life, death, and resurrection, you can experience an everlasting peace. He is the Prince of Peace.

So this morning, I want to lean in to what it means to understand who you are in relation to Jesus, and how that gives deeper meaning and worth to everything else that makes you, you. Let’s start by looking again at verses 19-20.

John 1:19–20 ESV

¹⁹ And this is the testimony of John, when the Jews sent priests and Levites from Jerusalem to ask him, “Who are you?” ²⁰ He confessed, and did not deny, but confessed, “I am not the Christ.”

Following Jesus starts with knowing who you’re not. And, right out of the gate, John lets the Jewish religious leaders know that he is not the Christ. He’s not the Messiah. He hasn’t come to save other people, and he’s not able to save himself. That was true of John the Baptist back in the first century, and it’s true for us today.

Following Jesus means knowing you’re not your own Savior. And when I say it that way, I’m guessing there’s not much pushback. Of course we’re not the Son of God. None of us are perfect, and I’m guessing none of us would claim to be. But it is all to easy to function like your own Savior even when you’re not wearing the title of Savior.

What do I mean by that? Let’s think about it both on the ground and in the air. On the ground, in your daily life, if you knew Jesus wasn’t going to be personally walking with you this week, would it functionally change anything about the way you normally go about your day? Would it change the way you approach your job or how you interact with your family or what you do when you’re by yourself? It’s really easy for us as Christians to carry Jesus around like a spiritual accent to our kingship. We might even call out to him when there’s trouble, but then do we actually rely on our own effort to save the day?

And we can be guilty of this mindset “in the air”, so to speak, as well. Do you believe your vertical relationship with God is primarily dependent on your ability to follow his rules and be a good person? Let me ask it another way: If you were to die today and be brought before God, and he were to ask you why he should let you into heaven, what would you say? If we start our answer with the word, “I”, then to some degree we are relying on ourselves to be our own savior.

Even if we’d answer, “I repented of my sin and placed my faith in Jesus.” Those are great things. Those are necessary things. But your willingness to trust Christ is not what saved you. Only Jesus. We can subtly use the mechanics of how Christ saved us as an excuse to still give ourselves credit. But on that day, when we stand before the Father, the name of Jesus is all we’ll have. And it’s all we’ll need.

The religious leaders thought John the Baptist might have been the Christ, but after he confesses that he isn’t, they pivot to all these other figures they think he could be. Let’s keep reading in verses 21 and 22.

John 1:21–22 ESV

²¹ And they asked him, “What then? Are you Elijah?” He said, “I am not.” “Are you the Prophet?” And he answered, “No.” ²² So they said to him, “Who are you? We need to give an answer to those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?”

This group of people were facing pressure to bring a report back that explained why John had such a great following and why he was baptizing people. It didn’t make sense to them, so they were trying to put him into a category that did. They knew their Scriptures, and Malachi 4 promised that Elijah would one day return before the Messiah arrived. Interestingly, John says in verse 21 that’s not who he is, but in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the three other gospels all record Jesus saying that John the Baptist was the promised Elijah who came.

So, why does John say “No”? Well, both in their question about Elijah and their question about “the prophet”, the religious leaders were asking about real characters, but they didn’t really understand them. They believed that the historical Elijah would return to earth to fulfill the prophecy in Malachi. And that’s not who John the Baptist was. He was just John. But he did fill the role of Elijah preaching repentance to the people as a prophet of the Lord. According to 2 Kings 1:8, he even dressed like Elijah did.

When they asked them if he was “the prophet”, they were expecting the promise of Deuteronomy 18 to be referring to some new prophet about Christ, when in reality it was Christ. In his sermon in Acts on the day of Pentecost, the Apostle Peter connects this very prophecy to Jesus. And yet, the religious leaders here in John 1 are mistaken again in who they’re talking to and what they’re asking about. But none of that deters John the Baptist from owning who he is in verse 23.

John 1:23 ESV

²³ He said, “I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said.”

You see, being a follower of Christ meant that John knew he wasn’t the Savior, but it also meant that he knew he wasn’t just what other people wanted him to be either. It’s so easy to become the product of other people’s expectations: who they think you should be, what they think you should do or not do. We’re going to see that in the life of Jesus later on in chapter 6 when the people try to forcibly make him king, believing he would overthrow the Roman government and take over. But that wasn’t who Jesus was, and that’s not what he had come to do.

Where do you face those kinds of outside expectations? Maybe your boss or your boss’s boss expects you to work a certain way or to make yourself available in a way that goes against your biblical ethic or jeopardizes the priorities you have for time with your family. Maybe your relationship with a friend or a family member has changed since you started following Jesus because they think that means you look down on them or judge them now. At the very least they might assume you’re not able to have fun anymore.

The religious leaders in John 1 only had a few categories to understand who John the Baptist was (and like we’ve seen, they even had their categories wrong!), so when it turned out he wasn’t any of those things, that left them entirely confused. It’s easy to treat followers of Christ the same way today. “Well, you’re a Christian, so clearly that means this or that. Maybe you have those presuppositions yourself— that “being a Christian aligns you with a certain political party, or it means you’re unwilling to listen to people that disagree with you, or you think that you’ve figured out something that other people haven’t, or you think you’re a better person than other people.”

And all of those beliefs are contradictory to the gospel of Jesus Christ. So why do people think those kinds of things so often then? Well, fundamentally I would say the good news of Jesus doesn’t naturally make sense to us, so seeing it lived out in someone’s life also won’t make sense. In his first letter to the church in Corinth, the Apostle Paul says,

1 Corinthians 1:27–29 ESV

²⁷ But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; ²⁸ God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, ²⁹ so that no human being might boast in the presence of God.

The story of Jesus flips our understanding about ourselves upside down. In any other part of life, when we see something we want, we strive to go get it. But not so with Jesus. We don’t “gain our life” by earning it; Jesus says we gain our life by losing it. It’s when we stop trying to earn and start trusting in what’s been earned for us that we truly to come to know him.

And increasingly doing that in our lives as we increasingly get to know Jesus is how we increasingly are changed to look more like him. But the achievement is not our own doing, and that’s something the world cannot understand without the grace of God.

If you’re familiar with the story of Les Mis, we find a similar dynamic between Jean Valjean and Javert. The former was a convict who now is a different person. And yet, Javert can’t believe it. He knows what it means to keep the law and he knows what it means to break the law, but he doesn’t have a category for a guilty man who has been changed by an act of mercy.

And that’s what makes Jean Valjean so confusing to him. Valjean doesn’t claim to be innocent. He doesn’t try explain away his mistakes or act like he’s better than other people now. And yet, he’s no longer the way he was.

The gospel does the same thing for a person. The story of Jesus tells us, sin is real. Judgment is real.

So even though we’re saved by grace through faith alone, much like the religious leaders in John 1, the world doesn’t have a category for that, so Christians are viewed in one of two extremes: either arrogantly lording their superior morality over people or universally accepting all sin and lifestyles from people. The world gets grace, and the world gets truth, but it doesn’t know how those two things could ever come together. And like we looked at last week, that’s only found in the fullness of Jesus.

But that’s not the only reason why people might look down on Christians with a wrong of understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus— we also might give them reason to. Even as Christians, we might consciously or subconsciously believe these kinds of things about ourselves. We might not live like people who have received both grace and truth.

If we fixate only on God’s grace, then we won’t have any compulsion to rely on him to transform the way we live (because who needs to change if we think God just loves us without holding onto his truth and holiness). But if we fixate only on God’s truth, then we’ll find ourselves feeling puffed up when we perform well and ashamed when we fail. Neither is walking in light of the gospel.

Knowing the fullness of Christ as grace and truth like we saw in our passage last week grounds us in understanding why John the Baptist can quote Isaiah 40:3 here in verse 23 and say he is “the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord.’” If Christ is the fullness of grace and truth to you, then knowing him and making him known is the best foundation you can have for understanding who you are.

John the Baptist knows he’s not his own Savior. He knows he’s not all these other things the people were trying to make him out to be. And he’s able to know what he isn’t because he’s confident of who he is. He exists to point to Jesus, and whether you’re a Christian or not, the Bible teaches that all of us were created with the same purpose.

The first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism is, “What is the chief end of man?”, to which it answers, “Man’s chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.” The apostle Paul backs this up in Romans 11:36 when he says, “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever.”

That means that if the core of how you answer the question, “Who are you?”—if your answer currently revolves around your career, or your wealth, or your status, or family, or anything else, the Bible assumes that you’re going to live an unsatisfied life because you’re trying to make good things into ultimate things that cannot consistently sustain your sense of worth and your sense of self in this world—because we were made for God.

All those other things you do aren’t meant to compete with Jesus. They actually can find their fullest joy and completion in Jesus. Let’s keep reading with verses 24-28.

John 1:24–28 ESV

²⁴ (Now they had been sent from the Pharisees.) ²⁵ They asked him, “Then why are you baptizing, if you are neither the Christ, nor Elijah, nor the Prophet?” ²⁶ John answered them, “I baptize with water, but among you stands one you do not know, ²⁷ even he who comes after me, the strap of whose sandal I am not worthy to untie.” ²⁸ These things took place in Bethany across the Jordan, where John was baptizing.

In that final verse, it’s like John, the author, gives us a little geographical nugget to help situate the reader. Which, honestly, is a good reminder for us that books like the gospel of John weren’t written as a fable or a myth: he was recording actual, historical events and wrote it that way.

In verse 24, we also get introduced to the Pharisees. That’s a group we’re going to see throughout our study in John, so they’re worth briefly touching on here. The Pharisees first rose to prominence when they opposed the Syrian King Antiochus Epiphanes over 160 years earlier when he was trying to do away with the Jewish faith. They were big time rule followers (and wanted people to know about it). They developed an oral tradition for how to keep every minute detail of the Old Testament law, and that included them expanding on it as they went.

This is the group that sent the members of the sanhedrin to John the Baptist, and most likely a few went with them. But now that John has ruled out every potential explanation they had for who he is, they’re left trying to grasp a reason for why he does what he does. “Why are you baptizing?”

It’s not like baptism was foreign to Judaism. Several Jewish groups practiced baptism, particularly for people who converted to Judaism, but in those cases the person baptized themselves. It was strange that John was baptizing other people himself. That’s probably why the religious leaders assumed he had some kind of special authority.

But as we close this morning, we see John’s baptism here wasn’t transformational. It was invitational. It followed his message to repent of your sin against God for the kingdom of heaven was at hand. The Messiah was coming, so John was calling people to reflect on their need for a Savior and prepare their heart for when he comes.

You see, the religious leaders asked John the Baptist who he was, and he answered based on who he is in relation to Christ. Then, they asked him to explain the things he did, and he once again explained himself in relation to Christ:

“Yes, I’m baptizing people, but really what I’m doing is I’m preparing people for the one who’s coming after me who is so much greater than me. I’m just baptizing with water.” As we’ll read next week in verse 33, John says that Jesus provides a truer and better baptism with the Holy Spirit.

John the Baptist viewed his ministry in the context of Jesus’ ministry. He understood his work in relation to the superior work that Christ does. And this is such a freeing mindset that you and I can also have today.

Everybody has to have a why—why they get out of bed in the morning, why they have their job or why they don’t have a job, why they spend their free time the way they do, why they engage with their neighbors (or don’t engage). Without a why, we’re aimless.

Since Nora was born almost a year ago, I have not worked out or lifted weights. Until this week. Did it four times, currently sore head to toe. I wanted to have more energy and be healthier. Not sure if that’ll be a strong enough “why” to keep this up long term, but we’ll see. I hope it is.

When you don’t have a strong reason, something to focus on that gives direction and purpose to what you’re doing, then you’ll find it hard to hard to be steady in anything. We all have a lot of different “whys” in life, some bigger, some smaller. But when you find your identity in what Jesus has done for you and the life he offers to you, then you can have one why that gives depth to every other why in your life. One why that gives you a unified purpose in all that you do.

John the Baptist understood himself in relation to the person of Christ and saw his life fulfilled through the work of Christ. That’s the invitation of the gospel. Not just to know where you’re going when you die. But to find joy and fulfillment in allowing who Jesus is and what he’s done to give shape to who you are and all you do.

Let’s pray.