Real Life Community Church Richmond, KY

Baptism And The New Life

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We unpack why baptism is commanded, what it signifies in Romans 6, and how the New Testament pattern calls for immediate, public obedience. We challenge baptized believers to live like the old self truly died and to resist the pull of “Egypt.”

• baptism commanded by Jesus and centered in making disciples
• symbolism of union with Christ in death and resurrection
• baptism as a new Exodus from slavery to sin
• New Testament pattern: belief then immediate baptism
• one baptism as a covenant sign with rare exceptions
• live as dead to sin and alive to God
• fight temptation by identity and Spirit-empowered obedience
• move from avoiding sin to offering yourself for righteousness
• leave Egypt behind and stop romanticising the past

Repent and be baptized for the remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit. If you want to get baptized right now, we’ll figure it out. Come talk to us at the altar, or come back tonight at 7 o’clock and we will baptize you.


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SPEAKER_00:

Have your Bibles, go with me to Romans chapter six, and we're gonna uh we're preaching right now through the book of Acts, but uh I wanted to preach on baptism, the ordinance of baptism this morning, as we've seen this pattern of belief and baptism throughout the book of Acts. So we're gonna take a Sunday and talk about that. So Romans six, verse one. Is baptism necessary? That's a question I've been asked many times. And it's a perplexing question to me. And so I I like Francis Chan's response to that question. Here's a response from his sermon. He said, quote, when people say, Do I have to be baptized? I think, why are you asking that? If Jesus commanded it, why would you not want to do it? End quote. You know, the great commission is this Matthew 28, 19. Go, therefore, Jesus tells his apostles to do what? Make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them all that I've commanded you. And behold, I am with you always till the end of the age. Now, so Jesus before his ascension, what's he do? He summarizes the disciples' mission and our mission. It is simply uh to reach the world with the gospel. And so in this Great Commission passage, the main imperative, the main verb there is make disciples. The other commands support that main verb. So make disciples, that's the command. How do we do it? Number one, first step. It's not a trick question. You baptize them. And secondly, you you make disciples by teaching them what Jesus taught and teaching them not just to hear, but to obey God's word. So after believing upon Jesus, repenting and professing him as Lord, water baptism is the first thing you do in your relationship with Jesus Christ. And Jesus commands it. By the way, it's not a suggestion. The Lord God does not make suggestion, He gives us commands. So here's my aim today. Two part. Number one, if you you're here today, you're a believer, and you have not been baptized, I've got a tank ready for you. And as a matter of fact, if you don't, if you say, I don't know, man, I don't want to be go home wet today. Um, this evening we've got Alpha Course at five o'clock. It goes till seven o'clock. I'm keeping water in the tank. It's gonna feel like a hot tub by uh that late tonight. And listen, I would invite you to come and be baptized. It's that important. Secondly, if you're here like I know most of you are and you've been baptized already, here's my cry to you this morning is to live in light of your baptism. So let's start here. What is baptism? Well, Protestant churches disagree on exactly what baptism is, what it means. Some Protestant churches, such as Christian churches like Southland, Christian, um, they believe that baptism is part of the regeneration process. And they've got good reasons and in supporting scriptures for that. Um, they believe that, by the way, someone who believes that does not believe that baptism saves you. We are saved by grace through faith in Christ. Those churches that that say that baptism is part of the regeneration process, what they would say is baptism is putting feet to your faith. It's not a work. You you know what most churches say to do? You you repent and ask Jesus into your heart, or you repent and do what? Pray the sinner's prayer. Those two things are nowhere in scriptures, in the scripture. So what yes, we profess Jesus as Lord, but what in Acts 238, what did Peter say then? We say when he was asked after preaching the word, Peter, what do we do with this? Repent and be baptized for the remission of sin and the gift of the Holy Spirit. So don't knock someone for believing that, okay? Other churches, such as Baptists and the Assemblies of God, believe that baptism is not part of the salvation process, but rather it serves as a sign of salvation that has happened through repentance and faith. So here's where I'm gonna take it today. Can we just find the point that we all agree on? Here's what we can agree baptism at minimum is symbolic. Is everybody okay with that? All right, good. So if you hold to that view of baptism being some symbolic, don't ever say that it is just symbolic. It is notably and wonderfully and powerfully symbolic. And something, even if it is just symbolic, something wonderfully mysterious happens in the waters of baptism, just like in the ordinance of communion. I can't necessarily explain it, I just believe it. All right. So that's what baptism is. At minimum, it's a sign of something that's happened in our hearts. So, what does baptism then signify if it is a sign? Number one, it signifies being united with Christ. Anyone here this morning united with Christ by faith? Look at verses one through five. Paul writes, What shall we say then? He's been arguing that salvation comes by grace through faith. Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? And his answer, by no means. How can we say we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were buried, therefore, with him by baptism into his death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in the newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. When we take that person down into the water, it's a tomb. It's that old person dying. And when you are raised up, it's a picture of that old life, that old self being gone and being raised with the Lord Jesus Christ in power and his resurrection. Baptism is a sign that your life of unbelief and rebellion and idultery is dead, and you are now a person who is alive in Jesus Christ. Now, how many of you are wearing a wedding ring this morning? All right. Think about back to your ceremony. For some of you, that's many, many moons ago, right? But when you when couples exchange the rings, they say something like this with this ring, I the wed. And when I wear a uh when I do a wedding ceremony, I always say about the rings, these are covenantal signs that you belong one to another as husband and wife. And do you know that's what baptism is? It is a sign that you are part of the new covenant, part of the the family of God, part of uh the the salvation of the Lord, that you have been united to Christ, that you are in covenant with him and with his church. So that's the first thing that baptism signifies. Secondly, this is the coolest thing to me. It signifies participation in a new Exodus. How many of you remember the Exodus story? Look at verses 6, 6 through 10 in Romans 6. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer, and I want you to mark this, be enslaved to sin. For one who has died has bets been set free from sin. Now, if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. We know that Christ being raised from the dead will never die again. Death no longer has dominion over him. For the death he died, uh for the death he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. So the book of Exodus records the story of how Israel for century lived as slaves under Pharaoh in Egypt. It's a miserable life for centuries. But God, by his grace, raised up a man by the name of Moses to deliver his people from Israel, or excuse me, from Egypt, and to bring them out of slavery. Now, how did they move from Egypt to the wilderness? What did they pass through? The waters of the Red Sea. It's through the waters that God rescued his people. So they came out of the waters, on through the wilderness, and on towards the promised land. So by using the word enslaved here, and this is Paul makes this more explicit, by the way, in 1 Corinthians 10, but Paul is echoing the Exodus story here to explain our baptism. Baptism signifies Christ freeing us from the slavery of sin, and in the passing through the waters, we are now living as God's people moving on towards the promised land. All right. Let me make this really clear by going to First Corinthians 10 verses 1 through 4. I'll read this to you. For I do not want you, Paul writes, to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized in the Moses and the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and that rock was Christ. So Moses, here's Paul's point. Moses was a type of Christ, and the Red Sea a type of baptism. So it is through the Red Sea again that Moses brought the people through the waters so that they could be delivered from Israel. And that's what happens in baptism. It is a going through the waters and on towards the promised land. Listen, before coming to Christ, every unbeliever doesn't just dabble with sin from time to time. They are slaves to sin. You and I, before we were saved, we were slaves to sin. It was our master. You're under somebody's ownership, mastery, lordship. Either you are under the lordship of Jesus Christ, which I highly suggest you be, or you are a slave to sin. And slave slavery is tyrannical, or excuse me, sin is tyrannical, by the way, and it will crush you. So baptism is this sign, one of being in covenant with Christ, united to him, but also of going through the waters, being delivered from slavery. It's a declaration that I am not in Egypt anymore. As a matter of fact, in particular like Muslim countries, baptism is the line in the sand. It's to say, my old culture, my old religion, it is gone. And when you are baptized in many of those cultures, do you know that you are excommunicated, if not killed?

unknown:

Yes.

SPEAKER_00:

Because of your faith. Baptism is the line in the sand. It is the profession of faith that says, I'm with Jesus. So that's what it is. Well, when should a person be baptized? So, number one, they should be baptized after repentance and belief. The pattern given us into in the New Testament is as follows. Here it is the gospel's preached, people believe, and what happens? And they are immediately baptized. Salvation comes by repentant faith. So if you get baptized without truly putting your faith in Jesus, listen, you've gone down a wet uh dry center and you come up a wet center. Because it's not magical waters that save you, it's faith. Mark 1.15, Jesus said, The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe the gospel. So baptism must follow or be um it must happen at the same time as belief. So it must follow repentance and belief. But then when you believe, when should it happen? Let me be really clear. Look at me. It should happen immediately. Immediately. I loved it when I was in the Christian church, brother. That's where you come from. We kept water in the tank all the time. If somebody came and they gave their heart to Jesus right then, is that how you guys do it? You you you know, you don't? You you baptize them right then. It's a beautiful thing. Let me show you this. We've been going through the book of Acts, and this is the New Testament pattern. Watch this. Acts 2.38 to go back there, and then we're gonna jump to 41. Peter said to these people who are they're cut to the heart by the gospel, repent and be baptized, every one of you in the name of the Lord Jesus, for the forgiveness of sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. Verse 41. So those who received his word were baptized, and there were added that day about 3,000 souls. Ain't that great? Then we have in chapter 8 the Samaritans, but when they bel when they believe, Philip has uh as he preached the good news about the kingdom of God and in the name of Jesus Christ, what were they do? He doesn't say, Well, they prayed the sinner's prayer, they were baptized, both men and women. Acts 8, 35 and 38. Philip opened his mouth. I love this, my favorite. Beginning with this scripture, he told him good news about Jesus. This is the Ethiopian eunuch. And as they were going through the road along the road, they came to some water, and the eunuch said, Look, here's some water. What prevents me from being baptized? And he commanded the chariot to stop. They both went down into the water, Philip and the eunuch, and he baptized them. Just imagine. I'm walking with somebody at Lake Reba and I'm sharing the gospel with them. And we're walking down that beautiful path past the pavilion, and that person believes what I've said and says, Look, there's water right there. What's preventing me from being baptized? That's the heart of somebody who really has faith in Christ. And let me just, I won't read these verses, but let me just take you on a little bit more of a journey through Acts. Acts 9, Paul receives, uh believes, he's baptized immediately. Acts 10, Cornelius and his whole household baptized immediately. Acts 16, Lydia's household, all of them baptized immediately. Acts 16, Philippian Jaler and the family baptized, it says that very hour. Do you see a pattern here? Can I sell somebody the prerequisites for baptism are simply repentance and belief? You don't have to go through confirmation classes. All right? Don't wait. I want your family to be here, but don't say, I want to wait a couple weeks before you know my friends in my family can be here. It's not about them, it's about Jesus. You don't need to wait for a uh uh, you know, a nicer uh baptistry tank here, like this one will serve just fine. Just be baptized. Well, how many times should you get baptized? Well, there are two ordinances that Christ gives to the church to practice baptism and communion. Both symbolize our union with Christ. So baptism is the first ordinance that is to be done as an emblem of the new birth. How many times can you be born again? One time. You can be physically born once, and you can be born again one time. When a Christian sins, they do not become unsaved. That's a big misconception, especially in a lot of charismatic churches. You don't get saved and uns, you know, unsaved and saved, unsaved. The cross is not that fickle. Can I get a witness? So you get baptized one time, but here's the exception. When someone was baptized as a child, and they come to me and say, Listen, my friends were getting baptized, or I really didn't understand what I was doing, and I just sense God leading me now that I'm truly following Christ to be baptized again. Who am I to say no to that? But generally speaking, if you have received, if you were baptized, you understood it, and you say, Well, you know, I kind of was living for myself. You don't have to be rebaptized because Hebrews 6 says, if you fight, if if you get to that point where you were unsaved, there's no coming back. And that's a really hard place to get to, by the way. And it's a walking away from Christ completely and renouncing your faith. So, communion, though, we do it every week, right? It's a constant reminder of our union with Christ and with one another. All right. So you say, Well, I've been baptized. So, so why am I here this morning? Like I know all this. Well, good for you. So here's here's what I want to challenge with uh you with today, those of you who have been baptized. I'm gonna ask you, are you living in light of your baptism? Like when people see your life, do they recognize that in the waters that old self died and that you've been raised to the newness of life? Because here's the problem statistics show us by the Barna uh group and the Church Pew uh Research Center that the majority of people out there who say they want nothing to do with the church, that one of the top reasons, if not the top reason, is because their quote unquote Christian friends live no differently than them. They walk in hypocrisy. So here's the main thrust of Paul's talking about baptism here. It's it's the whole point. He he says that look look at first, he says that we ought to um think of ourselves in a way that aligns with our baptism. So it starts with thoughts. Look at verse 11. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus. So Paul says, consider yourselves. Or in other words, think about yourselves as dead to sin and alive to God. Here's the point. Remember, folks, if you are in Christ, you have a new identity. You know, one of the saddest things about secular culture today is that identity has been root is reduced to sexuality. Do you know how demeaning and how horrible that is? You are more than your sexuality. And if you are if you are in Christ, your identity is solely in the Lord Jesus Christ. And that is a wonderful thing. You know, the culture says, look within to find your identity. No, you look to God to find your identity, amen. So we've got to remember who we are in Christ. We have died to sin and been raised with Christ. So we talked about this last week, but Christians do still sin from time to time. Is that true? Okay, but we are no longer under sin's tyrannical rule. Sin for the believer is no longer a way of life. And we've got to remember in our minds, because the devil would like you to think, well, you just can't help it. You're just a sinner, you can't help it. Oh, you can't help it if you're in Christ because sin no longer has its grip on you. For the first several days, um, after my son Connor uh returned home from boot camp, I'll never forget this. He was acting if like he was still there. Any of our veterans like remember that? You come home and uh you know he got out of bed on a regimented schedule, he worked out rigorously, and he was a little jumpy. I think he was expecting to get smoked by a drill sergeant. Come on, anybody still have those memories? So we had to tell him, Connor, you're not in basic training anymore. Relax, dude. You're you're just my son while you're at home. Remember who you are. Listen, if you don't think about your new identity in Christ, you will never live the Christian life victoriously.

unknown:

Come on.

SPEAKER_00:

Because what we think really matters about ourselves. You've got to remember who you are in Jesus. 1 Corinthians 10 13, to go back to chapter 10, related to baptism. No temptation has overtaken you. That is not common to man. God is faithful and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability. But with temptation, he will also provide the way of escape that you may be able to endure it. This is an often mistranslated or misinterpreted verse. Because some versions of the Bible say God will not um let you um what's what's the word in some of those? Tested anything more than you can bear. Yeah, more than you can bear. And people say, Well, you know, I've got all these problems, but God's not not gonna put on me more than I can bear. That's a that's a mistranslation, a misinterpretation. Can I tell you this? You can't handle anything on your own. You you that's why you got to lean on the Lord. You know, I had a lady, I mean, she went through hell on earth, to be honest, and she just claimed that verse. Well, I know the Lord's not gonna put on me more than I can bear. And I'm like, oh, honey, bless you. She's like breaking under the burden of you know, her, the weight of these issues. And I said, Listen, that's a mistranslation. You can't bear this. You've got the Lord Jesus Christ to help you with this. Come to him, all you who are burdened and heavy laden, he'll give you rest. But then you've got the church. We're to bear one another's burdens. That's not what it means. The best translation is that the Lord will not let us be tempted beyond our ability. So as a Christian, don't believe the devil's lie that you have to give in to temptation. Well, I'm just so weak. Well, yes, in the flesh you are, but if you are a living, breathing Christian, it's not just you living this life by our yourself. You have the Holy Ghost living inside of you. And Galatians 5 says, if you walk by the Spirit, you will not fulfill the lust of the flesh or sin. In other words, back to the wedding ring illustration. You know, there's days you wake up and you may not feel married, but you better act married. Come on, somebody. And the reminder, the reminder that you are married is that ring. It's a reminder to you, and it's a reminder to everybody else who might be interested in you. Right? Well, do you know that your baptism, you when you look back to it, it serves as a reminder that the old self has died and the new has come. So when the devil comes, in the way, his greatest tactic to pull us away from faith is temptation. It was the tactic in the garden. Look how good this fruit looks. Adam and Eve gave in. But praise the Lord. The Lord will not let us be tempted beyond what we can handle. When we're tempted, he'll always give us a way out.

unknown:

Amen.

SPEAKER_00:

You've got to think rightly about your new identity. And then you've got to live rightly. Be or your thoughts got to turn into behavior. Live like you are freed from sin. Look at finally at verses 12 through 14. Let not sin, therefore, because you're new in Christ, let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body to make you obey its passions. Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness, for sin will have no dominion on you, since you are not under the law, but you are under grace. So don't present your members as instruments for unrighteousness or your body. And often in the Bible, going back, I think, to 1 Corinthians 10 again, Paul says that in light of sexual immorality. Remain pure, don't defile your body. And it's also used within the context of idultery, which means to put anything above God, which God willing will talk about next week in Acts 19. Your life, hear me. Very important. Your lifestyle is a testimony to the genuineness of your baptism. Let me just Read you a shocking and sobering verse or passage in 1 John chapter 3, verses 4 through 6. John writes, now he's already said in the letter that Christians sin from time to time, but when we do, we have an advocate with a father. Here's what he says now. Everyone who makes a practice of sinning, that's habitual sin, also practices lawlessness. Sin is lawlessness. You know that he appeared in order to take away sins, and in him, Christ, there is no sin. No one who abides in him keeps on sinning. No one who keeps on sinning has neither seen him nor known him. Notice the word practice here. John's not saying, listen, if you stumble, you're not, you're not a Christian. No, here it is. If you get out of that baptism tank and you live like your old self religiously, you live in habitual sin. Nothing changes with you. What John's saying, you have not seen God nor known God. Your faith, your baptism, it was not genuine. So then he says, so he says, in going back to Romans, number one, don't present your bodies as instruments of unrighteousness. And a lot of Christians get that much right. It's like, all right, I'm not being that bad anymore. But you're only halfway there if that's as far as you've gotten. What's he say then? He says, present yourself to God. So there's something you don't do, you leave behind that life of sin. But then Paul says, live for God, present yourself as servants of God, as vessels that the Lord can use. In Ephesians, Paul says to take off a lot of things and put on a lot of things. So he says, take off lying. Don't lie to one another, but then tell the truth. He says, stop stealing, but he doesn't just say stop stealing. He says, what's what you have, share what you have, give it to the poor. So, beloved, listen, the Christian life is not just about not doing things, it's about positively doing things that bring God to glory and help other people. Now, in the wilderness, some of the Israelites expressed interest in going back to Egypt. Can you imagine? Do you remember this in the Exodus story? They get in the wilderness and things aren't going exactly like they thought they would, and they're thinking they start complaining against God and Moses, and oh, if we were just back in Egypt. And it's like, why would they say that? Well, here's why. Because the wilderness is difficult, it's challenging, it's not a life of perfect bliss. But here's the thing with Israel in the Old Testament, they were on their way to the promised land. So in their trials, here's what they did: they romanticized Egypt, remembering the good. Oh, we were fed. We, you know, we had a stake every once in a while, but forgetting the horrors of slavery. And you know this? Here's what's true about the Christian life. When you come out of that tank, you are in the wilderness. We are in a culture that hates, in the midst of a culture, that are rebellious and they're they are haters of God. And that's becoming more and more evident in even in our country. And it is not easy to live as a believer in this world. And we're traveling through. And our lives in some ways could be so much easier if we would just live like everybody else. We're in the wilderness. And sometimes Christians, you know what they'll do? They'll look back to those that old way of life as they see some friends who are living and living it up, so to speak, and they'll think, oh man. Oh man. You know, what if I were to go back there? What if I were to go back to Egypt? And you romanticize the past, forgetting the way that sin crushes your soul. When you slept with somebody you weren't married to, you had to wake up and wondered, do you have some disease or an unwanted pregnancy? When you drank too much or did too many drugs, you had to, somebody had to stay up by your bedside and watch you uh make sure you didn't stop breathing. And God, by his grace, brought you out of those things. But sometimes when you look back, you remember the high, but you don't remember the hospital room. And we tend sometimes to romanticize the past. But beloved, I want to tell you today, though the wilderness is dangerous, though it's not always fun to walk through the wilderness. I want to tell you, we're on a journey and we've left Egypt, and you don't want to go back to Egypt. Because God is bringing us to the promised land, and it's not just Canaan, it's the whole world. God is bringing about a new creation. When he returns, his kingdom will be consummated. You've heard me say it a million times. The Christian life is not about us going to heaven in the end. Now we believe in heaven, but the the end of the story, just go to the end of your Bible. I don't know how we missed this for so many years. It's about heaven coming to earth, and the world will be your Canaan if you are in Christ. Live in light of your baptism. Don't go, don't go back to Egypt. In the classic film The Wizard of Oz, remember when Dorothy opened the door of her relocated house and she saw this world of color for the first time. And what'd she say? Toto, I'm feeling I have a feeling that we're not in Kansas anymore. You know, that's exactly the declaration of baptism. Through the waters, baptism declares we're not in Egypt anymore. We're not slaves to sin anymore. We've crossed through the waters, left a sinful, dark, and tyrannical past behind. We've stepped into the kingdom of light, seeing the world in a new, colorful and beautiful way. The landscape is different now. And we belong somewhere, which to be sure is much better than Oz. So here's what I'll leave you with to do. If you've not been baptized, what are you waiting for? What in the world are you waiting for? Repent and be baptized for the remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit. If you want to get baptized right now, we'll figure it out. You can come and just talk to us at the altar. But if you want to come back tonight, it's 7 o'clock, you want to get prepared or whatever, I would love for you to come to church and we will baptize you. So if that's you, when we pray in a moment, you just come down and talk to one of our pastors and we'll get you signed up. If you have been baptized, just take a moment and evaluate your life. Does your way of life testify that you are that your baptism is genuine? Maybe there's something you need to repent of today and turn from. So do you have to be baptized? That's your question this morning. I would, why do you ask? A better way to think about it is this not that you have to be baptized, but that you get to be baptized. It's a wonderful invitation, one that I hope you'll take.