Baptism 130221
baptism - 13 February 2021
(matthew 28.18-20)
Jason Procopio
I am obviously happy to be here today, because not only do I get to baptize four sisters in Christ (which is always a joy), I also get to baptize a little brother in Christ.
But before we can talk about baptism, we need to talk about what goes behind it.
Some Christians act as if baptism is the thing, the main event that takes place in a Christian’s life. And while it is important, it is not the main event of our lives—rather, it is a picture of “the main event”. The “main event” is the work of Jesus Christ in us, which we hear proclaimed in the gospel.
The word gospel means “good news”—it is essentially a message from God himself. And this message comes in a variety of different ways, which all boil down to the same essential questions (this is the way Greg Gilbert summarized it around these questions, and I love his summary):
1) Who made us, and to whom are we accountable? Well, God made us, and we are accountable to him. The way an inventor has the right to decide what his invention needs to do, the God who created us has the right to tell us what we need to do, and we are accountable to obey him, because he is our Creator.
2) What is our problem? Our problem is that naturally, we don’t want to obey him. Ever since the first man and woman rebelled against God, every man and woman to come after them has rebelled against God too. We have wanted to be our own masters.
(If you want to test this in yourself, to see if I’m right, you can think of it this way: no one has ever thought, I want to only do what someone else tells me to do. Whether it’s our parents, our boss or the police, there always comes a point when we want to do what we want to do, and we don’t want anyone else to tell us what to do.)
The problem here is that because God is our Creator, he only tells us to do those things that are good for us. He knows how he created us, so he knows how we can be most happy—he knows how we operate, because he made us that way. So rebellion against God is hatred of all that is truly good (because he is good), and it is actually self-harm: it is doing what hurts us and rejecting what will help us.
This rejection of God, this rejection of what is good, that is what the Bible calls “sin.”
When we realize that, we start to see why, as the apostle said, “The wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6.23). Rejecting God means separating our souls from the God who gives us life. It means willfully deciding to spend all the time we have—which is actually eternity—apart from the God who loves us and who made us.
That’s a big problem. So (next question):
3) What is God’s solution to our problem? God’s solution to our problem is Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, came to earth as a human being, lived a life with no sin at all, took our sin on his own shoulders on the cross, and suffered the punishment we deserve. Essentially he took the thing that separates us from God off of us, and put it on himself. He lived the life we should have lived, and died the death we deserve. And when he was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit, he gave us his life—the life with no sin that he lived. So now, there is nothing standing between ourselves and God. There is nothing that separates us from him. There is nothing he holds against us. He looks at us, and instead of seeing our sin, he sees Christ’s sinless life which was not just given for us, but given to us. So he declares us holy and righteous because of what Christ did.
Receiving this incredible thing Christ did for us is what we mean when we say the word “salvation.”
So the last question is:
4) How can I receive God’s salvation? And here God just adds good news to good news. All he asks of us is that we place our faith in Christ, and that we reject the sin that was killing us.
Rejecting our sin—asking God to forgive us for us and turning away from it—is called “repentance”. The call to “repent” is very simple: “Get rid of what was killing you before.” Trust that Christ took all of that sin, all of our rejection of God, on himself, and now, turn your back on your old sin, and walk away from it. Listen to what God says and trust that he only tells us to do what is good for us.
Faith is trust—it is to trust that as crazy as it sounds, Christ really did live and die and come back to life for us, and that his life, death and resurrection are all we need to be saved.
This is the good news of the gospel, and this is how we respond.
Now here’s the surprising thing: all of that happened before we ever got to baptism. Baptism is not what saves us, and it is not just a rite of passage we do because that’s what happens in our family. Everything we just talked about in these four questions happened before we get in that water.
So now that we know that, let’s look really quickly at what baptism is. There are a lot of places in the Bible we could go to see this, but let’s keep it simple—we’ll be looking today at Matthew 28.16-20.
16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
In this text we see two main things. Baptism is an act of God; and baptism is for disciples of Christ.
Baptism is an Act of God (v. 18, 19b)
The Bible uses several images to help us understand what baptism is.
One image is that of birth. When a baby is born, the family comes to the hospital and visits, happy to see the baby. That visit isn’t the moment of the birth, but it is a celebration of that birth within the family.
Another image is a wedding. When people get married, they do it publicly. The love between them doesn’t begin at the wedding; they’re getting married because they love each other. The wedding is a public celebration of that love.
Another picture the Bible gives which helps us understand baptism is that of the ark that Noah built to survive the flood with his family. It’s a helpful image, but it’s a bit complicated, you can check out our series on 1 Peter on our website, we talked about it at length there (otherwise I’ll be up here for an hour).
The most common image the Bible gives to help us understand what baptism means for the family of God and what it means for us, is circumcision. (I don’t mean to offend you, but circumcision is the picture the Bible uses far more than all the others to help us understand baptism. In the first 4 chapters of Romans, Paul brings it up 16 times—this doesn’t come from me.)
Now why would God pick this frankly weird picture to help us understand something way less weird, like baptism? Circumcision was what they did to an Israelite boy, to give him a physical marker which physically showed that God had chosen to save him and bring him into his people.
Baptism serves a similar purpose—it is often described as a sign and a seal. It’s a physical marker to show on the outside what God has done in us. And it is a seal—like the seal on a birth certificate, or on a certificate of naturalization, which proves authoritatively that this person is a citizen of this country. Through baptism, God confirms and guarantees his promises—that is, he looks at all of the promises God has made to his covenant people, and then he applies those promises to us.
So baptism is first and foremost an act of God—it’s not something we do. That’s why Jesus tells us to be baptized in the name of God—in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. And that’s why he starts by telling his disciples that he has all authority in heaven and on earth. Baptism is a picture of what he did, not of what we did.
Because of what Christ did for us 2,000 years ago, he wakes us up; he gives us faith; the apostle Paul says that he brings us from death to life with Christ. And once we know that, once we realize that, he says, “Follow me,” and we begin to follow him.
That’s what we see in a baptism: it’s a picture that what happened to Christ, happened to us. When he died for our sins, the sinful people we were died with him (that’s what we see when we go under the water); and when he was raised from the dead, he gives us new life in him (that’s what we see when we come out of the water).
So baptism is an act of God. Secondly...
Baptism is for disciples of Christ (v. 19-20)
The order in which Jesus tells his disciples what to do after he leaves is important. He says first:
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…
It is very important that Jesus tells his disciples to go and make more disciples. A disciple is simply someone who follows a master: who learns from him, who observes him, who learns to live like him. Jesus had a group of twelve disciples who followed him around during his ministry; and now he tells those disciples to go and make more. “Do for others what I did for you. Show them what it looks like to follow me.”
To be a Christian is to be a disciple of Jesus Christ—that is what it means to be a Christian. It means to meet Christ, and listen to his voice, and learn to follow him. The day that Jesus met Peter and said, “Follow me,” in that very instant, Peter became a disciple of Jesus Christ.
Now it’s very interesting that according to Jesus, the next step in the process is not that we learn to live like him. He didn’t say, “Go make disciples, teach them to live like me, and then baptize them.”
He said,
• Go make disciples of all nations;
• Baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit; and
• Teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.
Baptism, according to Christ, should be the first step in this process. It is the sign which shows that we are now disciples of Jesus Christ. We hear the gospel, we place our faith in Christ, we repent of our sins (that is, we ask God to forgive us for our rebellion against him, and we do an about-face, make a commitment to follow Jesus rather than sin from now on). And from that point on, we are disciples of Christ—we follow him.
Baptism is meant to be the first thing we do after this happens—after we become disciples of Christ. Now it doesn’t always work out that way—some people have been misinformed about what baptism is, and some people just didn’t have the opportunity to be baptized before—but that’s what it is meant to be. Baptism is the public sign that this new disciple of Jesus Christ belongs to God’s family just as much as someone who’s been following Christ for fifty years.
And once a person is baptized, then they spend the rest of their lives learning how to observe what Jesus commanded. And this is why we want the church to be present at baptisms—obviously the whole church isn’t here today (because of Covid), but they’re watching online and celebrating with us. We want the people being baptized to be able to say to the church, “I’m part of this family now, so I will be there to follow Christ with you, to be there for you and help you grow in him.” And we want the church to be here to witness this event, to be able to remind those being baptized that they were here, they saw their faith, and they will walk with them and help them grow.
Now there’s another act that goes with baptism, another act that Jesus commanded for all of his disciples (the church has historically called them “sacraments”)—the first is baptism, and the second is the Lord’s Supper. These two acts go together. Baptism is the rite of entrance into God’s family (like a wedding: the love was there before, but we celebrate that love and commit to stay faithful to it at the wedding); and the Lord’s Supper—when we take the bread and the cup which represent Christ’s body and blood—is the rite of continued fellowship with God in the church (like how a married couple will celebrate their anniversary every year).
This is why we call baptism a celebration—like a wedding, it is a joyous occasion—and this is why baptism is not just a private affair. Baptism makes no sense if you are not committed to the life of the church into which you’re being baptized; and the Lord’s Supper makes no sense if you haven’t been brought into the life of the church through baptism.
So today, these six people—five sisters, one brother—are going to publicly profess their faith in Christ and be baptized, in presence of the church. They will tell God and the church, “I believe what God has done for me in Jesus Christ, and I have placed my trust in his work; and now, I commit to following him, with his help and with your help; and I commit to help you follow him too.”
And the church, by witnessing and celebrating this event with them, will respond, “We believe what God has done for you; we see your faith in Christ, played out before our eyes in your baptism. So we will be here for you, to help you follow Christ; and we will accept your help and lean on you too, as we learn how to obey him.”
