Today, we celebrate the Gospel through ceremony.  

In prayer, Father, we come before you.  We desire Your will, Your way, Your truth, Your light.  You are good.  As we look at the Gospel, it is Your truth, not ours.  It is Your reality and it is Your ceremony that you ask the church to commemorate through baptism.  As we look and experience that today, we pray that Your Spirit would unite, encourage, enthrall and fill us with joy as we celebrate the salvation we have in Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, Amen.

One of the reasons God has given us the ordinance of baptism is so that we will remember our own salvation, to reflect on what God has done in our lives, as we watch this picture happen and as we listen to the testimonies of those who have been touched and called by Him.  This is God’s design to encourage the church until His return.

God told the church how to organize until then, He gave the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper.  As we look at these ordinances, it comes with a heavy burden as we expand our view and look at them within the context of the global church, where there is a deficit!  If these are instructions given by God, why do we see the Lord’s Supper falling away to such infrequent intervals and why are baptisms being perverted?  Can we make any sense of this?  

The real issue is that while we can participate in these ceremonies, we cannot fabricate the work of God in the lives of people.  Salvation is from the Lord and the new birth is a miraculous work of God that we cannot create but only recognize. What then does the church do when leaders recognize there is no fruit being produced?  To make people think there is fruit, the church may try to manufacture it. The church may focus on the numbers of attendees as the measure of success. But it’s not the number of attendees, it's the number of lives changed by the spirit that is the fruit.  Another way churches manufacture fruit is to convince people they are saved, confuse confession with conversion, and allow people to be baptized without any knowledge of their testimonies or whether they have the ability to express any understanding of the Gospel.  Ultimately, we want to be incontrol of the fruit, but only when God’s hand is on His church is when He produces the fruit and He brings people forward to be baptized in a public proclamation.

These perversions of the ordinances demonstrates a lack of understanding of the Gospel. There is only one unchangeable Gospel and it is either believed or rejected.  We cannot add experiences to it and make people think that is the Gospel.

The Gospel begins in Genesis 1:1 with four amazing words, “In the beginning, God….”  This is the Gospel!  It is a statement of fact to be believed.  It is not an inquiry into a philosophical quandary.  It is not an allegorical simultude.  It is not Hebrew poetry to be deciphered, discerned.  Believe this: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” 

God gives no argumentation to prove His existence and this truth He has placed in the heart of every man and in all of creation.  All humanity knows God exists: no person creates anything so, the truth is known.  In our hearts, we know good and evil, right and wrong.  With that understanding, God draws us into the reality He exists and that He created everything.  

In this statement, every fallacy ever invented by man concerning God is exposed.  It counters humanism, disputes agnosticism, refutes atheism because it postulates the existence of God.  It refutes materialism because it distinguishes between God and the material: God was and then things came into existence.  It refutes pantheism because it necessitates a personal God who interacts with His creation.  God existed before everything!  This statement demonstrates He existed in eternity past with infinite knowledge (omniscience).  It emphasizes God’s aseity, that He is alone and does not need anything else.  It emphasizes His omnipotence, as only an all powerful, infinite God could create…and that is what He did!  

This personal, infinite, omniscient, omnipotent God gives us His word and He begins with “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”  This is the foundation of the Gospel.  It is all of theology wrapped up in one declaration, one statement.  Believe this!  Why?  Because He is sovereign ruler over all as the creator of all.  He owns the world and everything in it (Psalm 24:1).  He is the sustainer (Colossians 1:17).

As we move to Genesis 1:2, we begin to see the ministry of the Holy Spirit and the Word.  We see this throughout the rest of Scripture how the Spirit interacts with the Word.  In Colossians 1:16, we see that Jesus is the agent God uses to create; therefore, we see the Trinity of God in the very beginning.  God is sovereign therefore, salvation hinges on confessing God is sovereign Lord over all.

God then requires His people to ”be perfectly holy as I am holy”.  To fail in this requirement, to fail to keep any aspect of the Law, is to fail to keep all of it.  God desires for His people to reflect His character, to represent Him to the world.  As God begins to create a human race for Himself, the race being that of believers, reckoned righteous through faith, we see God taking Abraham, with whom He made covenant, and Sarah, aged and with a barren womb, and creates life, making Isaac, not Ishmael, God’s chosen line, as He told Abraham it would be.  In this, God wants Abraham and His people to represent Him, to perfectly obey Him, to know that He is the sovereign creator over all.

We see in Galatians 3:10, “For all who rely on works of the Law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them”.  This is where we find man, under the curse because we have broken God’s Law.  All humans are sinners before God.  Sin is within us from the very beginning of human life.  Man is under the bondage of his own will.  As Augustine said, “Man has lost his royal liberty”.  We find further confirmation in Romans 3:10, “None is righteous, no, not one;...”  We have sin, which is lawlessness (1 John 4), disobedience to the Law, disobedience to the Lord.  In this, we cannot marginalize our sin by comparing it to any other man’s sin: either you are a sinner or you are not, Scripture being quite clear we are all sinners in that, “...All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).

So, we ask ourselves, why would God give us this Law if He knows we cannot obey it?  The Law is to be our tutor that leads to salvation.  God loves us but there has to be a penalty paid for sin.  What we try to do in our flesh are works of righteousness.  There is a chasm we know exists between man and God, we know that we have sinned, we know God exists, we know the Law written on our hearts has been violated, we want the chasm closed and we attempt to close it with works.  From this, every cult in existence has formed, a cult being the Bible plus the word of the Cult with salvation found through the words of the cult, not from the Word of God.  This attracts the flesh because we are already self worshipers with a desire to make ourselves right with God.  It feels good to do something.  In this, we become sovereign, telling ourselves God must be pleased with us.  We want to deny that sin must have a penalty; however, “...the wages of sin is death….” (Romans 6:23).

From one man, Adam, all have sinned.  All of humanity was cursed by his willful rebellion, as Scripture tells us, “...sin came into the world through one man,....” (Romans 5:12).  Left to our own will because of our sin, when we choose something on our own that is choosing evil (Ephesians 2:1-3).  There must be a penalty paid for that sin.  For Adam and Eve, God killed an animal and clothed them.  Death entered on behalf of sin.  In an act of grace, God separated them from the tree from which they had sinfully eaten, putting a flaming sword between them and the tree; otherwise, they would have continued to eat from it and would be eternally damned.

God then tells them of a promised seed, Messiah, Christ who will come (Genesis 3;15).  God simply says we must place our faith in that Messiah; yet, we prefer to strive to change our behavior, which does not work: a change in our nature is required.  A miraculous work must be done within us, a new humanity must be created from within, an action only God can do.

Every person understands God exists, every person sees their sin and every person must come to an understanding of who Christ is.  What has He done?  What is His purpose?  Who is He?  We find that Christ is God Himself.  Effectively, God says, “I will save you from me through Me.  I will send you My Son, Jesus.”  Colossians 2:9 tells us, “For in Him, the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.”  In His love for His creation, even after we have fallen, turned against Him, while we were yet sinners, God leaves His throne room in Heaven, subjects Himself to the frailty of humanity, to the point of being in the womb of a woman then, growing in stature through time, learning as we learn, understanding as we understand, yet He does it with perfection, without sinning because He is God.

He demonstrates His love by subjecting Himself to the weakness of humanity to become the sacrifice for all of humanity.  For what purpose?  To bear our sins on a tree (1 Peter 2:24).  We took from the tree, we sinned against God and on the tree God bore the sins of His people.  On the cross this was completed where He bore the penalty for our sins, he bore the wrath of God.  He willingly took on our sin for us.  “For our sake, He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21).

And God did this in such a miraculous way!  “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us,...” (John 1:14a).  God left the cosmos and became very common, living among us, giving us imagery of the Shekinah Glory of God in the Old Testament, where God led His people through the wilderness, dwelling among them in the Tabernacle.  Likewise, in the New Testament, we have God, in Jesus, tabernacling with us.  He walked with us, lived with us, endured mistreatment from us.

“And we have seen His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14b).  What is the glory of God but the summation of His character.  In Christ, we see God.  To know God, read the Gospels, and you will see how He interacts with His creation.  He is full of grace and truth, the truth being the revelation of salvation, and grace being the forgiveness He offers.  He is full of both!

Jesus lived a perfect life then, He died at the hands of men, enduring the fullness of the wrath of God, extreme suffering in our place.  Upon His death, Jesus was laid in a tomb where He remained for three days  but then arose from the dead.  As He was raised from death, we see that he was the propitiation (or the appeasement, God’s approved sacrifice!) for our sins.  Rising from the dead, He is Jesus Christ, with “Christ” signifying the return of Jesus to His appropriate place in glory for our salvation. Jesus Christ is alive today!

Why was He raised? He was raised for our justification (Romans 4) so that we could be justified.  By placing our faith in Christ, we are not simply saved, not simply reconciled with God, we are completely justified, declared by God to be righteous just as if we had never sinned.  We have become the righteousness of God.  The perfect life Jesus lived is applied to us.  Christ rose so that we would be justified.

The question that remains is how do we become righteous?  How do we know if we are saved?  Repent and believe!  You must have a change of mind.  “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23).  From what do we repent?  All that dishonors God,  What dishonors God?  The idea that we think there is some other way to God than through Christ, some other work we can do.  What does it mean to “take up your cross daily”?  This is found in Romans 10:9, “confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord”.   God wants us to look at Christ and say, “You are the sovereign creator God!”  This is what God desires for us.  We must repent of everything else.  Believe this truth!  We will only be saved if we confess with our mouth and believe with our hearts God raised Jesus from the dead.

True repentance has to come from God.  We have to humbly go before Him and with an honest heart tell Him we want to believe this truth.  We must cry out for God to help us in our unbelief.  By His grace, God grants the belief, He grants the faith to believe (Ephesians 2:8-9).  As we believe, we desire to repent of our sins, the belief and repentance occurring almost simultaneously.  This is God’s salvation, coming to the understanding of who He is.  It is the testimony of all who truly believe, those who are broken before Him, knowing they have moved from self worship to the worship of the one true God.  For the first time, they know the Gospel of God in Christ is true!  They know God is now their Father and begin to experience love for God in a very real way.

Today, if you have never repented, will you now do so and believe Jesus is the resurrection and the life?  You are no longer ignorant.  Will you humbly bow before Him in worship?  “Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God” (John 3:18).  You are condemned because you refuse to look at Christ and say, “You are God.  You are sovereign.  You are the creator.”  Will you now relinquish your will to God and ask Him to help you in your unbelief to believe?

As we ready to witness the ceremony of baptism, remember that baptism represents the declaration of Christ as Lord, Sovereign, Creator, the great I AM.  To understand and to know this truth, one would refuse to be “baptized with glitter”.  The meagher things before us, this tub and water, represent a Divine reality.  In the ceremony of baptism, we see a picture of the Gospel.  God effectively says, 

“As the church comes together, if My hand is on that fellowship, I will bring people from darkness to light.  As I do this, I want you to baptize them in the midst of the congregation.  As you baptize them, see the Gospel.  Be reminded that you have been buried, made dead to your trespasses and sins and raised alive in Christ, in His righteousness.”

With this remembrance, let us be spurred on to love and good works, thus proving our righteousness (James 2).

Father, we again come before You.  If there is anyone who does not understand or believe that You are God, we pray they would fall on their face in repentance, that You would grant them the gift of faith to believe, that you would expose to them the truth of the reality of the Gospel and through that they be reconciled to You, brought from darkness to light, that You would be glorified through their conversion because it is done from You, through You, for You and to You in Your worship  In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.

SELAH
 

1. Are you persuaded the Gospel of Jesus Christ is declared in Genesis 1:1?  If so, what convinced you?  In what way(s) is it declared?

2. As you listened to the testimonies of those baptized, as you witnessed the Gospel on display, was your heart encouraged and stirred to praise God for what He has done in your own life or was it saddened as you realized you do not share their testimony?

3. As proof of our righteousness, the Gospel on display and at work in our lives, we should be “spurned on to love and good works”.  Has your heart been stirred to new heights to make the Gospel known to any who still remain in darkness?