Whittier Area Community Church
8/25/24 - Allelon, Week 2 (Message Only)
A picture is worth a thousand words. I'm guessing you've heard that statement before. I know many of you have used that statement before. I want to spend a few moments with you talking today about, there's a lot of validity to that. Pictures can be powerful. They conjure up feelings in us that words just don't. They can bring back memories for us. They can raise ideas in us. Pictures stand for something and you can see it right away. They tell stories. They communicate in ways that words sometimes can. Aristotle was known for saying, "The soul never thinks without a picture." And today, I suggest to you that to you because perhaps the most beautiful picture of what Jesus has done for every single person is found in the picture of baptism, of Jesus' death for us, of Jesus being buried, and then Jesus rising to new life. And because Jesus rose again, the picture of baptism tells us we can be saved and forgiven, we will rise again and we're welcome into God's family. You see, baptism is this picture that reminds us. We can't save ourselves. It's a picture that tells us our sins are washed away by His grace. It's a picture that reminds us that, hey, there is a new beginning that's possible even when it looks like it's the end of your story. Baptism is a picture of what takes place when we're saved. It's a picture of how God turns a life around. Baptism is a picture on the outside of what God has done in us on the inside. It's this beautiful expression of someone surrendering, putting their trust in God. It's a public demonstration of 2 Corinthians 5 or 17. If anyone is in Jesus, in Christ, the new creation has come. The old is gone and the new is here. And so for a couple of moments with you today, I wanna open God's word to dive deeper into this idea, this picture of baptism so you can grasp in a deeper way the meaning of it. And part of that, I wanna answer some of the big questions that come up about baptism whenever it takes place here. And then like I said earlier, we're gonna go back to continuing to worship God. And as we do, if today is a day where you feel like I wanna publicly demonstrate, I am saved by Jesus. I'm adopted into His family. You're gonna have an opportunity at the end to literally go to this side of the room. There's a hallway and we've got T-shirts and towels and we'll be ready to help you in that process. Now, I realize churches have been baptizing people now for 2,000 years, but some of you, you might be here and you've never witnessed a baptism before. Or maybe you came from a background where baptism looks differently than how you may be seen it done here. So I wanna unpack what does baptism mean? And the way I wanna do that is by going to a picture that the Apostle Paul uses in the Bible. So if you have your Bible today, turn with me to 1 Corinthians chapter 10 where the Apostle Paul gives this picture and the picture is kinda fascinating because he points back to the Old Testament to an event that took place before there was even baptism as we know it today. So we're gonna start in 1 Corinthians 10. I just need to do a shout out real quick. We're so glad our junior high students and high school students are with us today, are we not? So glad you guys are here. Thanks for joining us. (audience applauding) So listen to the picture. The Apostle Paul says this in 1 Corinthians 10. For I do not want you to be ignorant of the fact brothers and sisters that our ancestors were all under the cloud and that they all passed through the sea. They were all here to baptize into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. Now these words fascinate me because baptism as we know it was not practiced back in Moses' day. This developed much later on. Baptism was often a practice that someone would sometimes use when they were moving from a kind of a pagan Gentile worship into Judaism and then John the Baptist who was the forerunner for Jesus. He presents baptism as this opportunity of repentance, of turning from an old way of life and turning to God. But it's interesting because now Paul invokes this story from the Old Testament before baptism as we know it even was there. So the baptism story that Paul uses is back in Exodus chapter 14 if you want to turn there in your Bible where the people of Israel were freed from captivity in Egypt. Now some of us, you've heard the Exodus story, you've seen the movies, but you haven't maybe grasped how significant that picture is for Israel throughout history. When some of us, when we think about, as if you're a Christian, you think about what's a picture of me being saved, you would probably think of a picture of a cross. You think Jesus, that's my salvation, what he did on the cross. That's the central picture that gives us meaning and purpose and our identity. For those who were part of Israel, pre-Jesus coming as the Messiah, lot of them their picture would not be a cross, it would be deliverance from slavery, the Exodus where they were freed from Egypt. In some ways, the picture of the cross for Christians, throughout the centuries, it would be the pictures of the Exodus that would be similar to that. It was what gave them their identity, the Exodus gave them meaning, it gave them purpose. And as you might remember, because the people of Israel, they were living in captivity in Egypt where they lived in oppression, they lived in slavery for 400 years, they experienced even their children being killed. And out of this injustice, they cried out to God and God responded and He sent a man named Moses and Aaron and God intervened through plagues and eventually Pharaoh's hard heart was softened for a short period of time where He let the people of Israel go. And so the people of Israel are led out of Egypt in a very unique way. In Exodus 13, 21, it says this, "By day the Lord went ahead of Israel "in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way "and by night in a pillar of fire to guide them by light." In other words, when Paul talks about the cloud in the sea, it's talking about this pillar of cloud right here. This pillar of cloud was not just in the sky, a cloud, it was the presence of the almighty, all-knowing, ever-present God leading His people, which is pretty cool 'cause that means the first person who ever began storing all our information in the cloud was not Amazon or Google or chat GPT, it was God, of course, right? And so God led the Israelites through the cloud to the edge of the Red Sea where they encamped. And friends, when they left this journey from Egypt to camp at the Red Sea, they were feeling good. Like many of us, when we start our journeys, they were feeling confident. We read in Exodus 14, 8, when they left, they were marching out boldly from Egypt until Pharaoh changed his mind. And suddenly, Pharaoh comes and pursues the Israelites with a chariot army of soldiers from Egypt, a bunch of chariots, and then in verse 10, he catches up to them. And we read this as Pharaoh approached the Israelites, they looked up and there were the Egyptians marching after them. And were the Israelites feeling so bold after that? Not so much, they were terrified. And the Israelites cried out to God. Verse 11, they actually look at Moses, the one who's leading them out, and they said to Moses, "Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us out to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn't we say to you in Egypt? Leave us alone. Let us serve the Egyptians. It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert. But of course, they never said that in Egypt. You don't see that anywhere in Egypt. They were saying, "Get us out of there. Get us out, we want to be free." But they never thought the freedom would lead to this, where they've got a sea on one side, and they've got an army that's about to kill them on the other side. It looked like things were the ending here. It looked like before their new beginning would even happen, it was gonna be the end. And this is where then Moses, he speaks these unforgettable words in verse 13. He says, "Do not be afraid, stand firm, and you will see the deliverance. The Lord will bring to you today." The Egyptians you see today, you'll never see again. The Lord will fight for you. You only need to be still. It sounds good, but you kind of have to wonder, was Moses secretly panicking himself? Because in the next verse, the Lord looks at Moses and says, "Why are you crying out to me? Tell the Israelites to move on." God, where are we supposed to move on to? And God tells him, "I want you to go in the sea. Raise your staff. Stretch out your hand over the sea to divide the water so that the Israelites can go through the sea on dry ground." Now going into the water, friends, that looked probably to the people, like that looks like certain death to us. And in a way, it was. Because when they entered that water, what the Israelites were doing is they were dying to their old identity. They were dying to their fears. They were dying to their old way of life. You see, Paul, I think in 1 Corinthians brings up the story because he knew when the Israelites would go into the water and come out, they would come out as a new people. With God, a new story was happening. So the people, they trust God and they step into the sea. Look at verse 21. "Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea and all that night the Lord drove the sea back with a strong east wind and turned it into dry land. The waters were divided and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground with a wall of water on their right and on their left. God saved his people and he defeated their enemies and part of the reason I think Paul refers to the story in the context of baptism is because when the people of God came up out of the water, they had a new identity and a new reality. When they went down into the water, they were slaves. When they came out of the water, they were free. When they went down into the water, they were in grave danger. When they came out of the water, they were secure and God's love. When they went down in the water, they lived like everybody else in the ancient world. When they came out of the water, they now were headed to Mount Sinai where they were gonna receive a new covenant and 10 new commandments that would change the world. When they went into the water, they were terrified. When they came out of the water, they were secure in God's love and they were dancing and singing. If you look in your Bible, the next chapter, Exodus 15, you find it seems like the first hymn ever written down in the Bible. Miriam, Moses's sister and a prophetess, she sings this hymn and they're dancing to it. Here's one verse in this, Exodus 15 too. The Lord is my strength-facing, my defense. He has become my salvation. He is my God and I will praise him, my Father's God and I will exalt him. There's his victory. (congregation applauding) Sometimes, sometimes when you watch someone after they go into the water and they're baptized, they come up out of the water like this. And the reason they come out like that is because they've experienced a victory of God in their life. And often, you don't know what that victory is. You can't see it, you don't know what it is. But publicly, they're showing publicly that God has done something for them personally. Something was holding them back. Maybe it was guilt, maybe it was fear. Maybe they thought something would haunt them the rest of their life. But as they came up out of the water, there was this realization that God's love and God's forgiveness and God's mercy and God's grace are more powerful than anything in their past. Now, often when baptisms take place, like I said, people will have questions at times. People ask a couple questions more than any other. So I wanna cover three of these. First one, sometimes people say, "I was baptized as an infant. "Do I need to be baptized again?" I want you to know, when people practice infant baptism, I think they're recognizing that God is at work in the precious lives of these children. Even before God, they know the name Jesus or they know Jesus' love. They're saying these little ones, God's working in their life. It's expression of faith on the behalf of the parent, which I think is so beautiful. At WAC, we don't practice infant baptism, though we do what's called child dedications. We're in the same way on the eighth day Jesus' parents brought him to the temple to dedicate him. So we pray a prayer of blessing over children and we dedicate them. And the reason we do that, and we don't necessarily do infant baptisms, is because when you study scripture, baptism is a picture not just of your parents' faith, but it's a picture of your faith, of your chosen surrender to God. Did you notice that song again that we looked at? When the people of Israel, when they went into the water, in many ways they had the story of their forefathers. They knew that God was the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Joseph. They knew God rescued Joseph from prison and made him and gave him great esteem. But here's what's amazing. When they came out of the water, they didn't just have a story about God of Abraham and God of Isaac. They had a story of their own with God. Remember what it said? Now he's not just the God of Abraham, he's my strength, he's my defense, he's my salvation, he's my God. And so we encourage you, even if you've been baptized as an infant, to make that decision yourself, to say I wanna be baptized, to publicly demonstrate that God is my God. I've chosen that, not just my parents, as great as that was. Another question that comes up. How much water do you really need in order to be baptized? So some people sprinkle, some people dunk, some people do it three times, some people hold you down longer than others, right? Let me remind you that water and baptism is just an outward visible sign of the picture of something else, something you can't see, and that is the grace of God. And I know churches fight over this, denominations split over this. Friends, the grace of God is not contingent on how much water you have, okay? So you don't have more grace if you're baptized in an ocean than you would if you're baptized in a swimming pool, right? You don't have more grace if you're baptized in 3,000 gallons of water, or if you're baptized with three handfuls of water, okay? The water is the outward visible symbol of what God is doing inside of you by his grace. Picture sometimes a baptism that's used, it's not in the Bible, but it's helpful. Is that of a wedding ring? So a wedding ring is a sign of a promise, of a covenant, of a saying, "I'm gonna give my life to you, to love you, to cherish you." Now, here's the deal, does it matter how big the diamond is or how, you know, whether there's a diamond or not? I mean, for example, hold on. So, when my wife, when my wife married me, she was the pastor, she knew it was a pastor. So she knew like, did it matter to her whether it was like one-tenth of a carrot diamond or a 10-carat diamond? Would it mean any more or less that she was married? (congregation laughing) And the answer I'm banking on is, no, whether she is just as married, whether it had a 10-carat diamond or one-tenth of a carrot diamond. And she doesn't have a 10-carat diamond because I'm a pastor, but, okay. So, friends, I bring that because the quality, the quantity of the water doesn't change the grace you experience. So, if you're here, well, why do we do baptism by dunking people and not just sprinkling people? The reason we do it here is because the word baptized in English comes from the Greek word in the New Testament, baptism, baptism. It's a transliteration of that, which literally just means to bury, to dip, to plunge beneath the water, to immerse. So, we immerse people at Whack because that's what we see that Jesus experienced and what we see throughout the New Testament. Okay, one more question. Do I have to be a Christian for a certain period of time before I'm baptized? And the answer is interesting. Answer is, in Scripture, when someone believed in Jesus, it was, like, simultaneously, they would decide, I'm gonna be baptized right then, spontaneously. This is not the way often we work in our culture. The late Chinese preacher witnessed Lee, he said this, believing and being baptized are the two footsteps of one complete step. So, believing is one foot, being baptized is the other foot and these make the complete step. And this is what you see all throughout the New Testament, especially the book of Acts on the day of Pentecost in Acts 2.41, those who accepted the message when Peter preached it were 3,000 people and those 3,000 people were baptized on the spot. They didn't bring a change of clothes, they just did it right there. And then you look in Acts 9 and when Saul, who was the terrorizer of the church, became the apostle, I mean, he, remember he meets Jesus on the road to Damascus, he couldn't see, and then a man named Ananias comes to him. And when he believes after he talks to Ananias, he got up right away and he was baptized. And then there was a Philippian jailer who met Paul and Silas in the middle of the night when Paul and Silas tell him about Jesus, this man's life has changed and immediately he and his entire household are just baptized on the spot in the middle of the night, a man named Cornelius, a Gentile soldier meets Peter. And when Peter finds out that this man follows Jesus and accept the Holy Spirit, he says surely no one can stand in the way of him being baptized with water and the whole household's baptized. In Acts 8, Philip meets an Ethiopian official, an Ethiopian eunuch and this man believes in Jesus and then here's what the man says, look, here's water, what can stand in the way of being baptized? I love that response. The Ethiopian official doesn't say, okay, one day I plan on being baptized or someday I might be baptized, he says this very day, let's get it done. Because he knew, he had a new identity, he had a new purpose, he had a new hope and he wanted to show it. The people of Israel, they went down into the water when they were slaves and they came out of the water, they were the children of God. By the way, not just as individuals, but together. One of the reasons we do baptism publicly like this is because it's a reminder that we're part of a community together saved by God and that saving prepares us for whatever challenges we're gonna face ahead. Years ago, a pastor and civil rights leader named Andrew Young, he tells a story about how years ago when he was ministering alongside Dr. King in the fight through some of the worst parts of segregation and the civil rights movement, he remembers there was one Easter morning, 1964, when all of a sudden, a group of people, they planned, we're gonna make a march from New Pilgrim Baptist Church all the way up to Birmingham City Jail where Dr. King was being unfairly incarcerated because he stood against segregation. And so here's what happened, Easter Sunday, all the churches let out and all of these people dressed in all of their church clothes just began marching down the street singing through Birmingham and they were excited, they felt like this is awesome, this is the movement, until suddenly they turned a corner and they saw police officers and fire engines and firemen with hoses blocking their path. Bull Connor, he was the commissioner in that time in that town and he was brutal tactics like fire hoses and police dogs, not just against adults but against children as well. And so those 5,000 people frightened got down on their knees and they just started to pray in the middle of the street. And after praying for a while, the scene began to change and one of the oldest leaders on the march ends up shouting, the Lord is with this movement, off your knees, we're going on. And the commissioner Bull Connor was furious, he yelled for the police to stop the people. But here's what Andrew Young writes, he says the police didn't move a muscle, he said even the police dogs that had been growling and straining at their leashes were now perfectly calm. I saw one fireman, he says tears in his eyes and he just let the hose drop at his feet. Our people march right through the red fire trucks singing an old gospel song, I want Jesus to walk with me. As they sang Bull Connor's policeman refused to arrest us, his fireman refused to hose us, even his dogs refused to bite us. And then Young said this, I'll never forget. (audience applauds) One old woman on that Easter Sunday who became ecstatic with joy when she marched through those barricades and she began to shout, "Great God Almighty done, parted the Red Sea one more time." (audience applauds) And friends, you can be assured the country hadn't been changed totally. There were still so many issues and so many problems ahead, but that march had changed those people. Hope was stronger, hate was weaker. And friends, when you understand what a march through that Red Sea can look like, you realize it changes us. When we see people enter into baptism, enter those waters. So friends, no matter what problem you face today, no matter who your Pharaoh is, no matter what hopeless situation has you down today, listen again to the words of Moses, don't be afraid, stand firm, you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring to you today, the Egyptians you see today, you'll never see again, the Lord will fight for you, you only need to be still. And may I remind you as we close that your God fought for you. When he sent his son Jesus to die on a cross in your place. And then Jesus was buried in a tomb where it looked like the end of the story, but then on the third day, Jesus rose. And friends, that points to the fact that when you get baptized, you're demonstrating I have a whole new story because I believe Jesus rose from the dead and I will rise for eternity with him. Friends, if you've trusted Jesus, but you've never been baptized, I want today for you to really consider, is this the day? Not like the Ethiopian eunuch, not to say someday or one day, but today. Paul says one more place in Romans six. He says this, or don't you know that all of us were baptized into Christ Jesus, were baptized into his death. We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life. One of the sad realities is that sometimes we believe a new life is not possible for us. We think, well, because of the divorce, new life is not possible. Or because of depression, new life won't be possible. Or because of the addiction, or because of my failure, because of the abortion, or because of the affair, or because whatever the dark secret in your past is, you think, man, the end is for sure for me. There's no newness as possible. But I want to remind you, friends, that whatever that thing is that's haunting you, that is not the end. God wants to free you from the bondage of your past, like He freed the people of Israel. He wants to deliver you from your fear. He wants to turn your mourning into dancing and singing to give you a new identity and purpose. And when you go down in that water, you're just saying, God, my old life, my sins, my past, my burdens, that's all dead. I'm surrendering to you so I can be raised to new life. Baptism is not saying you've got it all together. It's not saying you're never gonna struggle again. It's not saying you figured it out. It's saying, in the struggle, in the fight, I am saved by Jesus. And now Jesus' story is my story. And that's what we celebrate today. Apostle Paul, when he got baptized, Ann and I have said this to him. And now what are you waiting for? Get up, be baptized, and wash your sins away, calling on his name. I don't know what you've been waiting for in your life. But today is a day for some of you where you can say, I want to show publicly what Jesus has done in me personally. Let me pray with you. Jesus, we thank you that you fought for us on that cross, that you forgave all of our sins in the past and all of our sins in the future. And on the third day when you rose, you guaranteed we will have eternal life now and forever. And today, God, for those who need to publicly demonstrate that in baptism, would you encourage their hearts? Would you give them the courage to take that step? And would you meet them in this sacred moment? And just with your head bowed and your eyes closed, if you've never accepted the grace of God. And today's the day you want to take that first step, just tell God in your thoughts. God, I believe you sent Jesus. He died for my sins on the cross. I could never earn it, but I received the grace that you give me. Wash away my sins. Fill me with your spirit. I want to be your child now and forever. In Jesus' name, amen. (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]