Water Marks, part 1

Father, thank you so much for what we are witnessing here today. Thank you,

Lord, for those who are willing to humble themselves and be baptized, immersed in water as a symbol of their being washed of their sins, being crucified with you, being rescued from judgment.

I pray, Lord, as we look into your word today, that you would help these realities to be real in our hearts, that we would have understanding of the things that we see.

In Jesus' name, amen. Amen. You guys who know me, you know that I love to preach verse by verse.

We usually take a passage of scripture, and we just kind of walk through it and explain the meaning of it. But today

I'm doing something different. Every once in a while, I will do a topical message. It's not bad.

Topical doesn't mean bad, folks. It just means what we're going to do is we're going to take a subject rather than a passage of scripture, and we're going to look at what the word of God says about that in terms of baptism today.

So the title of the sermon is Watermarks. I think it's appropriate. A watermark, if anybody has a bill,

I don't carry cash anymore. I'm all cards. Anybody else? Straight cards? Well, if you did have cash on you, you could pull out a bill, a dollar bill, $5 bill, and if you hold it up to the light, you will see a watermark.

A watermark is something that's somewhat transparent, but as you look at it through the light, you're able to authenticate that this is a dollar that belongs to the

U .S. government. This is real. This has the identity. It's legit.

So today, baptism is a way of authenticating or identifying that you belong to Christ.

It's some kind of watermark that God has given. Now, when somebody stands up here and gets baptized in the water, many of them will speak and they will have some word of testimony, but today what

I want to show you is that baptism itself is a testimony. There's a meaning that God has infused into this idea of baptism.

It's part and parcel of being baptized that it speaks to who Christ is. Baptism carries weight with it.

There is a meaning, and I want that to come out from the scriptures today. Sometimes we look a little strange as Christians.

Some of us look strange all the time, not just because we're Christians. We look strange to the world because we do things like baptize or maybe somebody standing in worship and all of a sudden their hands start going up and they're just lifting their hands in worship and someone who's not accustomed to that might walk in and say, you know, that's a little weird.

That's a little strange. Sometimes Christians look strange to those who are not informed, but when we hold up the practices of scripture with the light of scripture to reflect and shine upon those things, the meaning of it comes out, it becomes clear.

I have in my office some of my favorite things and some of the things that I value that have symbolic meaning to me,

I keep on the top shelf in my office. There's a chalice there with a plate, ceramic chalice and plate.

I keep that because it reminds me of the last supper when Jesus took bread and blessed it and took wine and blessed it and distributed it because that represents his body and blood.

It's a symbol that means something to me. There's a crown of thorns. One of my favorite things up there is a picture that I saw in a magazine called

Voice of the Martyrs. It's a picture from Vietnam and the picture is a jungle scene.

It's beautiful. There's a big rock going down into a river and it's very lush and it's a great picture, high definition, but the amazing thing about this picture is that 25 young adults are lined up to go into the water and you see them getting baptized.

Another interesting thing about the picture is that one of the guys who's doing the baptism, his face is blurred out.

It's fuzzy. You can't see who it is. And the reason for that is because in Vietnam with the current government, the evangelist who is bringing people into the water to baptize them is at risk of being arrested and imprisoned.

In John chapter four, verse one, we learned that when the Pharisees heard and learned that Jesus was making and baptizing more disciples than John the

Baptist, he had to depart from Judea and go to Galilee. When people begin to be baptized, other people take notice.

In fact, not just people, but evil spirits, the devil, spiritual forces in heavenly places are offended by what happens in the water.

And you'll notice this around the world. When Andrew Brunson was in Turkey preaching the gospel, he didn't take much heat until they began to baptize people into the

Christian faith. And then all of a sudden he found himself in prison. This is true in communist China, parts of India, other parts of the world.

The more Christians begin to baptize other Christians, something is stirred up opposition that comes from demonic spirits, but also from rulers and authorities in those lands.

Baptism represents something powerful. What is this thing called baptism?

Why does it matter so much? I'm going to show you seven watermarks of baptism in the

Bible. We won't have time to linger over very many of them, but each one is important.

And today, what I want us to understand is that what we're seeing today, after I'm done preaching, we are going to see a visual representation of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

Something more than water is happening here. It's not just people getting wet.

Something powerful and spiritual is going to take place in this building. And my prayer is that if you do not yet have eyes to see why this matters so much, that through God's word, the light of God's word will open your eyes to see.

The first thing, the first watermark, baptism, this strange and unpredictable thing was introduced by a predicted prophet.

A predicted prophet. In Isaiah chapter 46,

God tells us how we can recognize him. Here's his watermark. Here's his fingerprint that shows that God is the one speaking, not just a preacher and a pulpit, not just another religious man.

But this is how you know the watermark of God. God is able to say things from the beginning and bring them to pass.

According to Isaiah 46, everything that he does, he is able to foretell it because he is

God and whatever he desires to do, he is able to do. And sometimes he'll foretell things hundreds of years in advance.

So the coming of the Christ is that way. It was foretold that he would be born in Bethlehem, that he would walk among us, be raised in Nazareth, that he would die a horrible death, being pierced through his hands and feet and his tongue sticking to the roof of his mouth, but that he would rise from the dead.

All of these things were written more than 300 prophecies of the Messiah. But so thorough was the prophecy of the coming

Messiah that God even foretold the last prophet to introduce

Jesus. His name was John the Baptist. The Old Testament makes little sense, or at least you could say it never comes to completion until John the

Baptist comes and introduced Jesus Christ. There are 39 books in what's called the

Hebrew Bible. But without the completion of that through the

New Testament in Jesus Christ, those things are left hanging because the last two verses in the

Hebrew Bible, Malachi chapter 4, foretell the coming of a messenger who will prepare the way of the

Messiah. Malachi, or as my friend Bill Lukman calls it, Malachi, the

Italian prophet. Not many people know about Malachi, but in chapter three, verse one, and then in chapter four, we're promised a forerunner, a messenger who will prepare the way.

Isaiah says he makes straight the path of the Lord in the wilderness. And sure enough, when

Jesus came, he was introduced to the world by a prophet wearing camel hair and had a leather belt.

He ate locusts and honey and he lived out in the wilderness and he was baptizing people in the

Jordan River and he announced, behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

This prophet who looked like a madman to the people of Israel until they began to listen to him.

This prophet introduced Jesus. How do you know that Jesus is the

Christ? He has the testimony of John the Baptist who himself was prophesied by Isaiah and Malachi.

God speaks through prophets and the final prophet, the final

Old Testament prophet, if you will, was John the Baptist, which brings us to the second point.

When it was time for Jesus to be introduced to the world, he had grown up as an ordinary boy, raised as any other

Israelite, and yet around 30 years old, he went out to the Jordan and he was baptized, immersed in the water and brought out of the water.

And in that very moment, God spoke from heaven. The father said, this is my son in whom

I am well pleased. That's the fingerprint of God. That's the watermark that this one is different than all the rest.

No other prophet, no other great religious leader, no other president or important elected official or great man of the earth has that pedigree that God, the father spoke from heaven and said, this is my son.

You see, the water identifies Jesus was identified as the son of God in the water.

But third, his identity as the Christ was not merely with water because we emulate that.

In fact, Jesus said, John baptizes with water, but I baptize with the Holy Spirit and with fire, meaning some kind of inward thing that only

God can do. But there's a second kind of baptism that Jesus went through that identifies him.

Jesus says, speaking through John, the apostle in first John chapter five, he testifies not by water only, but follow this by water and by blood.

Jesus tells his disciples who were arguing, maybe some of you have had this argument in your household, which one of you is the greatest?

Somebody says, I have to do all the work around here. The other says, oh, I do more. And they argue, who is, who is most important?

Who is doing the most? Well, the disciples were doing this. They were arguing amongst themselves about which was the greatest.

You see this in sports a lot, right? Who's the greatest athlete? Who's the goat? These apostles of the

Lord were doing that, and Jesus rebuked them in that context and said, can you be baptized with the baptism with which

I will be baptized? And by this, he was referring to a baptism, not in water, but being drenched in blood.