A Baptismal Message

Well, this morning we're going to take a one -Sunday hiatus away from 1

Corinthians 3, where we've had this short series for the last few weeks, and we're going to look at something else, obviously, because we're going to be in a different part of Scripture.

We're going to look this morning at what happens at baptism.

We often hear messages before a baptism of what baptism does not do, what we must not account on as we go through the process or follow the command of Jesus Christ in being baptized.

So it doesn't do this, it doesn't save you, it's all about the cross of Jesus Christ, all of which is true. But I thought this morning, as we prepare ourselves for Quinn's son's baptism, which

Lord willing will take place in not too much longer from now, that we would put our focus on what the

Scripture says actually does happen, what are the positive things that occur when someone obeys the Lord Jesus Christ's command and is baptized?

Is it all negative? Is it all just what we need to say, what doesn't happen and what we must not rely upon? Well, those are good warnings, but the

Scripture has much to say about what does in fact positively occur when someone does, as Quinn will soon do, become baptized.

So before she enters the baptistry behind me, which Lord willing is filled with at least some comfortable water, if not warm water, and God willing to rise again, we'll take a look at 1

Peter 3 and verses 18 to 22 and hear from God's Word what actually occurs at baptism.

So please stand now in honor of God's Word, 1 Peter 3 and verses 18 to 22.

For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the

Spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when

God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is, eight persons, were brought safely through the water.

Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers having been subjected to him.

God bless the reading of his Word, now his proclamation. Please be seated. And let's pray one more time and ask

God's help in this. Heavenly Father, we do pray that you, by your Spirit, would open our eyes and our hearts to the wondrous truths of your

Word, that you, Father, would enlighten us, that you would give us understanding, that as we proclaim and as we hear, we would know what you would have us to understand here,

Father. And we pray that you would bless the service of baptism, which is to occur soon, that you would,

Father, be honored as obedience to Jesus Christ, your Holy Son, is brought about.

So Father, in all these things, just pray your blessing upon us and your help in all of this, for we ask it in Jesus' name, amen.

So again, we prepare ourselves for this ceremony of baptism and it behooves us to ask, just what does baptism do?

What does it do? Well, it brings us into obedience to Jesus' command, we know that, and that's the first and the simplest answer that we can give.

What does it do? It brings us into compliance. That was

Jesus' ongoing command to the church. You know there's two ordinances that we have.

There is baptism, which the church does continually, but we only baptize once upon profession of faith, as Quinn has done.

And then the Lord's Table, which is the continuing ordinance. So it's fairly important, it's fully 50 % of the continuing ordinances of the church.

Does baptism actually do something? Is there something that God actually does in the believer as they follow the

Lord Jesus' command and are baptized? Well, we know we're saved by grace, we're not saved by works, so baptism doesn't save.

Sins are forgiven by Jesus' cross, and this is apprehended and appropriated, how?

By faith. So baptism doesn't gain us our pardon from God, and that's enough on what it doesn't do.

What does it do? What actually does happen? Is there anything accomplished here other than compliance with Jesus' command, which is accomplishment enough, we have to admit.

Well, our verses this morning from 1 Peter 3, 18 -22, shed some light on what actually happens in the soul of the believer when he or she submits to this ordinance.

And that's what we read from 1 Peter 3, 18 -22, just as one place in the scripture where we can gain this answer.

And to explain this, Peter goes all the way back in the biblical narrative to the flood. The key is verse 21, where he explains that baptism is

God's positive answer to the sinner's appeal for a clean conscience. It is

God's positive answer to the sinner's appeal for a clean conscience before him.

So the first thing that baptism accomplishes, as we try to see this conscience that is cleansed, is that we follow the

Lord Jesus Christ in the pattern of his suffering and his death. Verse 18, for Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.

Put to death. Christ was put to death on the cross. Christ died for your sins, for my sins, for Quinn's sins, as she is given testimony.

So Quinn then follows him, any baptismal candidate, follows Jesus Christ into the earth, as it were, represented by the water, where his dead body was laid.

Not in the water, but in the earth, in the tomb. Paul writes in Romans 6 how believers have died, not in body like Jesus Christ died, and on the cross, but died to sin.

Christ suffered for sins, the Christians have suffered the weight of sin. Christ the righteous died for the unrighteous, and Paul would add in 2

Corinthians 5, 21, that by faith, God imputes to the believer that righteousness of God himself.

For he made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that in him, in Christ Jesus, because of Christ Jesus, on the cross, where Christ paid for our unrighteousness, we might become the righteousness of God himself.

There's purpose in Jesus' suffering. He obeyed God the Father, he obeyed his

Father in everything. You can read through in John's Gospel where this comes through so many times.

All that the Father has commanded me, I do as I have heard, I do as I am commanded, over and over again.

There's purpose for us in God's suffering. I was right there in the verse that I read, verse 18 from 1

Peter 3, that he might bring us to God, that he might bring us to God.

You see, in conversion, the Holy Spirit accomplishes in us God's purposes in his Son's cross.

Jesus Christ, on the cross, that he might bring us to God, suffered for everything that keeps you from God.

He suffered for your sin, he suffered for your lack of repentance, he suffered for your stubbornness, he suffered for your every violation of his good and holy, and I should say, revealed will.

The suffering was to bring us to God, not just to be an example, not just to show us how bad sin is, though all those things might be true.

The purpose that Peter brings out here is to bring us to God. So the

Holy Spirit, when he gives you a new heart and faith to believe, is to bring you to God.

It is to bring to your soul God's purposes accomplished by Jesus Christ on the cross.

Jesus suffered once for our sins for that purpose. Quinn's baptism is her public statement that Christ died for her, that she might have been brought to God.

And here she proclaims that God's purposes in Christ have been fulfilled in her. So what does baptism accomplish?

What does it actually do? With all the nots, with all the negatives, with all that we have to say that it doesn't do, because there's so much misunderstanding out there, out there in the world in general.

Not that we're perfect and we have truth with a capital T. What does it actually do?

It is her proclamation that Christ's purposes on the cross have been fulfilled in her.

And every one of us who's been baptized, this is the proclamation we're making. This is something that actually occurs.

We're saying, yes, God has done this, Christ's purpose on the cross, or God's purpose in Christ on the cross,

I should say, that his son's suffering should be adequate to bring us to God because he pays for our sins.

It's one thing that we accomplish or we proclaim in baptism that, yes,

I am one of those. Christ was put to death in the flesh.

Quinn and anyone who has been baptized, put to death in the old self.

As Paul says, the old self has been crucified as if we were on the cross next to Jesus Christ, which we are not, but crucified in terms of the old man has died.

The new heart has been given. Behold, if anyone is in Christ, says the Apostle Paul in 2

Corinthians 5, he is a new creation. All things are new. All things are new because the old died.

What Christ did literally, on the cross, literally, died literally by baptism we follow symbolically.

Christ was made alive by the Spirit, so too has every believer, everyone who believes in the

Lord Jesus Christ. That new heart, that new life he's given you, made alive by the

Spirit of God. The same working of that same

Holy Spirit who raised Jesus Christ from the dead raises we who are dead in trespasses and sins, as the

Apostle says in Ephesians 2. You're born in trespass and sin. You're born in iniquity.

By nature, children of wrath. But the new nature, the new heart, the new person, the new creation is the one who can follow

Christ. The one who can say that God's purposes to bring sinners to him has been accomplished.

And that same Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, out of the tomb, his literally dead body and resurrected him and raised him up again has raised up Quinn in new life now.

Dead to the old person, alive in Christ now. And this proclaimed, this is a public statement, that yes,

God has done this in me. Peter goes on, he says, in which, in verse 19, in which, meaning the

Spirit, he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey when God's patience waited in the days of Noah, while the ark was being prepared, in which a few, that is eight persons, were brought safely through the water.

So I understand this is Jesus Christ, by his

Spirit, through the man Noah, proclaimed the gospel of coming judgment and a forgiveness for the sins that brought that judgment.

Of course, as we know, he was ignored. But the gospel was proclaimed then to sinners who are in prison now.

They who ignored and mocked the messenger, but then died in the flood that he warned them of. So what then is baptism?

What do we actually do here? It's proof that Quinn has heeded the warning and forgiveness was gladly accepted.

As Noah said, this flood is coming, I'm building this ark because God told me, judgments are coming upon the world because of sin, you need to repent and to forgive.

And he was mocked and ignored. What happens at baptism?

How does the apostle Peter bring those together? Because Quinn has heard the warning.

God willing, you have heard the warning. God willing, the price and the consequences of your sin, once heard, have terrified you.

You see the judgment coming. You believed it was coming. And that only through faith in Jesus Christ, only by repentance for your sin, can that be avoided.

This is Quinn's public testimony as she follows

Jesus Christ in the death and resurrection that she has heard the warning and has thanked

God for granting her repentance and knowing now that the judgment has passed her by.

A positive statement that judgment has passed me by because my judgment was placed on Jesus Christ.

A positive statement that I can come before God because everything that kept me from God, Jesus Christ paid for.

What is baptism? It's proof that Quinn, that anyone who goes under the waters by faith, he did the warning and then in glad obedience accepted the forgiveness that God grants in Jesus Christ in him alone.

It might take a moment to make just one statement about our mode of baptism. There's two major modes, ways of doing this.

There's sprinkling and there's full immersion. I do want to point out that Peter, when he refers to the flood, and in Genesis it says all the high mountains under the whole heaven were covered, and we point out that they were covered and not sprinkled or dipped.

The fountains of the great deep burst forth, hardly describing a gentle sprinkle.

So I think this would confirm our Baptist mode of putting you completely under the water.

Verse 21, baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience.

Conscience cleansed by faith in Jesus's cross. Your conscience is cleaned by Jesus's blood.

His suffering for my sins means that I no longer bear my sins before God. That's how we have a clean conscience.

It means also that by faith I no longer bear the guilt of my sin. Baptism cleanses the conscience, but maybe in a little bit different way than the blood of Christ.

It means that we've obeyed our Lord. It means we've gone in obedience to Jesus's command.

See, an unclean conscience comes from having done something we ought not to have done, or from not doing something we ought to have done.

We call it sins of omission and sins of commission. We commit sin when we do something we shouldn't, and we do sin by omission when we don't do something we should.

So what does baptism do? It gives a clean conscience because now you can say, I've obeyed.

We stand before God, having followed the commands of the Lord Jesus Christ. There's nothing between.

There's no disobedience. There's no high -handed sin, we could even say, that what you knew to do.

Jesus Christ commands us to be baptized in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You have done it.

Have you ever stood when you remember standing before your parents when you were a child? There's something you're supposed to have done that you didn't?

Of course, my mother, she could just look and tell as my wife came with me, I have to admit, and that's a guilty conscience because it's something you should have done that you didn't do.

By baptism, you clear the record, as it were. To be baptized, and now in a few minutes, obedience will be had.

You know, I saved, I didn't want to be baptized. I still consider myself Jewish. Jewish people shouldn't be baptized,

I think was in the back of my mind. We were having a Bible study at our house, and a friend named

Scott Rubin came down from San Francisco, he being a converted Jew and a pastor up there. And I forget what he was going to teach us on, and I don't remember how it came up, but he asked about baptism.

Everybody talked about the baptism experience, and my wife was elbowing me a bit, and he finally noticed the elbows going into me and asked me about it, and I had not been baptized.

And he was appalled by that, and he immediately changed the subject of our study to baptism, and the command to be baptized, and the cleansing of your conscience by obeying the

Lord Jesus Christ. I have to admit that hearing what the scriptures had to say, as it was clearly taught there in my home, it pricked my conscience, and I applied for it and was soon baptized.

But this is something that actually happens at baptism, it cleans your conscience, it clears this thing that is to be done.

You say, yes Lord, I have obeyed. The Apostle Peter speaks of an appeal, the appeal of a good conscience, this word appeal is used only here in the

Bible. It was a technical word in ancient Rome for the sentence approval of something after an inquiry.

So it's as if Quinn or any baptismal candidate has appealed to God that he quiet the conscience that he by his

Holy Spirit has stirred up. He stirs up the conscience about your sin, he makes you realize that there is a holy

God who needs to be reconciled to you, that your sin stands between the two of you.

And so it's an appeal, it's as if God quiet my conscience, slow the stirrings, make me whole again.

God has made her aware of her sin and the consequences of his wrath. And this is the answer of the appeal, an appeal for a clean conscience.

It's as if it's, how shall I rid myself of this evil conscience? Will you, most holy

God, accept me, a sinner? Will a holy God have anything to do with a corrupted person like you or me or Quinn or anyone else?

Will you, Jesus, grant me the communion of your death and your life? Will you, Holy Spirit, assure me of grace and adoption and dwell in my heart?

And to these questions, to these appeals, God answers yes. God answers emphatically yes in Jesus Christ and because of his blood and his good word all brought to fruition when we obey and are baptized.

In baptism, the conscience is cleansed because this act of obedience, in this, Quinn rises to new life out of the water having obeyed, having said, yes,

Father, your word I have complied with. The conscience is not only purified from his guilt, but it receives new and vital power by means of the resurrection of the

Lord Jesus Christ, not by the baptism, not because of the water, not because of the ceremony, because of God's pleasure when a saint obeys his word, when you submit to the command of the

Lord Jesus Christ. This is a conscience cleansing, again, ultimately, let's never forget, by the blood of Jesus Christ, by faith in his cross.

And also, derivative of that, by this act of obedience, saying because of the blood of Jesus Christ, because of my gratitude for the salvation that he wrought for me,

I gladly obey him. When someone is baptized, they're giving testimony that God has answered their inquiry about salvation.

It's a public avowal that the conscience has been cleaned, that you stand clean and righteous and sanctified and cleansed of your sin by the blood of our

Lord, and it's your public commitment, it's your positive statement that I will live accordingly.

Paul writes in Ephesians chapter 1, verse 19, of the immeasurable power of God's power, excuse me, the immeasurable greatness of God's power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might, that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead.

By his spirit, we have new life in Christ. By the working of that same spirit who raised Jesus Christ and you from the dead, we have power to live according to this new life.

And so when the baptismal candidate comes up to new life, we often say that, now go and walk in new life.

Walk in the ways of God and his son, Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. We don't gain the

Holy Spirit, we don't gain his power here, but we do affirm publicly that this is what we have and this is how we will live.

Ephesians 2 goes on to teach us that we've been raised with Christ. And so in baptism, what do we positively do?

We reenact Jesus Christ's death and his burial and his resurrection by going under the water in death and rising up to new life as the

Holy Spirit raised him up and gave you a new heart to believe and raised you up now, knowing that he will raise you up again when

Jesus Christ returns, that we will follow a resurrection like his. This is all a positive statement, that I believe these things and I follow in the

Lord Jesus Christ's pattern. So baptism is a public proclamation.

As God saved eight souls, as the Apostle Peter tells us, he saved eight souls from his wrath. It's a public proclamation that yes, he saved me.

They by water, me by Christ's blood. The souls who are in prison, the ones who ignored, the ones who ignore today, they pay for their own sins.

You testified by baptism that Christ paid for your sins. The souls now in prison are paying for their sins, but with their own blood.

You testify today that Jesus Christ paid for your sins with his blood and the souls now in prison will pay and pay and pay and pay.

And you testify today, Quinn, that Jesus Christ suffered once for your sins, as we all testified when we were baptized, that Christ suffered once on the cross for our sins and we follow him in death and burial and resurrection, all following in the pattern of Jesus Christ's and also prophesying ahead.

As the word tells us, they will one day be raised to eternal life. We shall see

Jesus like he is for we shall be like him. So these are positively what happens at baptism.

This is what is going to be portrayed here in just a moment. God willing, everyone here believes in the

Lord Jesus Christ and if you do not, this cleansing of the blood, this washing of your conscience, this clearing the way between you and God is by repentance, is by faith in Christ and his cross and repentance for your sins that he paid for on that cross.

Come to the Lord in faith, in sorrow for your sins and in gratitude for Jesus Christ having paid for your sins.

And then God willing, if you can make that connection now, if the

Lord puts it on your heart, if your heart is stirred at all to come to God, then

God willing you'd be able to give testimony to that and also follow as Quinn will in just a moment into the baptismal waters in obedience to Jesus Christ.

So with that, let me say amen. So amen to that. As we hear a short interlude while the final preparations are made and the pulpit area here is cleared,

Quinn, prepare yourself for baptism. Pastor Owens will be the one who will administer the waters to her.