Identified With Christ (Various Texts)

But today, I just want to have more of a discussion, and we're going to talk about a couple different verses.

But this is a little bit different than what we normally do, because today is a special day in the life of the Shepherd's Church. We've been a church now, officially,

I guess for two and a half years with the state of Massachusetts. We've been gathering for a little more than two years, and the only thing that I can think of that a church normally does that the

Shepherd's Church has not been blessed to do is baptisms. And today, we get to do that. But it's been an interesting road on how we got here, and like I said before, with children being included in service, sometimes the

Word will conflict against your comfort, and it will cause you to have to repent, to change your mind.

Now, this is kind of the story of how I came to the position of baptism here today.

So I want to talk with you a little bit about that. I kind of began as a Christian at a very, very entertainment -driven church, like probably you would know the name of this church, one of the most entertainment -driven churches in the world.

And slowly but surely, the Lord brought me to a position of Reformed Theology, where I had to leave that church, and I realized that church is not for our entertainment, it's for the glory of God.

And then after that, I started understanding what Reformed Theology was, but I had this problem because Reformed Theology is not just that God chooses to save His elect, it's not just Tulip, if you know what that is, total depravity, unlimited atonement, like the five points of Calvinism that you hear people talk about, it's more than that.

It's an entire system of doctrine that encompasses how we worship, it talks about who the

Holy Spirit is, but it also talks about baptism. And when

I began studying these things, I was like, I do not see

Reformed baptism in the Bible. More specifically, I do not see the baptism of children in the

Bible. And I wanted to see it. I talked to multiple Presbyterian pastors because I was becoming

Reformed holistically across all of my doctrine. When I say Reformed, I'm not pointing to 1500s

Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Knox, Jonathan Edwards. I'm not pointing to that. I'm pointing to a return to biblical orthodoxy.

The Catholic Church for a thousand years almost had gone in a direction of biblical unfaithfulness, and at the

Reformation, when Martin Luther nailed those 95 theses—I said I'm not going to get animated, must be a disease or something—when

Martin Luther nailed those 95 theses to the door in the church at Wittenberg, it caused something to break out across the face of Europe and now eventually to America, where it was a return to the

Bible. So when I use the word Reformed, I'm not talking about dead theologians. I'm talking about a return to the

Bible, and how do we understand the Bible? But I didn't see infant baptism in the

Bible. So then I went to seminary eventually. My pastor at the time said that he thought

I would be a great person to go to seminary. I honestly suspect that it was probably because I was asking for meetings every week and asking him to teach me

Greek, and he just didn't have time, so he sent me to seminary. But I got to seminary, and I told my wife,

I said, I'm one good argument away from being convinced. Just one argument. Just give me an argument,

I'll believe that children are a part of the covenant, they should be baptized, and then all our problems will go away, and I didn't hear the argument in seminary.

My first job in ministry was a discipleship pastor. I didn't hear that argument in my first moments of being in ministry.

When we planted the Shepherd's Church, I hadn't heard that argument yet. And we were settled that we were going to be a

Reformed Baptist church. We actually are probably one of the only, probably the only church in America that called themselves a

Reformed Baptist church and had the Westminster Confession of Faith on our website. That might not sound like a big deal, but in some circles, those are fighting words.

We're probably one of the only Reformed churches, Baptist churches in the country, that accepted infant baptism.

Our posture right off the bat was, we want to take a posture of humility, because I've been so close to being convinced of this argument for so long that I wanted to give grace to John Calvin, who's about a hundred times smarter than me.

I wanted to give grace to 500 years of faithful, godly, intelligent men who loved

Jesus and who saw this in Scripture, and I didn't see this in Scripture. I wanted to be gracious, because who am

I? I'm trying to study the Bible, I'm trying to learn, I'm trying to grow, but the vast majority of Christians, and I'm not just talking

Catholic, the vast majority of Protestant Christians have baptized children. So I kept wondering to myself, what am

I missing here? So we wanted to be gracious. So we wanted to say, if someone had been baptized as an infant, that God counted that, and that we're not going to rebaptize them.

So we said that day one, but yet I hadn't been convinced of the argument. So we didn't call ourselves anything other than a

Reformed Baptist church. There's nothing wrong with that. There's many great Reformed Baptist churches. But as is often the case,

I can be very stubborn. Derek came to this conclusion about 18 months before I did, and I probably dug my heels in because Derek came to that conclusion.

I love Derek, but we're like brothers, so if he tries to convince me of something, I'm like, I don't see it that way. But he was right.

He saw it before I did, and that's to, you know, not to his credits, to the Holy Spirit who works in each of us and teaches us and we grow.

And I just, I couldn't hear it at this point. I watched debates,

I watched YouTube videos, I read books. I couldn't see it yet. Then all of a sudden, as if God has, we know

God does have a sense of humor because he saved me and he saved you, and that's funny, given who we are.

As I was preparing for a sermon in John chapter seven about covenant theology, that's when it made sense to me.

I was studying about what covenants are and about how God uses covenants to bring about his glory and about the story of the whole

Bible is inextricably bound up in covenant theology. God making promises. A covenant is just a promise from God to man that I'm going to do certain things and I'm requiring you to do certain things, and the

Bible is advanced on the story of covenants from Adam to Noah to Abraham to Moses and David.

The whole Bible is bound up in covenants and Jesus brings the final new covenant that brings all of it together.

But when I saw how each covenant has signs, I don't know if you remember the sermon where I talked about each covenant has a mountain, each covenant has a sign, each covenant has this and that.

Something changed in me. Now, I didn't say it in the sermon because that would have been irresponsible. As a pastor,

I hold it to be a fairly sacred responsibility that I don't want to say anything that I'm not confident of.

Now, when it was just Shannon and I in seminary and the stakes weren't that high, I would tell her things like, hey,

I've been studying this and I don't think I'm amillennial anymore. I think I'm postmillennial now. And she's like, oh, that's great, dear.

And that was, I could say that like right after I found out about, oh, day one,

I'm a postmillennial. She's okay, dear. But I don't want to be hasty when it comes to the

Lord's church. The Lord has entrusted me, that also is a funny thing, to stand up here and to share his word.

And I take that as a sacred duty and responsibility. And I know that for those who will stand up and declare his word, there's a grave responsibility.

And if we do it with anything other than fear and trembling, then we do it wrong.

So I didn't want to, I wanted to do my due diligence and study this with Derek and with others. So we went about the process of reading and studying and going to the

Bible and praying and just talking to as many people as we possibly could. Yesterday we had a baptism conference and we did three sessions on that.

And if you have a chance, check it out. It's about four hours worth of content. And I know that's a lot, but we could have spoken about it for 20, 30, 40 hours.

Baptism is probably one of the hardest topics in the Bible to understand. I gave this example yesterday,

I'll share it with you today. Graham and I were on a kayaking trip, and this is to show you how hard the topic of baptism is.

And on the kayaking trip, we saw this little tiny twig sticking up above the water. And Graham said, oh, look at that.

And I said, Graham, do you think that twig is surfboarding on top of the water? And he was like, no.

I said, well, what do you think? Is it connected to something underneath? He said, yeah. So we paddled our way over there and we saw that it was a branch that went down and was a big tree trunk, actually, that was holding this whole thing up.

Well, in the Bible, when you study the Bible, sometimes you can just go to the

Bible and say, I want to learn about the love of God. And you can just look at the little branch that's sticking up above the water and you can say,

I want to learn about the love of God. I'm going to go to every verse in the Bible about the love of God. There's hundreds of them, so it'd take you a little while.

But I'm going to write down what I learned about this. And it's pretty simple. You go straight to it and you can learn about it.

But yet baptism is not like that. Baptism is not like that. Because in order to understand what the

New Testament says about baptism, you have to understand what God says about covenants and you have to understand what God says about signs of covenants and you have to understand children being included in the community of God.

If you don't understand that children are always from Genesis to Revelation included in the community of God, you're going to miss baptism.

You're going to read all the baptism passages in the New Testament. You're going to say, I understand baptism. And I said that for 10 years and I didn't understand baptism.

So part of repentance is just publicly admitting that I got something wrong and that's okay.

We're all doing the best that we can to study the Bible. We're all doing the best that we can to try to understand what

God's word says. And we have to understand that we're dust and that he is infinite and that there'll probably be other things that I see in scripture later.

And I'm like, why did it take me so long to see that? It was right there. I don't know if you've ever had that experience where you, you read a verse and you're like, that could add it to the

Bible. I've never read that before. I've had that experience so many times. Like the idea of God giving us dominion as Christians.

I never saw that. We had three verses up here today or two verses up here today that talked about God's dominion, that God is going to rule.

God is currently reigning on his throne. He's going to put all of his enemies under his feet. For about 10 years of my life,

I lived like the church was defeated and the church had to live in a world that was broken and we had to huddle down in our bunker and wait for Jesus to come and rescue us through rapture and save us.

That's not the story of the Bible. The story of the Bible is the story of victory. Jesus' victory. It starts on the cross and for the last 2 ,000 years, his victory has been spreading so that the church has grown to, it's on every continent.

It's almost in every country. The church has grown. So these are things I didn't see. So I think we give ourselves grace that there are things in the

Bible that we just don't fully see yet. I also want us to give ourselves grace today because if it took me 10 years to get to this, we're not going to get it in one sermon and that's okay.

If we did four hours yesterday, it was supposed to be three, we went over. It wasn't my fault.

Mine was shorter, but if it took us four hours yesterday and we did not even scratch the surface of this topic, how are we going to do that in one sermon?

We're not. And that's okay. This is us as a church on a journey to understand our

God and to understand what God says in his word. And if you have questions and if you have thoughts and if you want to talk about this topic or you want to understand it better, we can have those conversations.

If you want, you can steal one of those books out there. I'd be happy if you brought it back, but I left them out there so you could see the books that I've been reading lately on this topic.

So this is a journey for us and this is a discussion if you want to have it. And I'm willing to teach any single person who wants to learn more because I realized how hard this topic is and how long it took me to get here.

So today I want us to just do a few things in the sermon.

I want the sermon to show us who or that covenant baptism is the biblical position.

I want us to understand that if we disagree with each other, then there's grace because there's plenty of topics that we probably disagree with now and we don't even realize it.

So we show each other grace, we show each other kindness, we love each other like Christ has loved us, we love our neighbor as ourself, and we major on the majors here.

We're not going to make baptism the greatest issue of the Shepherd's Church. I don't want in a hundred years for everyone to know the

Shepherd's Church because we made a decision about baptism. I want people to know the Shepherd's Church because we made a decision about the gospel and we proclaim the gospel with boldness to a dying generation that needs to know the hope that we have in Christ.

So this is a secondary topic. It's an important topic, but it's not a topic worth dividing over.

So with that, I want us to look at just a few things in the Bible today. Again, there's so much that we could share, but I want to look at three things.

Number one, Jesus came to identify himself with his people.

Number two, he did that so that we could be identified with him through baptism.

And then number three, we means all of us, from the tallest to the smallest.

So let's pray and let's tackle that together. Lord Jesus, thank you so much for your grace and your kindness and your mercy, and God, thank you for your word.

We don't want to rely on our traditions. We don't want to rely on just how we were brought up.

We don't want to rely on our church experiences. We want to rely on your word. That is a good word, a sufficient word, an inerrant word, a word that is going to be shaping us and chipping away at us for the rest of our lives.

Lord, I pray that as we submit ourselves to you, to your word, that we would make it the authority and not us.

And Lord, by doing that, that it would cause us not to be boastful or prideful or self -righteous or hoity -toity in our opinions, that Lord, we would never for a moment look down our nose at anyone who does not believe the same way that we believe, but we would take these as opportunities to love them, care for them, teach them, disciple them, and with humility realize that in comparison to an infinite

God, we know almost nothing. Lord, would you give us that grace and would you give us the courage to end what little we do know to serve you boldly and faithfully, to not let our lack of information in comparison to an infinite

God, that we would not allow that to cause us timidity or fear.

But you would let us serve you in good faith and courage and in boldness as we seek to serve you here in this church and beyond, in Christ's name, amen.

The purpose of today's sermon is going to be to show us that Jesus identified himself with us so that we could identify ourselves with him, and that means all of us, the community, if you are in Christ.

Now, first let's begin with God's covenant in the Old Testament. And what

I want us to see here is that the Old Testament people looked forward to Jesus in everything that they did.

They looked forward to Jesus in everything. So I want us to look at a New Testament passage talking about an Old Testament reality, and I want us to see how they looked forward to Jesus, and that's going to be really important.

So let's look at 1 Corinthians 10, 1 through 4, which is a fascinating passage.

It says this. I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that our fathers were all under the cloud and passed through the sea.

He's talking about the Red Sea when they came out of Egypt and they were brought out of slavery and into freedom.

And he said, all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they were drinking from a spiritual rock which followed them, and that rock was

Christ. This passage could take several sermons to get through everything that's in it, and what

I want us to see is just a few things. Number one, all were baptized into Moses. I said this yesterday,

Moses is not a code name for a lake somewhere in the Sinai Peninsula. They weren't baptized in a lake called

Moses. They were baptized into Moses. They were baptized to identify with Moses. They were baptized into Moses's covenant that God made between himself and the

Old Testament people. They were baptized into that system, and yet it says that it looked forward to Jesus.

It says that they were drinking from a spiritual rock, and that rock was Christ. That means that everything that they did, walking through the dry ground of the

Red Sea, was pointing to Christ. The cloud that hovered over him, pointing to the Holy Spirit that hovers over us in our baptism of the

Spirit, when the Spirit comes down on us and indwells us. Every part of this passage is looking forward to a

New Testament reality in the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and we'll talk more about that in just a moment.

So that's the first thing I want us to see. All of them were baptized into Moses. Now what does the word all mean?

It's not a technical term, all. It's not like the Israelites said, hey kids, go stand over on the shore for a moment,

Mommy and Daddy's going to walk through the waters here. That's not what they said. Men, women, children all walked through, and Paul is comfortable calling this baptism.

Paul is comfortable to call an entire nation walking through these waters as baptism.

That should tell us something, that Paul's comfortable to do that. It's not like Paul is back in the

New Testament church saying, gosh, if I write this, the Baptists are really going to get mad.

Like, they know some children walk through. I love my Baptist friends.

I've been Baptist for most of my life. But Paul's not thinking that way. Now think about this.

It's not just Jewish people. We know from the Old Testament that some of the Egyptians saw the works of God when

He rained down plagues, ten successive plagues on the nation of Egypt, and the

Egyptians saw that, ran to the Israelite people and said, we want to be identified with your

God. Take us with you. And it says a mixed multitude came up out of the land of Egypt, which means that both

Jew and Gentile, both male and female, both slave and free. Does that remind you of the

New Testament? That's the gospel. They came out of Egypt together, all of them.

Paul calls that baptism. I find that a fascinating thing. And I think Paul's comfort in calling that baptism should cause us to have comfort in calling it baptism too.

Now Paul tells us that this is a type of Christ. We know that the entire Old Testament points to Jesus.

Luke 24, Jesus takes His apostles together and He opens up the Bible and He shows them how all of it was all about Him.

Now if you remember at this time, Luke 24 had not yet been written. So Jesus doesn't open Luke 24 and say, hey guys,

I'm going to do this moment right now with you. He points back to the Old Testament and He says, every page of it is about me.

So that means that their baptism into the Red Sea is about Jesus and pointing forward to Jesus' baptism.

The spiritual drink that they drink is about the drink that we will eventually drink in Christ, the food that we will eventually eat in Christ.

Every single week, you and I take the Lord's table, which is the spiritual drink and the spiritual food of Christ.

We take what they were looking forward to. That's amazing. And the rock points forward to the cornerstone of our faith,

Jesus Christ. Every part of this passage is about Jesus, which means that the

Old Testament brothers and sisters and children were not content in the moment that they just walked through the

Red Sea. They were looking forward to something greater. They were looking forward to a baptism that was to come. That's the first point

I want us to see. Old Testament people were looking forward to Jesus' baptism. The second point

I want us to see is that Jesus came to identify Himself with us through His baptism.

He came to identify Himself with us, which is a radical point. The spotless lamb came to be identified with sinners whose life looks like filthy rags.

Spotless lamb and us like filthy rags. He came for us. The one who knew no sin came to those who were only made of sin.

The one who did not need to be baptized came to be baptized for us.

Now you think about it. Why did Jesus get baptized? John is confused about it. He says, you need to be baptizing me.

Jesus didn't get baptized because He had a need. Jesus came to get baptized to identify Himself with us.

Let's think about what happened here. Let's read Matthew 3, 13 -17 as we think about that.

Then Jesus arrived from Galilee at the Jordan, coming to John to be baptized by him.

But John tried to prevent Him, saying, I have need to be baptized by you until you come to me. Jesus answered and said, permitted at this time, for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.

Then He permitted him. After being baptized, He came up immediately from the water. Behold, the heavens were opened, and He saw the

Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him. And behold, a voice out of the heavens said,

This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased. So, Old Testament people are looking forward to Jesus.

Jesus in His baptism is looking back to the Old Testament people to identify with their struggle.

Let me show you. Jesus goes to be baptized in the

Jordan River. That's important because in the book of Joshua, the people of Israel walked through the

Jordan River and it parted and they walked through on dry land. This was a consequential moment for the people of Israel because in that moment, they were walking into their nation to take possession of the nation that God had promised them.

You remember in the book of Deuteronomy, an entire generation of people died in the wilderness because they were unfaithful to God.

And then an entire new generation walked into the promised land, not because they were perfectly faithful, but because God is faithful to His promises and He was going to give them the land.

So they walked through the Jordan River. It says that as soon as the Levites' feet hit the water, the water burst apart and they walked through on dry land, which is fascinating in and of itself.

So Jesus goes back to where Israel went when Israel went to take possession of the land. Why do you think Jesus did that?

Because He's identifying Himself with His people. Jesus is saying, Where Israel failed,

I'm going to be successful. Where Israel sinned, I'm going to be sinless. Where Israel fell short of the glory of God, I'm going to give glory to God.

So He goes back and He walks the path of Israel to show that He is true Israel.

I'll prove it again to you, not just here. You remember in the parting of the

Red Sea, the waters parted because of the breath of God. It says here that God speaks over Jesus.

He sends forth His breath and He says, This is my beloved Son. In the original baptism, God breathes in the waters part.

Here God breathes and He says that Jesus is my only Son. That is incredibly important, not just because you've got

God the Father acting in the same ways. It's incredibly important because Israel was known as the

Son of God in the Old Testament. They were known as the firstborn of God.

He says, Out of Egypt I've called my Son. So Israel was known as God's firstborn.

That's why Pharaoh, his firstborn son had to die because he was persecuting

God's firstborn son. Do you see? So Jesus comes, true

Son of God, replacing, fulfilling, showing that He's faithful.

When the firstborn son, the original firstborn son, was not. He's the faithful firstborn son.

You remember in the Red Sea, the Spirit of the Lord, the Angel of the Lord, led them through the waters.

It says that, that the Angel of the Lord led them through the waters here. That Angel of the Lord that most scholars believe is

Jesus in the Old Testament now is here Himself to be baptized because He's identifying Himself with His people. All of this passage is showing us that Jesus is identifying

Himself with His Old Testament brothers and sisters, showing that He is going to undo their sin.

And this is, this is not just, this is not just Red Sea moment. This is what happens next in Matthew, which

I think is so fascinating. We'll pull all these themes together in just a second. But Matthew chapter 4, verse 1 through 11 says this.

Again, the devil took Him to a very high mountain and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and all their glory. And He said to him, all these things

I will give to you if you fall down and worship Me. Then Jesus said to him, go Satan, for it is written, you shall worship the

Lord your God and serve Him only. And then the devil left Him and behold, angels came and began ministering to Him.

What I think is so fascinating about this passage, Jesus doesn't go out into the wilderness to be tempted for no reason.

Think about the story of Israel. They went through the waters of the Red Sea. Where did they go next?

The wilderness. They went to the wilderness. Who led them in the wilderness? The Spirit of God.

Fire by night, smoke cloud by day. Those are symbols of the Holy Spirit.

So the Israelite people were led through the waters into the wilderness for how many years?

Did they wonder? Forty. How many days did Jesus undergo the temptation?

Forty days. The verse here, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test, comes from the wilderness wanderings.

So we can see there's a correlation here. Jesus is tempted with three things. He's tempted with turning stones into bread.

What is it that the Israelites, when the word test is used, what are they testing God on?

Manna falling from heaven, bread. They put the Lord their God to the test and they said, we want meat.

Because in Egypt, we had all these pots filled with meat and stuff. And God says, you wicked people.

I'm giving you bread, now I'm going to give you quail that's going to come basically out of your jaws because I'm going to give you so much of it.

They tested God with bread. And Jesus comes and fulfills the temptation of bread, showing that I am the better Israel.

I'm going to succeed where they failed. What's the second temptation? Worship. Satan took him up to a high point of the temple and said, throw yourself off and the angels will come and rescue you.

What did the people of Israel fail? They made a golden calf. They worshiped the creature instead of the creator.

In two temptations of Israel, Jesus has successively said, I am true. I am faithful.

You are not. He's identifying himself with their story. What's the third temptation in the wilderness?

Bow down and worship me and I will give you all of the nations. What did God command Israel to do? To go into the land of Israel and conquer all the nations, to cast the

Cainites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, and maybe some other ites, to cast them out of the land, to conquer the nations.

They failed, but Jesus succeeded because Jesus knew that having the nations was already his inheritance.

Satan couldn't give him what was already his. He succeeded where Israel failed.

Do you see how every part of this story is Jesus identifying himself with the people of Israel?

And why would he do that? Because if Jesus is true Israel, then the only way that we can be saved is to be citizens through him, to be connected to him, to be called by him.

There is no salvation if Jesus doesn't go back and identify himself with his people, because it takes a man to stand in the place of man, but it takes someone as powerful as God to actually execute salvation.

So Jesus is the God -man who identified with his people's failure, and in that triumph, we can be saved.

It's glorious. You think about us today. This passage doesn't just mean

Jesus looks back to the Old Testament people. He looks forward to us, because while the

Old Testament people were slaves in Egypt, you and I were slaves to a far worse taskmaster than Pharaoh in our sin.

And Jesus led us to the waters, just like he did the Old Testament people. And in those waters, he announced his faithfulness.

And what are we right now? We are the people who are wandering through a life that looks a lot like a wilderness.

For however many years that God has given us until we get to the promised land. Their story is our story, and Jesus is faithful and true in our story as well.

He came to identify himself with his people, past, present, future, so that...

That's the second point, third point, whatever point I'm on. So that we could identify ourselves with him.

He came to identify himself with our struggles, our failure, our sin, so that in his victory, we could identify with him, so that we could be known by him, so that we could be connected to him.

This is what it says in Romans 6, verse 4. Therefore, we have been buried with him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the

Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. What I want us to see here, none of us are 2 ,000 years old, and if you are, you look really great for your age.

It says Christ baptized us into him. That happened 2 ,000 years ago. So if you're an

Old Testament saint, it hadn't happened yet, but yet it did, because in Christ, who is God, he does not constrained by human time.

When he died, he gathered his people from the past, Old Testament saints, and he gathered them to himself.

He gathered those who were present, like Nicodemus, who was going to repent for his sins and turn to Jesus. He gathered them, and he gathered us 2 ,000 years later, and all throughout church history, he gathered all of us to himself, and died on the cross permanently for our sins.

So that if you are a Christian here today, he didn't just die for the sins that you had before you prayed a prayer, and that now your sins are all on you.

He died for every sin, for every saint, past, present, and future, on the cross, so that in Jesus, we could be identified with him.

He identified himself with us so that we could be identified with him, identified with him in his victory, identified with him in his grace, identified with him in his new life, identified with himself in purification of our sins.

Every aspect of our lives, we have now been identified with Jesus because he first identified with us, and he went to the cross for us, and died for us.

Talk about the greatest moment of him identifying with us. He went to our cross and died our death for our sins that we deserve to pay.

He stood in our place so that we could stand in his. There's only one question that we have left to answer.

What do I mean when I say we? He died for us. We are his people.

What do I mean when I say we? Peter preaches a fantastic sermon. 3 ,000 people got saved, not because Peter was great, because God is great.

And this is what it says at the end. Peter said to them, Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the

Holy Spirit. Let's stop for a second. We tend to think about this passage, like I said earlier, individualistically.

I'm going to repent. I'm going to trust in Jesus. I'm going to pray a prayer. I'm going to write my name on a card.

I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to do. And then Jesus is going to respond transactionally by giving me something.

But look at what it says. For the promise is for you and your children. And for all who are far off, as many as the

Lord God will call to himself. Jesus, 2 ,000 years ago, died for you before you could speak a word.

And Jesus died for his people. This promise is not an individual promise.

This promise is a promise to God's people in whole. So that those people who are standing there listening to Peter say those words, they would have said, they would have said, this promise is for me and my children.

Exactly what Peter said. The Baptist who were standing there might would have set their kids aside and would have said, clearly

Peter's wrong here. It doesn't apply to our children. They haven't made a credible profession of faith. But when does

God ever require us to do some good work to get saved? Our profession of faith is a good work.

Our profession of faith is calling out to God in a credible way so that other people can understand and say, yeah, they've got it.

He doesn't save us that way. He saved us 2 ,000 years ago on the cross. Ephesians one says he saved us in eternity.

It says before the foundation of the world, we were saved. If we're in Christ, it wasn't your profession.

It wasn't your good work. It wasn't anything at all to do with you. It was all about him. We've been saying all service long.

It's not about our faithfulness, it's about his faithfulness. So why as adults do we look down at children and say that you have to do something in order for us to believe that you are a

Christian when we weren't saved that way? This promise is for you and for your children.

And there's so much more that we can share. Like I said, this is the tip of the twig that's standing on top of the

Merrimack River here. There's so much more we could share, but I want to believe this passage is true.

That the gospel is for us and for our children. It's for us. Now, I want to make a distinction here, because the

Bible doesn't say that if you're baptized, you're saved. It doesn't say that. And I want to make a distinction here for a moment so that you'll understand what it's saying.

In the Bible, it says that not all who are Israel are Israel, are they?

Which means that there were some people in the congregation of Israel who were not

Israel. And that doesn't mean that they were Moabites. And it doesn't mean that they were

Greeks or Philistines or any. It means that they were not spiritually connected to God. They did not believe the same things that everyone else believed.

Not all who were Israel were Israel. So the Bible gives us these categories, and we know it's true.

Each of us do. For instance, if I were to ask you, how many Christians are there in the world?

A lot of you would say, I've had conversations with some. A lot of you will say,

I don't know. The statistics say 2 .5 billion, but I don't know.

The reason you say that is because the Bible says that. It says, many will come to me on that day and say,

Lord, Lord, didn't we do many miracles in your name? And I will look at them and I will say, depart from me, I never knew you.

So we know that everyone who goes to church on Sunday is not saved or else that verse would not be true.

We know that there's a visible body of believers who gather together and say they're Christians.

And we also know that there's a true body of believers that God alone knows an invisible body of believers, that's the true church.

We know these categories exist. Baptism is for the visible community, the physical baptism.

The baptism of the Holy Spirit are only for those who are in Christ. So here's how it works.

As a church, we're gonna baptize the visible church. Those who are here, adults who make a profession of faith.

Let's say you're an adult and you say, I'm gonna return from my sins and I'm gonna repent and I'm gonna believe in Jesus.

We're gonna baptize that person like every other church has always done throughout all human history. But because this promise is also for you and for your children, for believing families, we're gonna baptize their children.

And I believe that that's the biblical position. So again, if you have questions, we can talk more.

But with that, let's pray. Lord Jesus, thank you so much for your word and for the fact,

God, that it's not about our performance. For the fact that it's not about our intelligence. For the fact that it's not about our maturity.

For the fact that it's not about our stature and our size. Lord, in the same way that you see a child in the womb as a true human being.

Lord, you see us who think we're so smart as also being a true human being, worthy of dignity from other people.

But Lord, also bearing your image and your mark. Lord, as a church, we have an opportunity to follow this verse where I had not been following this verse for the better part of my ministry.

To see that while children who are baptized might grow up to be unbelievers.

Just in the same way that adults who are baptized may show themselves to be unbelievers, that Lord, that's not our job.

Our job is not to rubber stamp someone and say that we know for a fact that they're a Christian. Our job is to be obedient to the scriptures and let you be the author of salvation because that's what you do.

Lord, we're gonna baptize those who come to Christ and in families of believers, we're gonna apply the sign of the covenant.

Because we see all throughout the Bible that children were included. The children of believing parents were always included.

And Lord, we do not want to go against your word in that way. In Christ's name, amen.