Sermon: Household Baptisms? Final Look

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If you will turn your Bibles, please, with me to the 18th chapter of the book of Acts, Acts chapter 18.

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It is certainly my pleasure to be with you today. I asked that I have an opportunity one more time before another lengthy road trip, starting in about 10 days, 14 days, something like that.

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Who knows? A little less than that, I think. Yeah, less than that. Going to be going to G3 and doing a number of conferences back east.

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And so before I am gone again for a lengthy period of time, I wanted to get back to our baptism series, lest we forget where we have been.

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And we made great progress there for four weeks in a row, unexpectedly. But here is our opportunity to continue that.

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And I again recognize the challenge that is ours to seek to have a balanced pulpit ministry in the midst of what can only be described as a revolution in our nation.

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It's very easy to become completely focused upon that. The reality is that we need to strive to allow our minds to dwell upon that which is true and honest and just and lovely and of a good reputation, to think upon these things, to meditate upon these things, as we are told by the

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Apostle Paul. If we allow our minds constantly to be consumed with difficult and challenging situations, it can become detrimental to our spiritual health.

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And so besides that, if we all end up in the gulag together with the Presbyterians, we need to be prepared.

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So that's just all there is to that. And that was only the Baptists who were laughing.

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The Presbyterians were not laughing. And everybody else is going, what is he talking about? Don't worry about it.

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Seriously, it has been a while since our last opportunity to look at this subject.

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And so I'd like to, for a second, have you look at the bulletin and look at the outline of what

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I gave you in the very first sermon, because I'm hearing from Luke and from others and from my own sources.

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And in fact, I was watching a little bit the YouTube video of my last sermon on this, and I was watching the comments.

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That's always a dangerous and normally depressing thing. We turned comments off on our

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YouTube page about two years after YouTube started, and that was a wise thing to do at that particular point in time.

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But I was watching the comments, and many on the other side of this issue were saying, well, you're not dealing with this issue, and you're not dealing with that argument, and you're not dealing with our real arguments.

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And I'm like, well, that's because we laid out a plan from the start, and we're sticking with it.

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And the plan is in your bulletin. I took this directly out of the very few sermon notes

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I had for the first sermon on baptism, and I want to remind everybody it has been a while, and I realize that sometimes people don't go back and listen from the start and things like that.

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But I think this is a wise and appropriate approach, and it will explain why we've done what we've done up to this point, and why we will then pursue the subject further in the way that we will do so.

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So if we really want to understand what the Bible teaches really on any subject,

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I think that this outline would be a good way of understanding many of the subjects that are raised in the pages of Scripture.

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So we began by defining the term clearly. So if you were looking at the word deity in the

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New Testament, what it teaches about God, you're going to have to deal with the term theos,

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God. You're going to have to deal with related terms, theates and theates, and other derivative forms, and you have to define your words.

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You have to start at the beginning. And that may not be where people want to start.

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I know that I've confessed repeatedly the fact that when I was a young person,

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I loved the idea of model aircraft and model ships and stuff like that.

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They looked really, really neat, and I wanted to be able to… I remember having a model of the

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USS Arizona, and the little guns moved and all that neat and fun stuff.

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It was pretty cool. But here was the problem. I was an impatient young man.

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I would like to say that I am now a patient old man, but that's not true. That remains one of my many character defects.

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And so I would read the instructions, and it would say, glue such and such into part such and such, and then lay aside.

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Well, I knew where that part was going. And so I figured I could go ahead and put that part in where it needed to go, and I could save myself some time.

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We'd get this done faster. Well, if you don't let the glue set, things don't work real well.

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And so let's just put it this way. I may have built the battleship Arizona, but the one I built would have sunk whether the

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Japanese bombed it or not. It never would have floated because I didn't let it dry the way that it should have.

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I was an impatient person. A lot of people are impatient with spiritual things, too. Can't you just lay it all out there?

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No, sometimes it takes some work. So we need to start by defining the term clearly. We did that.

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We looked at baptizo. We looked at it in the New Testament. We looked at it in contemporary literature. We looked at it in a bunch of places that I imagine a lot of folks were like, wow, this is really exciting.

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Well, you've got to do what you've got to do. Then we carefully looked at the distinctives of the

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New Testament, starting with John, John the Baptist. We looked at his baptism.

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We looked at the incidences that were given. And we tried to draw from that, okay, what was happening?

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Who was being baptized? Who was baptizing who? What was involved? Was it immersion in water?

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Was it sprinkling? Was it effusion? Was it Doug Wilson kissing your baby on the forehead?

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Exactly what was that? I don't think Doug was around back then, but how does all that work?

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And then we analyzed each example of baptism in the New Testament, asking these specific questions.

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And then we are going to look at, this is where we're about to finish number three, where we have historical incidences of baptism that are mentioned to us.

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So we've been working through the book of Acts, and we've been following patterns. We've been asking the question, was the

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Word of God preached? Who was baptized? What was said at the baptism? What was the intention of these things?

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We're trying to be as biblical as we possibly can be, because the danger is that this subject is fraught with tradition and emotion.

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It is fraught with tradition and emotion on every side. On every side.

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And so if we want to practice sola scriptura and tota scriptura, Scripture is the sole infallible rule of faith, and believing all that Scripture says, then we must be thorough in our examination of those particular sources.

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Now we're moving into number four, analyze each reference to the accomplished fact of baptism, the meaning of baptism, primarily in Paul, once in Peter, in light of the apostolic practice established in Acts.

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And so we're going to—we're just about to finish up working through the historical material in Acts, and then we're going to look primarily at Paul, because most of the references are found there, but there's reference in Peter that we need to look at as well, where baptism is made reference to.

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Now what we're going to discover is many, many times, it's just simply referred to in passing. And if we didn't have all the historical data put together, the danger is we could then read our tradition into the passing references.

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But that would be getting at it backwards, and unfortunately that's exactly what does happen.

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With many subjects, not just baptism, but if we want to have a biblical doctrine of baptism, then it must be derived out of the text.

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We don't take it out here and then find a way to cram it into the text, maybe boldly and badly, or maybe with great aplomb and fancy words, and it sounds like, wow, that fit in real well, but it's still an instance of our taking something outside and putting it into Scripture.

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We don't want to do that. Then we want to, in the fifth position, consider the voices of the early church in light of their circumstances, the development of the canon, etc.

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So, yeah, I don't know if it's going to be one sermon or two sermons or just what. There are entire huge volumes on this subject, so where exactly do you draw the line?

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And yeah, I've taught church history for 31 years.

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I had to do the numbers there, and that made me feel even older than I needed to, but I've taught church history for a long time, and so we could do a lot, but I will try to be balanced and yet thorough in asking the question, well, what did the early

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Christians do? Why were there so many different understandings of baptism in the early church? Why did certain portions of the church baptize in the nude?

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Why did some of them do it three times? Why did some do it forward, face down?

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Why did some of them have you eat bread and honey afterwards? Nothing wrong with that.

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I love bread and honey, but exactly what significance did that have? Many of them had fasting involved.

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Many of them had exorcisms involved. Why? Well, that's because there were a lot of interesting beliefs held by people in the early church about the subject of baptism, which since we will have worked through the

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New Testament by that point in time, you're going to go, how did they come up with that? Well, that's why I mentioned the development of the canon.

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What if you didn't have all of Paul, and yet your church developed a doctrine of baptism before having all of Paul?

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That became your tradition, and then when you get all of Paul, what are you going to do? You see the danger? And so we will look at church history, and we will look at the fact that fundamentally anyone who just examines early church history knows paedo -baptism developed long after the days of the apostles, and there is absolutely no evidence that the apostles left any apostolic tradition of paedo -baptism.

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None. There have been some brilliant men from all sorts of different traditions, especially

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Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, that have attempted to find evidence of these things in the early fathers, and their attempts fail badly.

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Now, the early church isn't the final authority, is it? No, because the early church had all sorts of interesting beliefs about baptism.

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But that is a significant reality. Those of you that have seen the second major debate

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I did on the subject of baptism with Dr. Strawbridge know that one of my primary assertions there was that Calvin's doctrine of baptism was what is known as a theological novum.

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It was the first time anyone had formulated with that specificity that perspective on baptism.

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No one else in church history had come up with that idea, that lots of infant baptism before Calvin, but not his understanding of why you would baptize infants.

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That's a different issue, and that's a very, very important issue, so we'll look at it. And then we will conclude by looking at the confessions of faith, and the

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Reformation, and the dispute on the subject amongst the Reformed. I would submit to you that the reason that these debates continue on, you could log on to Facebook right now.

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Please do not do so. You could log on to Facebook right now, and you will find somebody, somewhere, debating the subject of baptism.

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It is a 24 -hour, 7 -day -a -week, 365 days on a 366th leap day to debate that continues to go on.

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There are some people who just live their lives for that particular subject. Why? Don't you think we would have come to a conclusion by now?

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Well, some people would actually use that as an argument and say, that proves Scripture is not sufficient.

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I would say to you, what that proves is, even with the clarity of Scripture, we love our traditions, and very often we are not willing to let go of our traditions.

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And we have our traditions as well, but I think doing what you do here allows you to examine your traditions to see if they are firmly based in Scripture or not.

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But the reality is, most of these conversations do not follow this pattern. They do not start with the foundations.

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They start way up here someplace with a statement from a systematic theology that is using language that developed over centuries and centuries and centuries and centuries, and they never get back down to these foundational basic issues.

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And so I just want to remind us why we are doing this the way we're doing this, why it will take as long as it will, but hopefully why at the end you'll be able to say, yes, we examined this issue thoroughly and fully, and hence we can have a conviction that is sound and full as well.

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So, with that said, let us at least finish up number three and actually maybe take a shot at getting into number four in that outline by looking at Acts chapter 18.

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It is interesting to me that while we have numerous references to the subject of baptism at the beginning of the book of Acts, they taper out as the narrative moves forward, and that shouldn't be overly surprising to us.

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It's not that the church has stopped baptizing. It's that this has become the normative practice, and it doesn't have to be repeated over and over and over again.

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And so in Acts chapter 18, but when Silas and Timothy came down from Macedonia, Paul began devoting himself completely to the words, solemnly testifying to the

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Jews that Jesus was the Messiah, the Christ. And when they resisted and blasphemed, he shook out his garments and said to them,

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Your blood be upon your own heads, I am clean, for now on I shall go to the

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Gentiles. And he departed from there and went to the house of a certain man named

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Titius Justus, a worshiper of God, whose house was next to the synagogue.

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And Crispus, the leader of the synagogue, believed in the Lord with all his household, and many of the

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Corinthians, when they heard, were believing and being baptized. And then it goes from there to the vision that is given to Paul, but here is your last reference to baptism, and it is in the context of Crispus, the leader of the synagogue, believing in the

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Lord. And so what do we have here? We have a historical situation where once again you have the resistance of the

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Jews against the proclamation that Paul is making of Jesus as the Messiah. We've had this all the way through the book of Acts.

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If you want to see really how that developed, Acts chapter 13 would be a really good place to see how the dynamic of all that took place.

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And so after Paul seeks to convince them, notice he is solemnly testifying to the

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Jews that Jesus was the Christ, he does his due diligence, and when they get to the point of resistance and blasphemy, he shakes out his garments, he says, your blood be upon your heads, and by the way,

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I just in passing would say, that's generally not the best terminology to use on Facebook.

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Just making sure you're still awake, the fans are working so I can't hear if they're snoring or anything like that, so I just want to make sure you're all hearing me.

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We tend to think that, well, if it's biblical phraseology, we can do the same thing, but here is

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Paul. Paul has probably for an extended period of time very patiently been enduring their hardness of heart, and now they've gotten to the point of resisting and blaspheming, and these are individuals who have had an apostle of Christ explaining the

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Scriptures to them. They are individuals of the Scriptures. They have no basis for claims of ignorance at this point.

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And so when they resist and blaspheme, when Paul says, your blood be upon your own heads,

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I am clean, there is a context there that most of us probably shouldn't bring into our social justice interactions.

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We haven't probably been quite as clear as the apostle Paul would have been, and the people we're dealing with are probably not nearly as literate in the biblical literature as these people were.

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And so what he does, he departs from there, and went to the house of a certain man named Titius Justus, a worshiper of God.

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Now remember, these worshipers of God were these individuals who were attracted to Judaism.

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They were attracted to monotheism. They saw the beauty of one

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God, the creator of all things, over against the, really, when we think about it, the degradation of the concept of deity that is found in all polytheistic religions, and Zeus, and Aphrodite, and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

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And so here you have someone who is a worshiper of God, whose house was next to the synagogue.

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So this is taking place in history. We've found many of these synagogues in the various cities in which they are mentioned to have existed at that time.

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And then we are introduced to Crispus, the leader of the synagogue.

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And so this is going to be a literate individual. He is going to be a person who is familiar with what we call the

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Tanakh, the Torah, the Nevi 'im, the Ketuvim, the law, the prophets and the writings, the

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Hebrew scriptures, the Old Covenant, the Old Testament, with the scrolls, because he's the leader of the synagogue.

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And in this ministry of Paul's, he, notice, believed in the

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Lord with all his household. Now, the term kurios that's used here is

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Paul's normative term for Jesus. This is a Christian conversion. This is a belief with the object being

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Jesus the Messiah. That's the one that's being proclaimed up in verse 5.

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And so the very leader of the synagogue makes a

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Christian profession, which you must understand would have required in that day his expulsion from the synagogue that he was the leader of and sadly resulted in the disintegration of the many relationships that would have existed.

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But, notice, he believed in the Lord with all his household.

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With all his household. It's very clear.

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It's not saying that Crispus believed in the Lord, but his household rejected the message.

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No, he and his household believed in the Lord. And many of the

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Corinthians, when they heard, were believing and being baptized. So, when the leader of the synagogue and his household makes a profession of faith, it opens up the opportunity of ministry to others.

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Down through the history of the church, you've seen this happen many, many times where there's been a resistance to the

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Christian message and then a person of prominence is converted and all of a sudden there is an open door where there was nothing but resistance prior to that point in time.

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And so, many of the Corinthians, when they heard, were believing and being baptized.

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Now, what do we see with Crispus? Belief. What do we see with Crispus' household?

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Belief. Because they have belief, then others here, and they are believing and being baptized.

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There is no reference to anyone who is being baptized without believing.

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No reference. You can say that that's something that can develop down the road, that it becomes a normative experience of the church in generations to come.

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You can make all those arguments, but for right now, in this text, the key issue is

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Crispus believed, Crispus' household believed, and everybody being baptized in Corinth, according to Acts 18, verse 8, believed before they were baptized.

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That's the text. Now, you say you seem to emphasize that strongly.

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There's a reason for that, and you're probably familiar with what the reason is. You probably are already way ahead of me on these things.

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But if you'll turn to 1 Corinthians 1, you will find out why this is important.

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As you know, there was division in the church at Corinth, and Paul has to address it, has to rebuke it.

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Beginning in verse 10, Now, I exhort you, brethren, by the name of our

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Lord Jesus Christ, that you all agree and there be no divisions among you, but you be made complete in the same mind and in the same judgment.

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For I have been informed concerning you, my brethren, by Chloe's people, that there are quarrels among you.

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Now, I mean this, that each one of you is saying, I am of Paul, and I of Apollos, and I of Cephas, and I of Christ.

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Has Christ been divided? Paul was not crucified for you, was he?

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Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? And then here's the verse.

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I thank God that I baptized none of you except Crispus and Gaius, that no man should say you were baptized in my name.

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Now, I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any other.

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For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, not in cleverness of speech that the cross of Christ should not be made void.

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So, in passing, addressing the problem of the division that existed in the

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Corinthian church, Paul rhetorically asks, has Christ been divided?

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Paul was not crucified for you, was he? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul? And then he says, and this is one of those instances that's interesting to me, where we know that Peter's description of Scripture, the giving of Scripture, is that men spoke from God as they were carried along by the

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Holy Spirit. So, men are speaking. There are many times in Paul, in his personal epistles, bring me the parchments, bring me my cloak,

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I'm cold. This is not Paul as an automaton being dictated what to say.

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And yet, he speaks from God as he's carried along by the

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Holy Spirit. And so, as he speaks from God, he says,

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I thank God that I baptized none of you but Crispus and Gaius. Now, wait a minute.

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We know that Crispus believed. He's the same guy, same city.

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And so, he remembers that, maybe because he was the leader of the synagogue and because how many other people had their minds opened to the message because of his conversion.

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And he remembers baptizing Crispus and Gaius. Now, he probably baptized Crispus' household. But I doubt

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Paul did all the baptisms himself. And so, he makes reference to Crispus' baptism and says that no man should say you were baptized in my name.

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He does not want anyone saying, he does not want divisions existing.

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Look, sadly, I've been a Christian a long time.

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Grew up in fundamentalist churches. And I remember church splits.

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And let me tell you something. People can find every reason and no reason at all for church splits.

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And so, here, Paul is concerned that someone's going to come up with a reason that, well,

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I was baptized by the apostle and therefore, I have some spiritual authority over you or I have a better pedigree than you.

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And when Christians start fighting with each other, they start saying really stupid things.

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I unfortunately have seen it happen. And so, Paul's going, look,

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I'm glad I didn't do all the baptisms. So that no one could say you were baptized in the name of Paul.

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He didn't say, I have to do all the baptisms. And remember, in the Corinthian correspondence, we have these super apostles, these apostles that were claiming these types of things.

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So, Paul's saying, no, no, no, no, no. I never put myself in that spot. Never. And as soon as he says that, he says, now,

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I did baptize also the household of Stephanas. So, here you see Paul speaking as a man.

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And yet, it's important for us that he spoke that way so that we have this added information. So, however that works, men speak from God as they're carried along by the

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Holy Spirit. And so, he says, I did baptize also the household of Stephanas.

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Beyond that, I do not know whether I baptized any other. And so, what's the idea? There are those of our

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Paedo -Baptist brethren who will point to verse 16 in C .C.,

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household baptism. That's how it was done. You see it with the

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Philippian jailer. You see it with Lydia. And now you see it with Stephanas.

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You have one person believing, and because of that one person's belief, you baptize the other people in the household, whether they believe or not.

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Now, I submit to you that the only reason that someone comes to that reading is because they have read

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Reformed writers after the Reformation, not because they're reading either

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Corinthians or Acts. Why? Because as we've already seen, we work through Acts.

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The apostolic pattern, the pattern found in Acts, the pattern found in each one of those texts, the pattern found with Crispus in Acts chapter 18 was what?

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Belief, then baptism. Belief, then baptism.

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No reference whatsoever to baptism without belief.

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And so if you're going to say that Stephanas' household was baptized without their accepting the message of the gospel on some kind of patriarchal, federal representative pattern, you have no reference to it in Acts chapter 18.

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So the normative way, exegetically, that we would look at a situation where we have the historical context given in Acts and then a passing reference, and Paul's not laying out a doctrine of baptism.

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It is interesting that he says, Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel.

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In Paul's mind, there is a distinction between the two. There's a distinction between the two.

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He preaches the gospel, and the result of those that believe the gospel will be baptism, but it's not the gospel, is it?

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No. So the normal way of reading would be you look at the historical background, you have a passing reference that's made back to it, what you do is you interpret the passing reference in the proper historical background.

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When we look at the historical background, believing, then baptizing is all that's there.

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There's nothing else. And so you're not going to take the passing reference, expand it with a later theology, and then insert it back into the historical context.

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That disrupts the text. That's not exegesis, and the conclusion you present would not be a biblical conclusion.

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It would simply be wherever your theology is going to end up taking you. And so here are our historical references.

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Here are our foundational glimpses, and what we have seen is a consistent apostolic pattern, proclamation of the message of Jesus, belief, acceptance of the message of Jesus, baptism of those who accept that message.

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That has been the consistent presentation of the

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New Testament in its historical documents. Now, I fully understand that one of the normative ideas from the other side is, yes, but that's because this was the primitive period.

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That's going to change once you get into the next generation and the next generation, because now what you're going to do is you're going to go back to the old covenant patterns to establish new covenant practices.

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That's going to be the argumentation. And so we need to understand that if you're going to make that argument, then you need to be straight up front and saying, and we do not have a single example of this anywhere in inspired scripture.

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And some will be honest enough to just straightforward say, you're right, that's right, we don't, and we don't need it, because we believe that our arguments from someplace else are compelling, are sufficient, but what we need to recognize is the standard that must be met is a standard that recognizes that the belief that you are putting forward in paedo -baptism has no

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New Testament examples anywhere, and you need to be comfortable with that.

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And there are those that are, that are very well comfortable with that.

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So, with that, let's look at Romans chapter 6.

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Romans chapter 6. Romans chapter 6.

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It is fascinating to me, and hear me out here, because I don't want you to misunderstand what

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I'm about to say. There are not a whole lot of references to baptism in the

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New Testament. Are you surprised by that?

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Well, how many references are there to the Lord's Supper? Fewer. Far fewer.

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Does that make them unimportant? No. Why might it be that Paul can write an entire epistle to the church at Rome that he clearly wants to be seen as an enunciation, a codification of his entire theology, and we have basically only this section on the subject of baptism in that one epistle?

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Let me suggest to you why this is and why it's actually not very surprising at all.

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When we look at the doctrine of the Trinity, central and defining doctrine of the

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Christian faith, we find no creed like the

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Athanasian Creed or the Nicene Creed or the Apostles' Creed in the pages of the

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New Testament. And a lot of people find that strange and odd. I have told the story before.

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Matt, are you hiding in here someplace? Yes? No? Maybe?

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I can't see anybody. Maybe in the other room or something like that? Matt's not around today? Okay. All right.

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Well, Matt may remember this because I think he was in the Bible study when it happened. But I remember as a very young person at the

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Baptist church I was a member of, someone asking the question, well, where is the Trinity in the

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New Testament? And I remember a bunch of us were turning to the index in the back of our

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Bible, the concordance. Now, some of you are going, yeah, why wouldn't you do that?

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Well, because that term's not found in the Bible. How can it be the central doctrine of the faith if the word's not found in the

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Bible? Well, the answer is to be found, as I've explained many times, in the reality that the doctrine of the

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Trinity is revealed in the incarnation, death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and the outpouring of the

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Holy Spirit. The revelation takes place between Malachi and Matthew.

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And so the Old Testament looks forward to it, so we can see the pictures of it, but the

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New Testament, every document in the New Testament is written after the revelation has taken place.

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And so every person writing the New Testament is already a

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Trinitarian. They're an experiential Trinitarian. Peter has heard the

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Father speak on the Mount of Transfiguration. He's lived with the Son.

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He watched the Son perform miracles. He's witnessed the resurrection.

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And now he's indwelled by the Holy Spirit. So he's an experiential

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Trinitarian. And so what he writes just oozes

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Trinity. What Paul writes oozes his understanding of who

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God the Father is, of Jesus as Yahweh, of the Spirit of the

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Lord. And so you wouldn't expect people who already believe something, who are writing to other people who already believe something, to spend their time in the letters reiterating what everybody already believes.

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Instead, you're going to get these references in passing that only make sense in light of the common belief.

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And so the apostle can talk about the Spirit of Christ and the Spirit of God in the same sentence and not have to stop and go, okay, let me explain what that's all about if you've never heard of this before.

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He doesn't do that. And he can talk about the grace of Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the

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Holy Spirit in one sentence. And he doesn't have to stop and go, oh, that's the Trinity thing, and maybe some of you haven't heard about that.

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No. It's understood. You can't make sense of the New Testament outside of recognition of its

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Trinitarian context. In the same way, when we read

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Paul's epistles, what is obvious from the start is that he is a baptized

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Christian writing to baptized Christians. It's their common experience.

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In fact, when he writes to the Corinthians, he can use it as an example, saying, well, we've all been baptized, and when you were baptized, didn't you believe this?

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And you wouldn't be able to do that if there was any question about the universal recognition that the church was made up of baptized believers.

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So, with that in mind, it's not shocking then that when

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Paul writes to the church at Rome, he does not expend a tremendous amount of time on the universal reality of what they had already experienced.

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But in this text, listen carefully to how he does speak of baptism and ask yourself, what does it tell you?

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Verse 1, what shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace might increase?

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May it never be. How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death?

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Therefore, we have been buried with him through baptism into death in order that as Christ was raised from the dead to the glory of the

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Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. For if we become united with him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection, knowing this, that our old self was crucified with him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.

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Now notice what he's doing all the way through here. He is drawing them in and saying, what about we?

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We were baptized. He goes on to say, for he who has died is freed from sin.

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Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him, knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again.

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Death no longer is master over him, for the death that he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life that he lives, he lives to God.

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Even so, consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.

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Now obviously, it would take us a tremendous amount of time that we do not have. I realize that we've already gone through most of our time.

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Don't worry, don't panic. Jeff's sitting right over there. I'm not gonna, yeah,

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I know. I'm not gonna do that. And I'm also not gonna do what Jeff normally does.

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See, I sit over there and I watch and I know what happens.

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He plans on getting it all done in one sermon. And then I can almost tell exactly when it is.

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I see a little switch go off in his brain that says, nope, I'm not gonna make it.

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Not gonna make it. The mothers are going to absolutely start throwing Cheerios at me. I better find a way of finishing with point two and I'll turn point three into the next sermon.

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I've watched it happen over and over and over again. I know you too well.

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I know you too well. Not gonna do that. But I am going to try to point this out to you. Paul joins himself in and he's talking about why it is that believers are to live lives of holiness.

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That we are not to be abusers of grace. So he rhetorically says, are we to continue in sin that grace might increase?

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Because he's been, in chapter five, he's been talking about federal headship of Adam and he's talked about the grace of God that has brought about justification of life to those who are in Christ.

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There's two humanities in Revelation chapter five. If you don't understand that, you're gonna become a universalist. There's two humanities there and grace has given us this standing we have in Christ.

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So hey, if we've got grace, why don't we just sin? He says, how shall we who died to sin still live in it?

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How shall we who died to sin still live in it? Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death?

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Now, so there's our term baptism. And immediately we must understand that the tendency of humanity is to want to control the grace of God.

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We say we're dependent upon it, but we want to be able to control it.

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And so we'll say we need it, but we will not allow it to be free in the sense of actually bringing about salvation freely by the power of God.

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So you look at the sacramental system of Rome, the sacramental system of Eastern Orthodoxy, whatever it might be, any type of synergistic system where you have

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God and man cooperating together to bring about salvation, fundamentally man ends up in charge.

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God may do 80%, 90%, 99 .9%, but as long as man has that one little thing, then he has control.

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That's what the religions of men is all about. And so the tendency of mankind is to look at a text like this and we see all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death.

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We take the physical act and we make it the temporal point in time at which we experience union with Christ.

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And so there are many who have a theology of baptism that you are regenerated by the act of baptism.

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You are joined to Christ by the act of baptism, which means from that perspective that faith is not sufficient.

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Faith is not justifying. Instead, you have to have something added to faith.

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The reality is that Paul is using here baptism as a picture of the greater spiritual reality of what has taken place in Christ Jesus.

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Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death?

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So this immersion, this joining, we have been baptized into Christ Jesus.

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We have been identified with him. We have been baptized. Remember, what's the baptismal formula?

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Baptizing you into the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit. There is a marking.

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There is an identification. You are taking a name upon yourself that you cannot ever deny.

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And so his point is, do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death?

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And is that not what is pictured in baptism itself? Death, burial, resurrection.

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It's all laid out right here in Romans chapter 6. So you have been united with him.

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This is pictured in your baptism. So you have been baptized into his death.

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Therefore, we who have been buried with him through baptism into death in order that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the

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Father, so we too might walk in newness of life. So you see the picture.

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You walk in and you're the old man.

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But you have been buried with him through baptism and you've been raised to walk in newness of life.

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Therefore, how can you possibly still live in the realm of sin?

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You're to walk in newness of life just as he walked in newness of life. He becomes the pattern and the picture of baptism is how we see our union with him in his pattern.

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For if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall also be in the likeness of his resurrection.

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And that is why you had people in the early church. We'll get to it later, but that bread and honey was representational of the feasting in heaven.

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You've been raised to newness of life. Now you've got the heavenly food. It's all meant to be a picture, a representation, just as the elements.

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Just as the elements, the bread, his body, the wine, his blood.

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You have a picture and therefore the point he's making to all of the

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Christians in Rome is what? None of you, none of you have any foundation, any means of being able to say that you can use grace as an excuse for sin.

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Because by your union with Christ you have died to that sin.

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You've died to that old way and you've been raised to walk in newness of life.

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You have been raised from the dead and so if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, certainly we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection.

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And therefore if you want to have the promise of resurrection, then you need to recognize the connectedness of the entirety of the

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Christian experience and if you're running around still living and loving the old life and the old ways but thinking that you're going to be resurrected, you've deceived yourself.

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You're in deception. Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin.

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That's his whole argument. And if baptism of believers was not the norm for everyone in Rome, how is this an argument at all?

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Think about that. Why is it that he can speak this way and he can do so?

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You all understand this because you've all what? You've all been baptized. Well, there might have been people in the congregation who were baptized as infants by this point.

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Not really. A little bit too early for that but okay, let's run with that one a second.

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How do you make application? What do you have to do in this text to make application within a paedo -baptist context?

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You have to say, yes, you were buried with him through baptism into death before you ever heard of him, before you heard the message of the cross, before you repented of your sins.

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And that is why for the vast majority of church history, when you had infant baptism, the logical result was that was when you were regenerated.

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That was when you were joined to Christ. That was when you received the state of grace or whatever other terminology might be used.

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You can at least see how that works. You're baptized, you're regenerated, you're forgiven, you're placed in a state of grace and then you have to maintain that.

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And historically, it was through the sacraments of the church. But here's the problem.

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We all know that infant baptism has for many, well, even in our own modern experience, how many people do we know that were baptized as a child who have absolutely no interest in Christ today?

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It is the normative experience within Roman Catholicism. It's the cultural experience within Eastern Orthodoxy.

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It sadly was the cultural experience within formerly Protestant and Reformed Europe.

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Now people don't even bother with it. But it made sense to argue that if you're going to be united with Christ by baptism, then you really were regenerated by baptism.

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And what do you do about faith? Well, then you transfer it to the parents. It's the parents' faith in bringing the child to the font that is the faith of faith alone.

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Do we really have to point out how far that is from the apostolic example? How different it is than anything we see in Acts?

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But that's the assertion. But our Reformed brethren most, not all, there are some that will go this far.

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Our Reformed brethren try to not say that the child baptized is the child regenerated.

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Now many will argue that the normative pattern is within family. And therefore this is consistent with the

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Old Covenant revelation. But many of the people in this room have become believers as adults.

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Many even in this room who were raised in Christian families know a time when they did not follow after Christ.

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A time when you truly repented of your sins and you recognized him as Lord and you confessed him as Lord.

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Many in this room know exactly what I'm talking about. And so the idea then becomes, well, we baptize them as a sign of the covenant and they will say they therefore are under the curses of that covenant if they will not believe.

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But they're not regenerated until a later point in time in their life when they actually have faith.

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Again, there's no examples of this in the New Testament and the argument would be that's because the New Testament is only for that first generation in the sense of its experience and that we have to have good and solid grounds to assume this in a future context.

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I simply say we would have to have very strong evidence from other sources to be able to come to that type of conclusion.

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And certainly here in Romans, the assertion is if you have been baptized, this is what it represented.

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It represented your death, burial, and resurrection with Christ.

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And I see nothing in these words that indicate to us that for some people you could hear it in its normative sense and go yes, okay, that's what

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I was professing. That's what I was doing. And I did that willingly and therefore

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I need to recognize that I am no longer to be a slave of sin. I see no evidence of a reading that would be well,

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I knew none of this when I was baptized. I don't remember my baptism.

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I have to believe what somebody else says that I was baptized. But I'm going to accept the idea that because I was baptized that that means that now that I have accepted

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Christ and repented of my sins that now what that meant back then becomes real for me.

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It wasn't real that time. It was hoped for by my parents.

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But now it's become real for me at a later time when God has chosen to regenerate me and to give me a new heart.

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And now that I have a new heart I look back upon something that I didn't see and didn't experience but it's supposed to mean to me that I have died and been raised to newness of life even though after I was well, in most of these situations not brought up out of the water at all but after I was sprinkled

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I didn't walk in newness of life. I didn't even understand what it was.

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But now I do so now I will. That is the non -infant regenerational understanding of what takes place.

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Now again there are differing views and when we get into this and it will be the last stuff that we deal with when we get into this we will see that there are

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Reformed people who will say that baptism actually does something for the baptized child so much so that some would argue that it basically removes the impact of original sin and brings you to a moral neutral point where you then can make a proper decision for Christ.

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To say that there is absolutely nothing in the New Testament that even hints at such a thing is a bit of an understatement but that's where we are.

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That's where we are. So we're now in point number four if you've got your bulletin we're now beginning to look at specific texts that make reference to baptism not to a historical baptism but to baptism as a concept to baptism as an experience in the

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Christian faith amongst the Christian people to see how much we can learn what we can learn and if there is a consistent understanding of how these things would be related together.

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I know that's a lot of stuff to be thinking about but it's important because when we get right down to it this fellowship has a tremendous amount of fellowship with people who disagree with us at this point and we need to know why that disagreement exists we need to be firm in our understanding be able to explain it to others and in my opinion the better you know these issues the more you can engage those conversations in love and respect rather than with a pitchfork and a flamethrower which ends up resulting in division and instead of us pulling all in the same direction and loving one another and accomplishing things in the kingdom of God well we end up in Facebook chat groups until three o 'clock in the morning and getting angry at people and we don't want that to be happening so that's why we are pursuing in this fashion so let's thank the

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Lord for our time and celebrate the supper Our Heavenly Father indeed we do thank you once again for the freedom that we have had to open your word and to consider what it says to us on these important issues we ask that we would have minds of remembrance of clarity of thought so that as we work through these issues we can set aside emotion and tradition and look firmly to your truth and to your word

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Lord we love our children we want the best for them and we know that the best is what your word commands for us and so let us lay these important foundations so we may stand firmly upon them we pray in Christ's name