There’s this drunken old man who is walking along by the river one Sunday afternoon and he stumbles upon a baptism service. He walks down into the water with a bottle in his hand and stands in the water.
The minister turns and notices the old drunk, spots a good opportunity for evangelism and says, “Are you ready to find Jesus?” The drunk looks back and says, “Yeah all right.”
The minister then dunks the man under the water and pulls him back up. “Have you found Jesus?” the preacher asked. “No, not yet!” said the drunk.
The preacher then dunks him under for a bit longer, brings him up and says, “Now, have you found Jesus?”
“No, I have not Reverend.”
So the preacher holds the man under for at least 30 seconds this time brings him out of the water and says, “Have you found Jesus yet?”
The old drunk wipes his eyes and says to the preacher...”Look, are you sure this is where he fell in?”
Katy and Emma, have you found Jesus? Actually, that’s the wrong question. The evangelist Reinhard Bonnke once said: “Christians like to say ‘I found the Lord.’ Well, OK, but the Lord was never lost! We were lost and Jesus found us.’”
Thank God Jesus has found you. You, like all of us here today, were lost and God found you in Christ.
He was looking for you long before you were ever searching for him. He loved you ages before you ever even thought about him.
He had a good and perfect plan for your life way before the first time you ever wondered what you might like for breakfast.
Anyway, congratulations! We are so happy for you today. We celebrate your new life in Jesus and we salute you for the brave stand you have made this morning as two young people who want the whole world to know that you belong to Jesus and you want to follow him all your days.
Following Jesus is a great adventure. But I want to say that it will not always be easy for you. I think there will be times when you will find it hard.
I’m going to ask the rest of the congregation to answer me honestly now.
Raise your hand please,
· if you have ever had times of doubt about God’s love for you
· if you have ever felt that the joy in your faith has disappeared
· if you have ever been ridiculed by other people for your faith in God
That most of you for each question. You probably will be teased and laughed at. People will say you’re “holier than thou” even though you’re not, just because you’re a Christian. Sometimes it will feel lonely and sometimes you will wonder if it’s all worth it.
You definitely will have ups and downs but I want to say this: ups and downs are a sign of life. If you don’t believe me, look at the picture on the screen. Would you rather have ups and downs or a nice comfortable straight line?
So I just thought I’d start with a little word of encouragement for you…
Well, what is baptism and why do we do it? What, if anything, do we get out of it?
I want to say that baptism is five things and just to help you remember them they all begin with the letter B; baptism is a banner, a burial, a beginning, a bath and a badge.
1) Baptism is a Banner
What do I mean when I say that baptism is a banner? A banner is something you hold up with a message on it. Unhappy people raise banners on protest marches. Football crowds hold up banners to show support for their team (or to call for their manager to be sacked).
When you hold up a banner it’s to tell anyone who’s looking “this is what I believe.” You’re making a stand. You aren’t keeping your thoughts to yourself. You’re nailing your colours to the mast. You’re letting the whole world know exactly what you think.
There was a young teacher who explained to her class of small children that she was an atheist. She asks the class to raise their hands if they are atheists too. So, because young children tend to want to please the teacher they all put their hands up. Except one. A bright young boy called Fred doesn’t go with the crowd. So the teacher asks him why he is different from the rest of the class.
“Because I’m not an atheist” he says.
“So what are you then?” asks the teacher.
“I’m a Christian” he says.
The teacher looks a little surprised and asks why he is a Christian.
“Because I was brought up to know and love Jesus. My mum is a Christian, my dad is a Christian. And I accepted Christ as the Lord and Saviour of my life.”
The teacher puts her hands on her hips.
“That’s not a reason!” she says. “What if your mum had been an idiot and your dad had been an idiot too. What would you be then?”
“Well, miss” he says, “I suppose I’d be an atheist like you!”
That’s taking a stand isn’t it? Your baptism today is a stand of obedience to Christ’s command.
2) Baptism is a Burial
Secondly, baptism is a burial. This is language that the New Testament uses several times.
In Colossians 2:12 we read “For you were buried with Christ when you were baptized.”
What does this mean? It means that when you are baptized you are saying, “I am leaving my old unbelieving life of sin behind. The old me that didn’t care less about God and was only interested in me is finished, it’s done with, and I am not going back. There’s a me I used to be - but since I gave my heart to Jesus Christ there’s the new me. I am not going back to the old me – it has no spiritual life in it at all. It’s lifeless so today I am digging a hole six feet under the ground, putting the old me in a cheap coffin and giving it a decent burial. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, amen!”
But the burial thing means a little bit more than that. It’s not just us saying goodbye to our old self. It’s also a spiritual connection to what Jesus did on the cross.
Romans 6.3 says this: “all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death. We were therefore buried with him through baptism.”
So when you get baptized you are saying that what Jesus did on the cross is of supreme importance to me.
3) Baptism is a Beginning
Thirdly, baptism is a beginning.
In Colossians 2:12 it says this: “You were buried with Christ when you were baptized. And with him you were raised to a new life because you trusted the mighty power of God, who raised Christ from the dead.”
When you came up out of the water you left your old life behind - but you showed that life goes on. When you’re under the water you can’t breathe – you’re spiritually dead. But when you come up afterwards, you start to breathe again. You’re alive but it’s not the old you. You have decided to let Christ live in you. It’s a brand new start, a clean slate, a new page.
Romans 6.1-2 say “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? No way! We have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” And then it goes on to say “If we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.”
People get upset sometimes when I say that baptism does not in fact make you a Christian. That goes right against the grain for many people.
Some people say, “Now look here. I was baptised by the Reverend so and so when I was 4 months old.” “I had a Christian upbringing.” “I was educated by nuns.” “I'm Church of England.” Or whatever. But none of that make you a Christian. Baptism isn’t magic. Only faith in Jesus makes you a Christian. So why would you want to get baptized if it doesn’t actually make you a Christian?
Put it this way, baptism is a bit like a wedding ring. Wearing a ring on this finger doesn’t make you married. It is a symbol. For a married person their wedding ring reminds them of the promises they made that meant from the moment they first put it on things were going to be different.
The day Kathie put my wedding ring on this finger my life changed. My wedding ring reminds me that “From 28th May 1983 my future was bound up with hers.” Baptism is like that. It says, “From 1st April 2012, my life is bound up with Jesus and now I live for God.”
4) Baptism is a Bath
Fourthly, baptism is a bath.
The water in baptism speaks of cleansing and, by faith, your soul is washed when you go down under the waters of baptism.
1 Peter 3 talks about this saying it’s not about “the removal of dirt from the body but the pledge of a clear conscience toward God.”
Titus 3 talks about “the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.”
In our Acts reading today Peter said, “Repent and be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” (Acts 2.38)
Now then, you’ve been sitting down for a while so I am going to ask you all to stand... Turn 90 degrees to the left. And now turn another 90 degrees so you are facing the door you came in. Stay right there. Thank you. Now, the Bible word for that is repentance. OK, you can turn back and face the front again now.
You demonstrated just now that repentance literally means to turn round.
“Repentance” is a religious sort of word these days, but in New Testament times it was just an ordinary, everyday word which just meant “make a u-turn”.
So repentance of sins means that we admit that we are travelling in the wrong direction on our spiritual journey, then turning round and correcting our course.
Repentance is all about changing our minds about God. Somebody once said; “the one way to prove you have a mind is to change it.” And the truth is that changing your mind about God is the most intelligent thing you will ever do.
“I repent of my sins” is one of our baptismal pledges. We commit ourselves to do it. And we pledge to repent because the Bible says it.
There is a retired church leader, who says that whenever a stranger at a party asks him what he does for a living, he replies, “I'm in the recycling business.”
I can tell you that whenever you say you’re a vicar at a party people do two things; 1) they apologise for all the swearing they’ve just done and 2) they smile weakly and it goes awkwardly quiet and they head off to fill up their glass again.
So this vicar tells people at parties that he works in the recycling business. People are always more interested in the environment that they are about church. So people sometimes say “Oh, that’s interesting, what do you recycle then?” And he says “People”.
“First of all,” he says, “in order to be recycled, people need to be salvaged (or saved), and then, like most recycling processes they go through a kind of intensive washing experience that, in my company, we call baptism. The total recycling process typically lasts many years, but the end result is that they are always made useful again for God, thus avoiding the rubbish dump of rust, decay and eventual destruction, known in the trade as 'hell'.”
So your baptism today is the early washing stage of your lifetime recycling process.
5) Baptism is a Badge
Last of all, baptism is a badge. What do I mean by that? I mean it’s like a badge of membership. Here’s a Tufty badge.
I always wanted to have one of those when I was a boy. I’ll be honest with you, I never got to be a member of that club and I have never quite got over it.
But seriously, everything I’ve been saying up till now has been about Katy and Emma as two individuals; their relationship with Jesus, their future, their sin, their new life. That’s all good – but when you are baptized you are baptized into Christ’s body, the church.
Here’s a picture of the Archbishop of York doing immersion baptisms outside York Minster – which he does every Easter Sunday.
In the early days of the church, baptism was how you identified with that group of people who were called Christians who were despised and hated.
To be a Christian meant persecution, maybe death; it meant being ostracized from your family and shunned by friends. As long as you just met with Christians socially, the authorities left you alone, but when once you got baptized, you declared to the whole world, “I belong to this dangerous group.” You could be a believer and keep it strictly a secret and avoid the hassle, but once you submitted to public baptism you had burned his bridges behind you. No going back.
Ending
Emma and Katy, that’s where you are today. I have decided to follow Jesus. Never mind the cost. The reward is far better! No turning back!
Sermon preached at All Saints' Preston on Tees, 1st April 2012
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