Sermon Transcript
The following is a lightly edited transcript generated from the audio; it may contain small errors.
Opening Scripture
And we’re going to look at the scripture this morning before we have our baptism. And if you would, if you have a Bible with you, you can open the book of Ephesians. In Ephesians chapter 2, we are going to start in verse 1. It says, and you, he is made alive, who are dead in trespasses and sins, in which you once walked into the course of this world, According to the prince of the power of the air, the Spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience, among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lust of the flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh of the mind and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others. But God, who was rich in mercy because of his great love with which he loved us, Even when we were dead in trespasses, and raised up together and made to sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast. For we are His the workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.“ seem like an odd text for baptism because the word baptism is not mentioned here, but you’ll see the connection I think before we conclude. I want to make a few observations on this passage. And Paul, who wrote this, of course, was a very logical thinker and writer, and this passage is a very natural outline, if you will, and the outline is very simple. It’s this. First, man has a problem. Man is the generic man, right? Mankind, humankind. Mankind has a problem. Secondly, God has a solution. And then thirdly, we’re told that that solution that God provided for man’s problem came from deep within the heart of God. And so we’re going to look at these three things briefly.
Man’s Problem
First, Paul tells us about man’s condition or man’s problem, his plight. And the plight is one of spiritual alienation from God. If you read any modern literature, you know that the theme of alienation is very common. It’s in psychological works, it’s in literature, it’s in philosophy. Man has a fundamental alienation. This is an alienation from himself. He’s divided within, we call it neuroses, right? Man is alienated from those around him, his environment, and he’s also alienated from God. The Scripture causes spiritual death, because the word death has several meanings in Scripture, but one of the meanings is that there’s a separation between God and man. When the body dies, the immaterial part of a person separates from the material part. That’s the root idea of death, this moment of separation. So when the Scripture talks about a spiritual death, it talks about that man’s soul, the immaterial part, the invisible part, is separated from God. And I have an old pastor who used the illustration of, It’s not that you don’t have a soul, but your soul is like a radio frequency and it
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You know what I’m saying? So you got your phone there, your laptop, or whatever your device is. And they’ve got the Wi-Fi, but you can’t get connected. So we’ve got a soul. We have an immaterial part of us. And there’s different words that people use for it. But the real me isn’t the physical me. It’s part of me. But there’s something inside of me. The ego, Freud called it. And that actually comes from the Greek word, which means I. The real person is the immaterial part. The ego, the heart, the soul, the spirit, whatever word you want to use. That me is on a frequency that’s not connecting with God. There’s a separation. My device is not on God’s Wi-Fi. Got it? That separation is the spiritual death that the Scripture talks about. So there’s a separation between us and God, and that’s our plight, and that’s our problem, because only in a reunion between God and man, only between me entering into a personal relationship as we say today, being reunited with Him, then do I find true joy, peace, happiness, love, and all of the many blessings that we receive through knowing Him.
So we’re separated from Him spiritually. That is our condition, if you will. But then we’re also alienated in another sense, because Scripture says that each one of us violated God’s law. Now, sin is a funny thing, because it’s the most obvious thing of anything the Bible ever talks about. If there’s anything that’s obvious, it’s sin, right? I mean, turn the news on. Wars, riots, murder, poverty, rapes, injustice. I mean, it’s in your face constantly, yet the irony is it’s one of the things that we want to deny the most. But to me, our very denial and refusal to call it what it is, is one of its most glaring symptoms.
In other words, we’re not seeing things as they really are. And that’s because we’re separated from God. We’re not seeing things rightly. To deny the reality of sin is to really look away from that which is most obvious in our existence. Our world is filled with pain and suffering and brokenness of every kind.
Every kind. And many of you know this not just from theory, you know it from your own experience. You have gone through painful experiences in your life. And what the scripture tells us is that the pain and suffering of this age is not, was not God’s original intent and it’s not God’s ultimate intent. It’s not the ultimate intent. We are in a period, if you will, in which sin and its evil, painful effects are allowed to,
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if you will, damage us, harm us, etc. But this age is not the end of the age. age, this time of suffering in which the world is really alienated from God, in a sense. This is not the end of the story. We’re going to talk about the end of the story in a minute. But we have to understand the reality that we’re dealing with, that we live in a broken and the biblical word would be a fallen world. And Paul tells us elsewhere that the world is subject to vanity or futility because of sin. Sin is a very simple concept
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sinned and fallen short of God’s glory, every one of us. To deny that reality is to claim perfection, which I don’t think any of us are ready to do. So man has a problem, and you read the pages of human history, and they are covered with human blood and darkness. And that’s the product of sin and it’s man’s plight. And it’s a very sad story. So does God have a solution? Does God even care? Does God care? Some people think so, some people don’t think so. I remember the days when I didn’t think so. I went through a lot of suffering in my childhood. And the last thing I believed in was God, especially the idea of a good God, because I thought if God was so good, then why did He allow me to go through the suffering I went through? I understand that mentality perfectly well. But scripture gives us a revelation of the heart of God. And it says here in Ephesians 2, verse 4,
God’s Solution
it says, But God, who is rich in mercy, because Because of his great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved, and raised up together and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that. That in the ages to come, he might show the exceeding riches of his grace in his kindness toward us.” So you notice that the, a couple things here. There’s a couple key words here that are very important that tell us about the heart of God. And the first one is mercy. Mercy is the disposition to help those that are in need.
Another word could be that we use for mercy is the word compassion. The Scripture tells us here that not only is God merciful in compassion, but that He is rich in it. He has much of He is full of it and he then because of his mercy acted on the behalf of mankind.
Because we were in a condition of alienation from him and separation from him and also knowing that we couldn’t really fix that, God acted toward us out of his great compassion for us.
But not just mercy, also grace. This is unrestrained and unmerited favor for those who do not deserve love.
You know, when Dallas and Betty shared, they said, we just love each other. And, you know, if I said to Betty, tell me the truth. Is there anything about Dallas that kind of annoys you sometimes?
I’m sure she’d say yes, but her love overcomes it. It’s not that it’s not there, it’s not that she doesn’t see it, but her love overcomes it. It’s the same way for Dallas toward her, because that’s what love does. Love overcomes, right? It overcomes. And so God has mercy and God has grace toward us, not because of anything we’ve done, quite the opposite. It’s not because we earn His grace. As a matter of fact, earning grace is a contradiction in terms. Grace is undeserved. And we’re told here that God has grace, and it is the free bestowal of His kindness toward us on those who have no claim to it. None whatsoever. And the last attribute of God’s love, because of his great love with which he loved us. God’s love is simply his goodness revealed in his self-disclosure to us.
His goodness moved him to bestow blessings on us, but his love moves him, to bestow himself. And there is no greater gift than the gift of God himself. So God’s solution to man’s problem can be summed up in the person in the work of Jesus Christ.
Now, if you’re a Christian, you’ve heard this word saved so many times that you don’t even think about it.
But the reality is saved means so many things in the Bible that we’d have to talk weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks to unfold the riches of what that one word, saved, really means. Because in various contexts in the Bible, it means different things. Sometimes it means forgiveness. To be saved means that you are forgiven. Sometimes it means restoration or healing. Sometimes it means redemption or deliverance or freedom. It depends on the context. But when the Bible says that we’re saved, It means that all of that is given to the Christian. All of it. So what does Jesus, what does Jesus have to do with me and God being restored in terms of this alienation problem? Well, as I said earlier, you know, the alienation is rooted in the fact of our sin. And so, If you read Genesis, what happens there is that man turns away from God. It wasn’t God turned away from man. Man turned away. Man walked away from God. And the beauty of the story in Genesis is it tells the story of how even though after man walked away, it says that God came and God walked in the garden, you know. And then God calls out and he says, He says, Adam, where are you? As if he didn’t know, of course he knew. So God’s walking in the garden. Adam, where are you? Where are you? God seeking man, not man seeking God, God seeking man, God calling out to man.
Where are you? Where are you? He knew where he was. And of course, a man was hiding. And you see, that’s that alienation. The reluctance to be exposed before the all-seeing eye. the reluctance to be bare before God. And you know what? If you don’t believe that God is merciful and gracious and kind and loving, then the alienation is completely understandable. Because otherwise, the kind of deity we’re talking about is simply raw power.
You know what I’m saying? Power without morality. But if God is kind and loving and merciful, if God is the one doing the seeking, the the one that’s reaching out, then what God really does is God, He woos our heart. He woos our heart back to Him. And He does it through Jesus Christ. Now you probably, whether you’ve ever read the New Testament or not, you’ve heard enough about Jesus to know that He died on a cross That’s supposed to be important. That was important for some reason, the Christian. For some reason they think that’s important, right? You know that much probably. Why is that important? Because the cross is, was, is a moment in history in which God was winning back the the world, if you will. The cross was the point at which God determined that instead of punishing those who deserve it, which would be me or you, that he would punish a substitute, a representative, a stand-in, if you will, so that those who ought to have been punished could then be freed and released from their obligation. That’s what the word vicarious means. It means that someone takes the place of another person. There’s many scriptural allusions to this. We think of the story of Abraham, the book of Genesis, where he goes up to the top of the mountain and can offer up Isaac and then God intervenes and it says that God provided a lamb or a ram in the place of Isaac. In the place of. In the place of. So what scripture tells us is that Jesus Christ not being a mere man but a unique man in the sense that he was God and man. You say well how can that be and I say I don’t know Because no one can know, no one can understand this. This is one of the revealed mysteries, and I know that sounds like a contradiction to you, but it’s true. But he was perfect in both his deity and humanity. And thus he was fit to be the one who could take upon himself the obligations and debts of all of us. And so what scripture teaches us is that God has provided a way for me to be restored to him, but at the same time, God doesn’t just say, eh, you know, sin’s no big deal, so I’m just going to overlook it. In other words, God maintains the reality of a moral universe, a universe that has a moral order, a moral foundation. There is a right and there is a wrong, as God defines it. God maintains the right and He punishes the wrong. But He is willing in the person of His Son to not just be the punisher, but to be the punishe. He is willing to not only say, I must maintain law and order. I must maintain the foundation of the world, if you will. There is a right and there is a wrong. That which is wrong must be dealt with. But he not only deals with the problem of sin, but he is willing to step in himself and receive that punishment. I mean, it’s just a crazy idea when you think about it. It’s so crazy when you think about it that it’s like, I can’t believe that. That’s crazy. God is the one who steps in. God is the one who takes my place. I thought God was the one who was doing the punishing. He is, but he’s also the one who is now receiving it upon himself. And he said, how can this be? And we say, we can’t really understand it. That’s why we are at a place, we come to a place where we see that it’s revealed, we believe that it’s revealed and we embrace it by faith. But we can never truly fathom the depths of what happened on Calvary. But what we do know is that when Jesus Christ died, there was a transaction there where God was dealing with the sins of mankind and the person of his son. And the scripture says that he, Jesus, was made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him. There was an exchange that was happening in which my sin was being placed on Jesus and he died as if I were dying. And so he receives the payment for my sin and then I end up receiving the payment of his righteousness.
Now that’s grace. Because I don’t deserve it. And he doesn’t deserve what he got either. I remember the first time, I came to Christ as an adult, I remember the first time that I read the Gospels and really really paid attention to what was going on when Jesus got crucified. And I remember I just started weeping. Because I thought, this is so unfair. This is so unfair. That Jesus got treated this way, that Jesus got crucified. He didn’t deserve. And then the light bulb went off. That’s the point. He didn’t deserve it. And I don’t deserve it either. He didn’t deserve the punishment. I don’t deserve the grace. But that’s the very definition of grace. It’s that you don’t deserve it. It’s a gift. So Paul goes on in his passage, and I’m going to conclude in just a moment, he goes on in his passage and says, that’s why he says Verse 8, for by grace, grace, you’ve been saved through faith and then out of yourselves. It’s the gift of God. Everything that we receive from God is a gift. We don’t earn it. We don’t work for it. We receive it as a gift. Just as Jesus didn’t deserve to be punished, we don’t deserve to be blessed. Yet God in his goodness blesses us in his son, Jesus Christ. But the way that we enter into those blessings, Paul tells us, is through faith. Not of works, lest anyone should boast. I think the biggest lie regarding really any religion, but especially Christianity, the biggest lie, and this is a lie that I believed for many years, is that God would love me, or care for me, if I was good enough, that if I was going to have any kind of future hope, it was because I was going to be good or be religious or do something to earn His acceptance or earn heaven, however you want to put it. That is the biggest lie of all lies. Because our relationship with God is rooted not in our performance, not in our religion.
It is rooted in His great mercy and love for us. And faith is the empty hand that takes hold of what God offers us. That’s what faith is. Faith is not a performance, faith is not something that you do to earn, it’s the opposite of earning. It is rather an act of receiving. And it’s so simple that a child can do it. Simple faith. Simple faith. So we’re going to stand and we’re going to have a moment of prayer while those that are being baptized to have an opportunity to change and get ready.
Closing Prayer
To bow your heads with me, we’re going to have a word of prayer. Father, we thank you for today. We thank you for so many things that we can celebrate.
We thank you for Dallas and Betty and their example testimony to us of fidelity. It’s so rare today, but we thank you for that. We honor them. I thank you for those new members that have joined us today. We pray that we’d be faithful to them as a community. We pray that they would likewise be faithful in their communal commitments to us. We also want to thank you for those who are going to be baptized here in a moment. What a special day it is for them to publicly profess their faith than you. And Lord, we also want to pray if anyone here today is alienated from you. I pray, Lord, that you would help them understand through your Holy Spirit your great love and compassion for them. I pray that you would help them to hear your words today. I pray that they would just be open to what you are trying to say to them.
Because, Lord, I believe that just as you called Adam and said, where are you? I believe you were saying that to each one of us, each one of us. You are seeking out each one of us. And I pray that each one of us would be receptive and responsive to your overtures. And we ask it, Lord, in your name. Amen.
Baptisms
on the water. Then we’d have excitement. More so.
Alright, we’re going to do a couple baptisms of some young men today starting with Mr. Andrew Carpenter. Where’s Andrew’s parents at? There they are. Oh, you got the video camera going.
Do you believe Andrew has made a credible profession of faith? Yes? Andrew, do you believe in Jesus with all your heart? Yes. Do you commit to follow him all your days? Yes. Alright, in obedience to Christ and based on your profession of faith, I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
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All right, next we have Tyler Kesselring. Where is the Kesselring at?
Right there, all right. Kesselring’s David and Heather, do you believe that Tyler has made a credible profession of faith? Do you believe in Jesus with all your heart? You commit to follow him all of your days? All right, then an obedience to Christ based on your profession of faith. I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit Next is my own son, Job Bond. Logan and Job and I a couple of memorial days ago a few years back had about a 45 minute to an hour conversation that was really prompted by them really by the Holy Spirit and we talked for a long time and it was a decision that they both wanted to make to truly follow after the Lord so I vouch for them for their faith. Job, do you believe in Jesus with all your heart? Yes, I do. Do you commit to follow him all of your days? Yes. Then in obedience to Christ and based on your profession of faith, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And now we have Logan Bond.
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Logan, do you believe in Jesus with all your heart?
Yes. Do you commit to follow Him all of your days? Yes. Then, based on your profession of faith and in obedience to Christ, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. All right, we can get rid of the chair now, because the next couple are a little bit taller.
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Give it up for Ben Inman. I’m going to give a lot of room to baptize you, man.
This guy is tall. Ben, do you believe in Jesus with all your heart? Yes. Do you commit to follow him all of your days? Yes. Then in obedience to Christ and based on your profession of faith, I baptize you in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And we have Adam Vaughn.
Adam, do you believe in Jesus with all your heart?
Yes. Do you commit to follow him all of your days? Yes. In obedience to Christ and based on your profession of faith, I baptize you in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Alright.