You have fired up the grill, got some big juicy steaks on there, you are just about ready to take them off, some grease from the fat falls on those hot coals, flames spit up and catches your finger on fire. Sitting right next to the grill is a glass of ice cold water that you have been drinking on a hot summer day. So, finger on fire, glass of ice-cold water – what do you do with your finger? Exactly! You would immerse it into that water! Normally, water extinguishes fire, but in this case baptismal water enhances fire.
Believe it or not you would not just be finding a medical solution to your problem, but you would actually be illustrating a biblical principle. For a true follower of Jesus Christ, fire and water go together. Let me explain what I mean by that.
If you are just walking in for the first time today, we have been in a series of messages on the Book of Acts called “Ignite.” We have simply been taking a look at the early church and what it was like to be set on fire by the Holy Spirit of God. When a person decides to become a surrendered follower of Jesus Christ, God sends the person and the power of the Holy Spirit into that believer’s life to enable him to live the Christian life. One major symbol of the Holy Spirit is fire. Interestingly enough when you study the Book of Acts every time someone was set on fire for the first time by the Holy Spirit, guess what they did? They jumped in the water. Specifically, they jumped into the water of baptism, but there is one difference. Normally, water extinguishes fire, but in this case baptismal water enhances fire. Stay with me!
We are going to deal today with one of the most emotionally charged issues any pastor ever deals with. If you grew up in a church where baptism in any form or fashion was practiced then you know there are two things that can get people extremely charged up and that is either messing with their baptism or making baptism in some way mandatory.
Of all the things through the centuries that have divided the church, questions like these have been right at the top of the list.
- Who should be baptized?
- Should babies be baptized or only adults? Whether babies are adults what qualifies someone to be baptized?
- How should people be baptized?
- Does it matter? Is it a big deal whether you are sprinkled, poured, dipped, dunked, or somebody just spits on you in the name of Jesus?
- Is baptism necessary for salvation?
- Is baptism somehow the kick-starter for salvation to really take effect in a person’s life?
This whole debate is very frustrating for any pastor, because baptism is meant to be a bridge – not a barrier. Baptism is meant to be a stepping stone to walking deeper with God, not a stumbling block from going higher with God. In fact, baptism properly understood is not something you have to do, but something you get to do and something you should want to do.
I will be upfront and tell you that there is only one practical application today for this message and that is for those of you who have never been biblically baptized to be baptized. For those of you who have been biblically baptized to make sure you understand why your baptism is important, but also why you need to be about the mission of telling others both about Christ and about baptism.
There are only two rituals or religious practices in the New Testament that share these three characteristics:
(1) Jesus commanded us to do them
(2) Jesus did them Himself
(3) They were practiced by the New Testament church
Those two things are - Communion and Baptism.
As you study the Book of Acts you get hot sometimes and you get wet at other times, because you not only keep running into the fire of the Holy Spirit, but you keep falling into the waters of baptism. No book in the Bible talks more about baptism than the Book of Acts and that ought to clue us in on just how important is baptism. Baptism is not just important because a Baptist, or a Catholic or a Lutheran thinks it is, but because the Bible says it is. The Bible talks about baptism no less than 74 times. Whatever else you believe about baptism, understand baptism was not a Baptist idea, a Methodist idea, a Presbyterian idea, Episcopalian idea or Catholic idea. It is a Bible idea.
I could have just reached into my Bible jar and blindly picked out a story about baptism and illustrated all that we need to know about baptism, but I am going to choose one, again in the Book of Acts, and it is the story of the first Gentile who ever became a believer in Jesus Christ. His name was Cornelius. He lived in a place called Cessaria. I have been there many times. It is a beautiful area by the Mediterranean Sea and Peter had been commanded in a dream to go to this man’s house and to share with him the message of the Gospel. It is a fascinating story we find in Acts 10. [Turn to Acts 10].
Cornelius was a man who feared God, but he didn’t know God. He was a religious man, but he was not a spiritual man. He was a devoted man, but he was not a saved man. Peter goes and shares the Gospel with him and his household and he trusts Christ as his Lord and as his Savior. We pick up the story in verse 44.
“While Peter was still saying these things, the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word. And the believers from among the circumcised who had come with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit was poured out even on the Gentiles. For they were hearing them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter declared, ‘Can anyone withhold water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit just as we have?’ And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Then they asked him to remain for some days.” (Acts 10:44-48, ESV)
You see in that passage fire and water. Cornelius and his household had been set on fire by the Holy Spirit and immediately they got in to the water of baptism. That by the way, is the picture of every baptism in the New Testament which leads to the key take away. Key Take Away: Baptism is the biblical way a Christ-follower confesses his faith in the risen Lord.
As we begin this message I want you to understand something. If you come from a church or a religious tradition whose understanding of baptism is different than the one I am going to present today, please understand I am not attacking your church, trying to throw down on your baptism, or demean your religious heritage, but what I am going to do is tell you what the Bible says about baptism. To do that we just simply need to answer a few simple questions. Question one…
I. What Does The Word “Baptize” Mean?
That is a technical question, but we have to answer it to get at a spiritual answer. I normally don’t do this, but in this case I am going to make an exception, because this is too important not to. The Greek word for baptism, which is the original language of the New Testament, is “baptizō”. The word “baptizō” was a very common word 2,000 years ago with one difference. It wasn’t a religious word, but a secular word. It is a word that literally means “to dip, wash, soak, or immerse.” It was used, for example, to describe ships that sank in the sea. It was used for dipping a light-colored garment into a dye to change its colors. One ancient Jewish historian even described a man that was murdered by baptism (incidentally that certainly doesn’t mean he was sprinkled to death or poured to death, because even back then waterboarding was illegal!) No, he was put under the water and drowned.
For a long period of time, the word “baptizō” had no religious significance whatsoever. Women baptized their dishes. Ships were baptized into the sea. Kids playing in the river would dunk or baptize each other. But then one day a man exploded on the scene named John. He was preaching a message of repentance and faith. He began doing something no one else had ever done in history. He began doing something no one had ever even seen before. He began baptizing, immersing, and dipping people into water.
“John appeared, baptizing in the wilderness and proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.”(Mark 1:4, ESV)
Even Jewish people who had tried to keep the law, who had made their sacrificing, who had tried to dot the religious “i’s” and crossed the religious “t’s” realized that John was preaching something they had never heard before. He was telling these Jewish people that if you really want to get right with God, if you are tired of religion, and you really want a relationship with God you need to repent, receive His forgiveness, and then to identify with this message and with this desire be baptized. John said that baptism was an outward sign of an inward repentance. John became so famous for this new way of having people publically confess their repentance and their faith that people began to call him literally, “John the Baptist” or more literally “John the baptizer” a term that never, ever before had been used in any literature. In other words, this was a made up word.
This is important. The reason why they had to come up with a new word was because John’s way of baptizing was a brand new method.
Has it ever occurred to you why John baptized in a river? John 3:22-23 says this, “After this Jesus and his disciples went into the Judean countryside, and he remained there with them andwas baptizing. John also was baptizing at Aenon near Salim, because water was plentiful there, and people were coming and being baptized.” (John 3:22-23, ESV)
Why did John have to have “plentiful water?” After all, it doesn’t take a lot of water to sprinkle people? The reason it takes “plentiful” water is because to be baptized you have to go down into the water. The reason you have to go down into the water is so you can immerse people under the water.
You will also see every time you read about someone going down into the water they also come up out of the water. One of the greatest things that has ever happened in my life was not when my pastor put me down under the water. I am grateful every day he brought me up out of the water! Paint the picture into your mind. If you go down into the water and you are put under the water and you come up out of the water, you can only conclude that you must have been immersed into the water. That is the only New Testament method of being baptized.
I am not here to pick a fight and I am not here to throw rocks. Good brothers can disagree on what I am about to say. There are some who say the method doesn’t really matter. All that matters is that when you get baptized you know what you are doing and you truly trust Christ so any method will do. Honestly, I don’t know how you can possibly come up with that thinking when you read the Bible. There is a reason why the method of baptism is important to baptism. The reason the method is so important is because of the meaning. What does baptism mean? What does is it supposed to picture? What does it represent? When you ask the average person what does baptism mean they will usually say something like this, “It pictures the cleansing of sin.” That is not what baptism pictures. We are specifically told what baptism means and what it pictures in Romans 6.
“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.” (Romans 6:3-4, ESV)
Just as the Lord’s Supper pictures the body of Christ and the blood of Christ, baptism pictures the death, burial and resurrection of Christ. Just for emphasis, Paul repeats this in Colossians 2:12.
“Having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead.” (Colossians 2:12, ESV)
Here is why the method of baptism is so important. If you change the method you change the meaning. You don’t take the Lord’s Supper with beef-jerky and a diet coke. Likewise, you don’t baptize any other way other than by immersion. If I want to see a picture of your dog, don’t show me a picture of your cat. Baptism is to picture the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ and that can only be done by immersion.
You cannot separate the meaning of baptism from the method of baptism. To put it simply, the meaning of baptism determines the method of baptism and the method of baptism pictures the meaning of baptism. That is why baptism means “immersion.” That leads to the second question.
II. Who Qualifies For Baptism?
Regardless of how you believe baptism should be administered there is still the question of who is illegible. Frankly, this won’t affect the form of baptism, but it does affect the timing of baptism. In the New Testament, you only find one kind of baptism and it can best be described in two simple words: believer’s baptism. Two things always go together in the Bible – belief and baptism. You never find one without the other and they always go, by the way, in that order - belief first and then baptism.
Without exception every time you read about anyone being baptized in the New Testament it was after they believed. It was after they became followers of Christ and never before.
“So those who received his word were baptized.” (Acts 2:41, ESV)
“But when they believed Philip as he preached good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women.” (Acts 8:12, ESV)
“Crispus, the ruler of the synagogue, believed in the Lord, together with his entire household. And many of the Corinthians hearing Paul believed and were baptized.”(Acts 18:8, ESV)
Remember what I said earlier? Baptism is the biblical way a Christ-follower confesses his faith in the risen Lord. Some of you probably grew up in a tradition where you were taught the way people confess their faith in Christ was to walk down the aisle of a church, to fill out a card, and shake the pastor’s hand. The problem is in the early church they didn’t have aisles to walk down and didn’t even meet in churches. They met in homes. No, the New Testament way you confess your faith in Jesus Christ is by baptism and that is what baptism is to be – a confession of your personal and public faith in Jesus Christ.
Which is why we don’t baptize infants and which is why there is no record of any infant ever being baptized in Scripture. The Bible reserves baptism only for believers, only believers were baptized, and they were always baptized by immersion. That leads to the third question which is…
III. When Should One Be Baptized?
In the New Testament baptism was always performed immediately after one professed their faith in Jesus Christ and expressed a desire to become a part of God’s family.
I am going to make a statement that may be the most important statement you will ever hear about baptism. There is no record of an un-baptized believer in the New Testament. The Bible knows no such thing as an un-baptized Christian. There is no record of anyone delaying their baptism or refusing to be baptized after becoming a believer and a Christ-follower. The reason is simple. When people were set on fire by the Holy Spirit, they immediately wanted to jump into the water. You never read anywhere in the New Testament where people delayed their baptism or refused to be baptized or didn’t want to be baptized. I could dwell more on that, but I really want to get to the last and the biggest question of all.
IV. Why Should Every True Christ-Follower Be Baptized?
There are two big mistakes people make about baptism. One mistake is to believe that baptism is of no importance at all. This is the mistake of people who understand, correctly, that baptism is not necessary to have a relationship with God. It doesn’t make you any more of a Christ-follower than if you are not baptized, so why be baptized? It is not a big deal. The other mistake is made by people who say that baptism is of ultimate importance and that it is necessary for salvation and that you cannot have a relationship with God unless you are baptized, so it is a big deal. As usual, the truth is exactly in the middle, because both groups are half right. No, baptism is not necessary to have a relationship with God, but it is necessary to be right with God.
Baptism is not essential to salvation. You don’t have to be baptized to become part of God’s family, to have eternal life, or to even be forgiven of your sins. Many times I’ll ask people if they have a relationship with God and the first thing they will let me know is they have been baptized into some church. I want to make plain that being baptized, regardless of how it was done, and regardless of when it was done does not make you a follower of Jesus Christ. Remember baptism is a picture. Baptism is not the experience of being saved; it is the expression of being saved.
Baptism is just like a wedding ring. This wedding ring is a picture of the fact that I am a married man. If I were to take my wedding ring off and put it in my pocket, I would still be married. In fact, I would still be married if I never wore a wedding ring or if I had never put one on. If you don’t have to be baptized to be a follower of Christ and if you don’t have to be baptized to have a relationship with God, then why should a person be baptized?
Three reasons: (1) Jesus commanded it. The marching orders of both the church as a whole and individual believers is found in Matthew 28:19.
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:19, ESV)
If a church does not baptize believers it is disobeying God. If believers refuse to be baptized they are disobeying God. Either way, when you live in disobedience you are not right with God.
Reason (2): Jesus was baptized and set an example for us to follow. You probably don’t know this if you’ve never been to Israel, but for Jesus to be baptized in the Jordan River where John baptized, He had to walk 60 miles one way. Why would Jesus do that? Why would Jesus make a three day trip, take an entire week out of His life just to be baptized? He wasn’t a sinner. Talk about being right with God – He was God! So, why did He do it? To set an example for us to follow. I’ll just say this, “If baptism was good enough for Jesus it ought to be good enough for you.”
Reason (3): Baptism is the way you publicly confess your personal faith in Jesus Christ. I wear a wedding ring every day of my life, because I want everyone to know and see that I am married to the most beautiful, wonderful woman on this planet. Baptism is the way you let everyone know that you have become a follower of Jesus Christ.
I want to close by talking to five groups of people today. I want you to decide which category you are in.
(1) Never Saved/Never Baptized
That may be you here today. You’ve never really surrendered your life to Jesus Christ. You’ve never really repented, turned away from your sinful nature and by faith received Christ as your Savior and surrendered to Him as your Lord. That is always going to be the first order of business. In a moment, I am going to ask you to make the greatest decision of your life, but then we are going to ask you to be baptized.
(2) Never Saved/Baptized
There are some of you here today and you did get into a pool of water or a river, or a lake or a swimming pool and you were immersed. You were technically “baptized”, but you were not truly baptized. Remember, true baptism must be of a believer. We could run a bunch of atheists through our baptistry anytime we wanted to, but we wouldn’t be baptizing anybody. We would just be dunking them. There are some of you here today who have struggled with this all of your life, because you know deep down, maybe you walked down the aisle of a church when you were a child, signed a card and got baptized because you thought it was the right thing to do or maybe you were baptized because your buddy got baptized or you thought it would make your parents feel good, but you know deep down you have never truly experienced Christ. You have never been born-again and never really received salvation. Then just like the first group, we are going to ask you to truly receive Christ as your Lord and Savior and then be truly baptized. (Incidentally, there is no such thing as re-baptism. I cringe every time I hear of preachers talk about re-baptism, because if they understand the New Testament they wouldn’t even use the term. You have either been biblically baptized or you haven’t. You can no more be re-baptized than you can be re-saved.)
(3) Never Saved/Sprinkled-Christened
You were sprinkled as a baby and maybe christened later in life. Again, never trusted Christ, never been born-again, and never truly received salvation. You are in the same category as the first two. We are going to ask you to make the most important decision which is to receive Christ and then to take that next step of baptism. Then you have the fourth category.
(4) Saved/Never Baptized
Something that really disturbs me and perplexes me is something that Pastor Larry shared with me not long ago. He said, “Pastor, almost without exception everyone who checks on this card that they want to be baptized, follows up with baptism. We have almost a 100% rate of following Jesus in baptism. Of those who have checked the box saying they have professed their faith in Christ, almost none of them follow up in baptism. I want to say this again, “If you are claiming today that you are a follower of Jesus Christ and received Christ into your life whether you have done it recently here in one of our services or done it in another church or did it 25 years ago there is no such thing in the Bible as an un-baptized Christian. If Jesus Christ loved you enough to get on a cross, you should love Him enough to get into a pool of water. The last category is…
(5) Baptized/Later Saved
You are the person, who again, was baptized as a child and maybe even sprinkled as an infant. Somehow later in life, God graciously convicted you of the fact that you had never truly been saved, never truly trusted Christ and you did. Again, you have never been baptized – you just got wet. You need to take that next step of following Jesus in baptism.
I want to close this series and this sermon with a question that I asked early on, “Is your Christian faith a raging fire or a dull habit?” There is a simple test to determine that right now. If you have never been biblically baptized meaning baptized after you became a believer, not before, and baptized by immersion, not any other way, if you are truly on fire then you are ready, willing and able to jump into the water.