There is a ridiculous story about a priest who was about to baptize a young child. He approached the father of the child and said solemnly, “Baptism is a serious step. Are you prepared for it?”
“I think so,” the young father replied. “My wife has made appetizers and we have a caterer coming to provide plenty of cookies and cakes for all of our guests.”
“I don’t mean that,” the priest responded. “I mean, are you prepared spiritually?”
“Oh, sure,” came the reply. “I’ve got a keg of beer and a case of whiskey.”
I’m not sure this is what the priest had in mind when he asked the young man if he was spiritually prepared.
Today we are celebrating the baptism of our Lord. You know the story. A man named John was baptizing people out in the wilderness in the Jordan River, which means he was several miles outside of Jerusalem. This is interesting because the Gospel of Mark tells us that “the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem went out to him.” Obviously John was a remarkable preacher. He appealed to a large section of the population--enough so that many of them walked for many miles to be touched by his ministry.
It is also interesting that John’s preaching was of a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Scholars tell us this was highly unusual for Jews. Jews believed that only Gentile converts to Judaism needed to be baptized.
According to the customs of the day, these Gentile converts had to do 3 things: First, if the convert was a male, he had to be circumcised. This was the defining mark of a Jew. Second, a sacrifice had to be offered as a payment for his sins. Third, the convert had to be baptized. This was literally a full bath in which the whole body was bathed. This ritual symbolized a cleansing from all the pollution of sin in his life, so that he might start a new relationship with God. (1)
No such ritual was required of Jews, however. Still, people, mostly Jews, poured out from Jerusalem and the surrounding territory to be baptized by John. Could it be that the people of that area were becoming aware of their sin and their need for repentance? I suspect most people today would never admit that each of us stands in need of repentance. I doubt that most people today even know what repentance really means. Repentance is a change of direction.
John Ed Mathison tells a story about a middle-school principle who was having trouble with the girls in his school putting lipstick prints on the mirror of the girls’ bathroom. Middle school is the age at which girls are experimenting with makeup, and all the girls seemed to be wearing bright red lipstick. The janitorial staff was spending an inordinate amount of time cleaning all the mirrors in the girls’ bathroom.
The principle called on Mrs. Miller, the head custodian, to demonstrate to the girls how she cleaned up the prints. The principle invited as many of the girls as could fit into the bathroom and turned to Mrs. Miller. Mrs. Miller grabbed a large sponge, dipped it into the toilet, and proceeded to wipe the lipstick prints off the mirrors. After that, amazingly, no more lipstick prints appeared on the mirrors.
John Ed Mathison said that the girls made an “informed decision” to never leave lipstick prints again. (2) I believe those girls could be said to have truly repented.
It is unusual that a preacher could make an entire region of people so aware of their need for repentance and baptism as John did.
Maybe people came at first out of curiosity. John the Baptist, of course, was interesting for many reasons, not the least of which was his appearance and his lifestyle. Mark tells us he wore clothing made of camel’s hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey. His was a Spartan existence out in the wilderness, but there is no questioning his appeal to those who were searching for some spiritual assurance.
John’s ministry was also interesting because of his message: “After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie. I baptize you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.”
John’s ministry was designed to help people prepare spiritually for the coming of Christ. If you think about it for a while, this is the purpose for which baptism is still administered today. [When parents present their children for baptism at the altar of the church, they are preparing them for a lifetime of spiritual growth.] When a young person or an adult comes for baptism, we hope they understand that this is not the end of the process; it is but the beginning.
Educators today think in terms of life-long learning. So it is with the process of following Jesus. Baptism isn’t the end of that process; only its beginning.
People come to present their children or themselves for baptism for a variety of reasons, I suppose. For some it is a means of fitting into the community. They believe that belonging to a church is important and baptism is a requirement for church membership.
In his book The Death of the Banker, author Ron Chernow tells about the sociologist Max Weber who once saw a banker being baptized in a cold stream in the Southern U.S. When Mr. Weber asked what was happening, he was told that the banker was being baptized so that the people of the town would trust him and so do business with him. (3)
Well, that’s not the best reason to undergo this sacred rite. People are baptized and join the church for a variety of reasons. Some regard baptism as a form of spiritual insurance in order to escape the fires of hell. I hope it works for them. But that’s not the best reason either. The best reason for being baptized is to welcome Christ into your life and to commit yourself to following him.
That is why repentance is a necessary element of baptism. How can you open your heart to the love of Christ if you are still holding on to destructive emotions and practices? How can you follow him and live your life with no regard to the effect you are having on others?
A seven-year-old girl once told her parents that she had to see her pastor. They asked her why. All she would say was, “Something is wrong, but I can only tell Dr. Steve.” Every day for two weeks she persisted. “I have to see Dr. Steve.”
Finally the parents brought her to Dr. Steve’s office and the girl poured out her concerns. “My brain is broken,” she told him with great sincerity. “You know that thing in your head,” she said, “that keeps your thoughts from coming out your mouth? Well, it doesn’t work for me. Whenever I think something bad, I just say it. Then I feel so bad because I don’t want to hurt people.” (4)
“Maybe we all have broken brains,” says her pastor, Dr. Steve Stephens.
I’ll have to say that’s sometimes true of me. Sometimes my brain seems broken. Who hasn’t said things they’ve regretted? Who hasn’t done things they later regretted as well?
“I’m loyal to a fault,” quipped comedian Steve Allen. “I’ve got a great many faults and I’m loyal to every one of them.”
He could have been speaking for many of us, but our faults, by definition, are thoughts and practices that keep us from being all God means us to be.
I read about a small country church that had just concluded a revival meeting and was conducting a baptism service in the local river on a cold January day. After baptizing the first person, the pastor turned to the man and asked him if the water was cold.
“Naw,” the man replied.
One of the deacons who was there shouted, “Dip him again, preacher. He’s still lying.” There are some things you need to let go of when you profess faith in Christ. Lying is just one of them.
Dr. Norvel Young tells about a young man named Richard Taylor. At one time, Taylor was happily married. He was a pre-med student with a promising career. He was also a college athlete, healthy and strong. But Richard Taylor lost his marriage, his career, and his health when he became addicted to illegal drugs. He soon descended into a world of other addicts, drug dealers and violent crime. One day, a “friend” of Richard Taylor’s shot him nine times and left him for dead. Miraculously he survived.
In the hospital, Taylor met a pastor named Bill Banks. Banks befriended this burned-out, dying addict and helped him find Christ. Taylor eventually recovered enough to leave the hospital. The change in his attitude and behavior was so thorough that the district attorney, whose job it was to prosecute Taylor, recommended his release instead.
Taylor spent the next few years speaking at schools and churches on the dangers of drugs, alcohol, and the criminal lifestyle. He influenced hundreds of people with his message of conversion and repentance. Sadly, he never recovered fully from his former lifestyle, and died only a few years after the shooting. But he made the most of those few short years, investing them for God’s glory. (5)
We can thank God for Richard Taylor’s conversion. He left his addictions, his unsavory lifestyle and his criminal friends behind. And he had a positive influence on a host of other young people and adults. But isn’t it sad that he waited until his past had nearly destroyed him before he repented? And this brings us to something we need to see.
Repentance isn’t something that we do for God. Repentance is something God does for us. Our repentance does nothing to enhance God’s life. Baptism is entirely for our benefit.
In her book Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary Of Faith, Kathleen Norris writes about a little boy who wrote a poem called, “The Monster Who Was Sorry.” In the poem the boy explodes about how he hated it when his father yelled at him. In anger he threw his sister down the stairs, wrecked his room, then destroyed an entire town. His poem concludes: “Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, ‘I shouldn’t have done all that.’”
Commenting on the boy’s poem, Norris writes, “‘My messy house’ says it all, with more honesty than most adults could have mustered. The boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in a fourth century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell?” (6)
Some of us have messy rooms in the house of our lives. Those messy rooms mar our peace of mind, they endanger our marriages, they alienate us from our neighbors and from God. They load us with guilt, they fill us with the fear of being found out, and they bog us down with depression. We’re unable to be what we know God wants us to be. Why put up with all that? Why not repent of our waywardness before it is too late?
In 1991, a judge fined brothers Geno and Russell Capozziello, owners of a Bridgeport, Connecticut, wrecking company, nearly $900,000 for operating an illegal dump. In 1986, on the empty lots surrounding their facility, the brothers began dumping debris from buildings. Eventually the mound of rubble and muck covered two acres and reached a height of thirty-five feet, the equivalent of a three story building.
The state ordered them to clean it up, but the brothers claimed there was no place to dump it legally in Bridgeport, and they could not afford to have it hauled away. While spending more than $300,000 the previous year to have debris hauled away, they barely dented the pile. According to Geno, “It was never supposed to get this high.”
“Like garbage,” says Pastor Michael Hardin, “the effects of sinful habits have a way of accumulating beyond our plans and beyond our control.” (7)
Who wants to live with a lot of potentially dangerous debris in your back yard or in your heart?
Of course the worse thing about sin is what it does to our relationship with God. A very dirty little fellow came in from playing in the yard and asked his mother, “Who am I?”
Ready to play the game she said, “I don’t know! Who are you?”
“WOW!” cried the child. “Mrs. Johnson was right! She said I was so dirty, my own mother wouldn’t recognize me!” Is there so much debris in your life that even God no longer recognizes you?
A few years ago, pastor James Emery White learned that a deacon in his church had just abandoned his wife and small children in order to take up with another woman. When White confronted the man, he replied, “Right now, I’m happy, Pastor, and I don’t want to give this up. I know it’s wrong, but I don’t care. If that means I’ll burn in hell, then I guess I’ll burn in hell.”
Even many years later, White reports that those words still send a chill down his spine. He was looking at a man who professed to be a Christian who had knowingly chosen sin over God’s way. And this man felt no regret. God only knows where that man is now, and whether or not he has ever realized the consequences of his choice. (8)
This man was seriously in danger of losing his soul, losing his relationship with the source of his being, losing everything that was decent in his life. That’s why repentance is so important to life. Our lives can careen treacherously out of control to the point that God no longer sees His image in our souls.
Because He cares for us so much He comes to us and offers His grace and His love and His forgiveness as well as His help in changing our life’s direction, but only we can make the final decision. John came offering a baptism of repentance. Interestingly enough, Jesus came the same way. Why? Because repentance is to our benefit. It is not something we do for God; it is something God does for us. Would you hear His invitation today? Repent and begin a new life today.
1. Rodney L. Cooper, Holman New Testament Commentary - Mark: 2 (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Reference, 2000).
2. Illustrations from the Festival of Wisdom And Grace, Lake Junaluska, NC July 28-31, 2014.
3. (New York: Vintage Books, 1997), p. 92.
4. Dr. Steve Stephens, The Wounded Warrior (Sisters, OR: Multnomah Publishers, Inc., 2006), pp. 79-80.
5. With Mary Hollingsworth, Living Lights, Shining Stars (West Monroe, Louisiana: Howard Publishing Co., 1997), pp. 51-52.
6. Daniel B. Clendenin, http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20080922JJ.shtml?view=print.
7. Edward K. Rowell, 1001 Quotes, Illustrations, and Humorous Stories (Grand Rapids: Baker Publishing Group, 2008, p. 264).
8. James Emery White, Your 10 Most Life-Defining Moments (Colorado Springs: Waterbrook Press, 2001), pp. 159-160.