Baptism: God's Gift of a New Kind of Living - Ephesians 4:17-24
I’m not going to ask for a show of
hands on this one, mainly because it is not anything that many of us would want
to admit to in a forum like this, especially sitting so close to someone
else. However, even though I am not
going to ask for anyone to identify themselves to us, I would challenge that
many, if not most or all, of us here have done this. We have an important event, maybe it is a job
interview, maybe it is a date, maybe it is time to meet the future in-laws;
something along those lines. We jump in
the shower, of course we want to be clean, wash our hair, soap our body, and
rinse off. We get out of the shower,
brush our teeth, put on deodorant, and start getting dressed. Halfway through getting dressed, we
stop. Where is that shirt? It is the shirt that we had planned to wear
for this event all week long. We look in
the closet, it should be hanging up!
Well, maybe we folded it without thinking, we look in our drawers. It’s not there. Then something hits us, “Man…that’s right, I
was supposed to have done the laundry last night…it’s in the hamper.” Then, rather than find a new outfit to
wear—yeah, go ahead and cringe—we start picking through the dirty clothes until
we find the shirt. “Hey, it doesn’t look
too bad. Hmmm, wonder how it smells…Sniff…not too bad…we’ll just throw it in
the dryer with a couple of fabric sheets to freshen it up and knock the
wrinkles out.” Ten minutes later, we
take it out of the dryer, give it the once over, sniff it again, slide it on,
and head out the door.
We’ve journeyed through the waters
of Baptism for a month now, and today we conclude our journey.
We began by discovering God’s
prevenient grace…the understanding that God begins working on us before we are
ever aware of it. God’s grace is
constantly being poured into our lives and there is nothing we could ever do to
earn it. The waters of our Baptism
recognize and mark that special gift, freely given to us by God.
We then realized that as we
gather, each and every time we gather, we are in the midst of a huge family
reunion. The waters of Baptism are the
entry way into the family of God. As we
receive these waters we are joined to Christ, made brother or sister with
Christ, and brother and sister with all before us, all with us, and all who
will come after us, who have surrendered their lives to Christ through these
waters.
Another gift we unpacked that God
offers to us through Baptism, is the gift of forgiveness. With the waters of our baptism, we are washed
clean of sin. That washing is not because
of anything that we do, but because of what Christ has done. We are recipients of God’s justifying
grace…the fact that as we are joined to Christ in Baptism, Christ’s
righteousness is placed upon us, erasing our sin before God…so that God no
longer sees our sin, but sees Christ’s obedience.
Last week we examined how these
aspects of what God does in Baptism grants us a new birth, a new life…that when
we are joined to Christ, as Paul says, we are a new creation. That what is old, what our lives have been
about in the past, all of the ugliness of our sin, is gone, and we are new
creatures, we are born again, through water and the Spirit. We are washed clean and made beautiful and
our past no longer has a hold on us.
So where does that leave us? That leaves us to the question of putting on
those clothes out of our dirty clothes hamper.
Why would we want to put dirty clothes on our clean bodies? Paul says, “That is not the way you learned
Christ! For you have heard about him and
were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus.
You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self,
corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your
minds, and clothe yourselves with the new self, according to the likeness of
God in true righteousness and holiness.”
My brothers and sisters, once Christ
has given us a new life, once we have been born again, once we have been made
new creations, once we are clean, why we would ever desire to intentionally
dress in clothes we know are dirty? Why
would we ever want to delve back into the sin that He has freed us from and
continue the same behavior? Through the
waters of our Baptism, God not only gives us a new life, but calls us to begin
a new kind of living…living in his holiness.
God pours his grace into our lives once more…just like prevenient grace,
just like justifying grace…and gives us His Sanctifying grace to make our lives
holy like His and enable us to live lives that reflect His glory.
All too often we go rummaging
through the hamper trying to use any excuse we can to put on those dirty clothes.
We say, “I just can’t help
myself,” and we go right back to sinning.
We find ourselves calling up Betty Jo to tell her what we heard about
Suzie from her neighbor’s cousin’s hairdresser.
We find ourselves buying one more lottery ticket. We find ourselves smoking one more
cigarette. We find ourselves clicking on
the link that we know will take us to that flesh-filled website or sliding into
the bed with someone who is not our spouse.
We pull that shirt out of the hamper and slide our arms right into the
sleeves.
When we use this excuse, we deny
the power of God’s Holy Spirit to give us the strength to resist temptation and
live Holy lives. It is the power of
God’s Holy Spirit that, though our Baptism, gives us the strength to be able to
resist those temptations. Remember when
Christ was tempted? He did not go into
that temptation empty-handed or relying on his own power. Prior to entering the wilderness Jesus found
Himself by the Jordan River where John was Baptizing those who came. Jesus entered that river, received the
Baptism that John offered, and as Jesus came out of the waters, what
happened? In every description of Jesus’
baptism, the first thing that is reported is that the skies opened up and the
Spirit, God’s Spirit, the Holy Spirit, descended upon him. It is then, and only then, after receiving
the Spirit through baptism, that Jesus entered the wilderness and endured
temptation…and we read from Hebrews that Jesus was tempted in every way as we
are, and was without sin.[i] To say that we can’t help but put on those
dirty clothes again, is to deny that we have been joined to Christ, and to deny
that God’s Spirit will empower us to resist temptation.
Sometimes we say, “I was just made
me this way” and go right back to sinning.
We cuss with every other word we say.
We live afraid of our shadow. We
get angry and lash out at the drop of a hat.
Or we claim that some other sin is just part of our make-up or who we
are, how we are made, part of our very nature.
We pull those pants out of the hamper, and step right into them.
When we use this excuse, we are
accusing God of designing us to be sinners.
Yet at the very beginning of time, God said, “let us make humankind in
our image, according to our likeness….”[ii] From the start we were created to be sinless
and holy like God. Yet, with the gift of
our freewill we chose ourselves and chose to sin…and that is not of God. However, despite our sin, God gives us the
gift of grace, and as we read this morning, our new self has is “created according
to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”[iii] To say that we are just made to put on those
dirty clothes again, to say that it is part of our very being, is to suggest
that sin is part of the very nature and likeness of God or to say that God was
imperfect in how He created and recreated us.
Sometimes we say (and I am just
hitting the big three of our excuses), sometimes we say, “Everyone else is
doing it.” We choose to get drunk with
all the rest of the folks at the company party. We join with the rest of the folks in the
barber shop telling racist jokes or ridiculing folks that have a different skin
color or speak a different language. We
take the joint, bottle, or needle that is being passed around the circle to
grab hold of the same buzz that everyone is experiencing. We pull those dirty undergarments out of the
hamper and clothe ourselves in them.
When we use this excuse, we fail
to hear the word of God shared with us through Paul, who wrote, “Do not be
conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so
that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and
perfect.”[iv] And if Paul isn’t enough, we can turn to the
one on whom Christ promised to found the church, the Rock, Peter himself, who
tells us, “Like obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires that you
formally had in ignorance. Instead, as
he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is
written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”[v] To say that we are going to do it because
everyone else is doing it is to choose to conform to the world rather than to
be transformed by God…it is saying that our family, our friends, those around
us are who we would rather be like and are more important to us than our
Creator.
My friends, it is pretty gross,
don’t you think, to consider taking the shirt, the pants, the underwear out of
the dirty clothes hamper and putting them on after our shower or bath, isn’t
it? The only reason that we would ever
consider doing that is that we forgot to do the laundry and there is absolutely
nothing else to wear. That is not the
case with our lives. God did not forget
to wash us, He cleansed us all through the birth, life, death, and resurrection
of His Son…every one of us, no one has been forgotten. Just as Jesus knelt and used water to cleanse
the feet of his disciples, so to, does God use this water to cleanse each and
every one of us…and through these waters and the Holy Spirit, God offers us
clean clothes, holy clothes, to wrap about ourselves and enter a new kind of
living…living for Jesus, clothed with Him in all that we do.
Sometimes we need to remember that
God has done all of this for us, and that is why today before we share in the
gift of Holy Communion, we are going to conclude our series on Baptism, by
reaffirming our faith and rejection of sin, and remembering our baptism…and as
we do so, let us cherish this gift that God has given us…the gift of his grace,
the gift of a new family, the gift of forgiveness, the gift of a new life, and
the gift of a new kind of living…
In the Name of the Father and of
the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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