Hello, and welcome back to Restored. I'm Steve Blayer. This is week three, and I'm really glad that you're staying together with this. I hope that you've been growing in Christ, that you've been experiencing His love and His grace, and that every day is just getting better and better for you. I know you're probably in the middle of some conflict. It's just that way. Call them growing pains. But what I want to talk to you about today is a great way to be completely severed from all those things you left behind when you came to Christ, and it's called water baptism.
There's a reason why Christians do baptism, and the different traditions of the church have done it different ways, but it's remained a central part of the Christian faith for good reason. Jesus only told us to do two things, practical things, to express our faith. One is communion or the breaking of bread, and we'll talk about that at some point in the future. And the other is water baptism, and water baptism by some is viewed almost like a rite of passage. It's a thing you do, and now you're a part of the church. What I want to share with you today is that there's power in water baptism. It's actually an avenue by which Jesus opened a door for us to experience something that really is life-changing.
I myself had known Jesus for about two years before my pastor introduced me to water baptism, and I can testify that at the moment that I went into that tank and I was baptized in water by faith. I was broken free of a couple of addictions. I was set free from the shame of some things I'd done in my past. Something spiritual happened inside of me, and I have no real explanation for it except to say that if Jesus tells us to do something, there's a reason for it. So here's what Jesus said, some of his last words to his apostles before he ascended into heaven, he rose from the dead, spent some time with them, and he said, let's get priorities straight. He said this in Matthew 28, and this is verses 18, 19, and 20.
If you want to turn in your Bible, I think that would be great to do. Feel free to hit pause if you need to. Find it. Remember, if you're new to using the Bible, use the table of contents. Don't be afraid of that and find it. But it's better for you to open up a Bible and actually read and get familiar with it. So Matthew is the first gospel, and here's the very last words of that gospel. Jesus came and spoke to them, and he said, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth.
So this is the resurrected Jesus now. He has all power and all authority, having conquered the grave, sitting at the right hand of his Father in heaven. And he said, therefore, because I have all authority, here's how I'm going to execute my authority in the earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations. Baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I commanded you to do. And lo, I'm with you always, even until the end of the age. So did you catch that?
Teach them everything that I commanded you to do. So whatever Jesus told the apostles to do, we should be doing it too. But there's something that comes first, and it's water baptism. Baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. And the reason for that is this ritual is not a command in the sense of you've got to do this if you want in. It's an invitation. Baptism is an invitation to experience in the Spirit what Jesus experienced in the natural. We're going to turn to another, one more chapter of Scripture in a moment, Romans 6, if you want to join me there.
But what baptism represents is we are physically joining Jesus in a watery grave. Now remember last week we looked at the Scripture, I am crucified in Christ, and it's no longer I that lives, but Christ who lives in me. This is our way of being crucified in Christ. Thank God we don't have to actually go on a real cross. Thank God we don't have to go into a real grave to experience new life the way that Jesus did, but baptism takes us through the entire journey that Jesus took, from the cross to the grave to the empty tomb, and then the new life on the other side of that, and that's what baptism is all about.
So every single new believer, and as you read the book of Acts, and I do encourage you, that's one book if you're looking for something to read, the Gospels as I told you first lesson, and the book of Acts. The book of Acts is the record of the first church in Jerusalem. What did they do? How did they go about life? They began to do what Jesus taught them to do, and this is what it looked like, and it's a great, great book to read, but one thing you'll see as you read through that book is that whenever the Gospel was preached, like Peter preached to the very first crowd of new believers in Jerusalem, and they said, what do we have to do to be saved?
And he said, repent and be baptized, each one of you, for the remission of your sins. So all throughout the book of Acts, all throughout the New Testament, you see that when people are saved, the first thing they do is they're water baptized. Amazingly, there's no record of anybody praying a particular prayer, there's no record of going through any rituals. You know, we believe here, and what I'm teaching in this course is that as soon as you're saved, your first thing ought to be get baptized. And I'll explain why when we read the next section of Scripture here, there's no reason to go through any hoops, jump through any hoops is what I'm trying to say, go through any other motions. The first thing to do is bury who we used to be in a watery grave.
I'm happy to say that I buried the old Steve in a watery grave in 1991 in a very cold baptism tank in East Boston by Phil Cappuccio. I have a picture of it, and it's the most life-changing moment I've experienced in Christ, even until this day. And what baptism is, you know, why, what kind of weird thing is this? You go into a church in a baptism service, and we're going to have one here at Hillside, actually, this week, and go into a church service, and there are these people in bathing suits in church, and they're jumping into a tank and going all the way under with some prayers and things like that. It's kind of a weird ritual if you just look at it and not understanding what it's really all about.
So here's what baptism means. It's a powerful way of putting our beliefs into practice. Believing is one thing. We could say, Jesus, why can't we just say, I believe, and I'm ready to follow? For the rest of my life, why do I have to go into a baptism tank? And maybe he'll have a better answer for that when we get to ask him face-to-face. But in the meanwhile, here's the meaning of it. It's first and foremost a way to put our faith into actual action, which is going to become a theme.
Belief alone is not what gives us new life. The demons of hell believe that Jesus is the Christ. In fact, when Jesus walked the earth, the first ones to recognize Jesus were demons. In many of the places he went, demons in people would cry out, this is the Son of God. I know who this is. Before the people even recognized him as the Son of God. So demons believe. The problem is that what they do with that belief. And baptism is one of our first steps to say, I believe, and therefore, I'm going to do whatever Jesus says to do.
Because he knows how to live life better than I do, apparently. And so baptism is that. So Romans 6. Let's look at this. This is going to be our main scripture for today. I'll be in this for about another 10 or 15 minutes. And then we have some things for you to do during the week. He opens up chapter 6 and says, what should we say then? Are we to continue in sin so that grace might increase? May it never be. How shall we who died to sin still live in it?
And here's what Paul's saying. You'll be wrestling for the rest of your life with certain temptations and things, especially things that we've given ourselves to, or maybe you gave yourself to. It's like a changing of appetites. It takes a while to lose a taste for what we once enjoyed, to have new appetites that are more spiritual and that are better for us. And so during that fight, as we learn about the grace of God, we're going to discover and learn how the grace of God is much more powerful than that inclination in us to sin. But only if we believe that we actually were crucified with Christ, if we actually cut that old person off. Because otherwise, you may have heard this expression, a Christian is just a sinner saved by grace.
And if we believe for the rest of our lives and say, oh, I'm just a sinner saved by grace, then what we've done is empowered sin inside of us to actually determine what we do and how we live our lives. And the truth couldn't be any further away from that reality. The truth is we were sinners. We were saved by his grace. And now we are saints of God. We died to sin, Paul said. How can I who died to sin still live in it? So what I do and what I encourage all of my friends to do in Jesus is when I'm tempted to sin, instead of saying, hey, don't sin because it's against the law of God, it's against the word of God.
Instead say, Steve, don't sin because this is not who you are anymore. This is not an accurate reflection of the new creation that you are in Christ. And so you can't go on and continue in sin because now you're a new creation. And so that's much more empowering and it's much more of a reality of who we are. And here's where baptism then gets introduced. Or do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus have been baptized into his death? So what baptism is, when we do this water baptism thing, we are now being soaked.
And the word baptism is a word that refers, they used to use the term to say, I'm baptizing this cloth. I'm taking this white cloth. You know, if you've ever done tie dyeing, I'm making it a new thing now. And how do I do that? I'm soaking it in something. So being baptized is like being soaked all the way in. And that, if you're dyeing a cloth and you want it to stay that color, you got to make sure that that dye gets into all the threads of that thing. It's soaked all the way in.
So what is baptism? When we go in that water, we're experiencing physically what's happening spiritually. We're being soaked all the way in with something. What is that something? Jesus Christ himself. As we learned already, Christ is in us and we are in Christ. Just like the water gets into that cloth because the cloth is in the water. That's what baptism is. Baptism is how we have been baptized into his death. So the first thing that we're identifying with is, as we shared last week, we are with Jesus Christ on his cross.
I'm being baptized into his death. Okay. He goes next. He says, verse four, therefore, we have been buried with him through baptism and to death. And it kind of looks like, you know, you're going into a grave. You go down under the water and you're being, it's like you're being put into a grave so that, but you don't, you don't have to stay there. And this is a statement of purpose that I'll just kind of add into here. The reason why we come back up out of the water is because we're baptized and we're born again because we have a purpose for our life now.
And we're about to actually begin to explore that purpose because now we've added God into the mix, the one who made us with a purpose in mind. And so that's what we've now come into. Otherwise, we may as well, when we baptize people, just hold them under and then you get to die and go to heaven and then it's all over, right? But we've been baptized so that as Christ was raised from the dead to the glory of the father, so we too might walk in newness of life. So we go into the grave, but guess what? We don't stay in that place. We come up out of that grave, just like Jesus did.
There's a scripture in Hebrews that says that for the joy set before him, Jesus endured the cross, thinking nothing of the shame of that cross. There was a joy on the other side of that cross. Jesus had the worst day a human being has ever lived in all of human history on that day that he was crucified because he wasn't just dying on a cross like a martyr. He was carrying the weight of all of the sins of the world, all of the sorrows of the world, all of the wars and the famines and the disease and everything that makes life miserable. He embodied that on the cross, so he carried that.
Why was he willing to go through all of that? Because he could see through to the other side of what would happen and on the other side of that grave was a resurrection. And here's a very simple reality. You can't be raised from the dead unless you die first. We have to crucify and actually put to death everything about who we used to be. That's what we looked at last week. But baptism is putting that into practice and by faith saying, I am severed from everything I used to be. The good, the bad and the ugly herefore dies.
And now only what will remain is what belongs to Christ. Raised from the dead, Jesus was a whole different person. In fact, when you read the stories after his resurrection, his closest friends didn't even recognize him at first. He had to reveal to them, hey, I'm Jesus. Jesus, that's how radically different he was. And I hope that your testimony is that your old friends will look at you and say, what happened to you? There's something so different about you right now. What is it? And you're going to be able to testify, oh, I have a one word answer, Jesus.
That's what happened to me. And that's what, so we walk in newness of life. Verse 5, for if we have become united with him in the likeness of his death, then certainly we'll be also in the likeness of his resurrection. So if you go into that water by faith, crucifying your old self, you can be assured that as surely as Jesus came out of that grave, so are you. Knowing this, that our old self was crucified with him. There it is. This is where we identify with the crucifixion of Jesus.
And by faith now, God, who is outside space and time, says, you go in that water by faith, understanding what you're doing, and I will consider you to be in Christ, crucified with him 2,000 years ago, in order that the body of sin might be done away with, so that we would no longer be slaves to sin, for he who has died is freed from sin. And this is where by faith, we have a baptism preparation booklet that will be in your notes that you can look at. And we invite people before they go in the water, if there's any preparation for baptism except to believe in Jesus, it's to go in by faith, believing that you're going to bury certain things in that water.
What did you use to be a slave to? Every addict can testify that having this compulsion to do something that's harmful, the power of addiction is strong. It's like slavery. It's like even though I know that this is harmful to me, even though I don't want to do this thing, and I don't do the things that I want to do because I'm stuck with this thing. That's a form of slavery. It's spiritual slavery. But if you die, you're no longer a slave to that thing. And that's why baptism is so important, and understanding what it means is so important, that by faith we go in saying, I'm putting this to death.
The chains will be broken off because that man's dead. So from here on out, when the devil comes, and I mean when the devil comes and says, yeah, you say you're a Christian, but you still do this. You say you're a Christian, but you're still kind of stuck in that, and you still have this addiction, or that problem in your life. You can look the devil right in the face, and have all the authority in heaven and earth to say, that man's dead. I don't know what you're talking about. I have things in my past before Christ, that I was ashamed of. And when this revelation came to me, and there was one particular thing I did, I participated in an abortion actually.
That was my greatest shame of my life in sin. And I was really under this season, where although I was in Christ, and enjoying this freedom, I really felt the guilt of that thing, and it finally really was pounding in on me, until this came real. And the next time those thoughts began to flood to my mind, I said, you know what, devil, I don't know who you're talking about right now, because this man that's living right now, is living by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. You're talking about a dead man, and that man doesn't exist anymore. That's the power of baptism, and I pray you get to experience it soon. Verse 8, For if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him.
So, the first half of that, I just want to say this, that on the other side of this, many believers, unfortunately, live half-crucified. And what I mean by that is, we have just enough faith to believe, Jesus paid the price for my sins. We have just enough faith to believe, when I sin, He forgives me, if I go to Him. But I want to encourage you, all the way into the full faith, of what baptism means, which is that, at this point, and from this point on, and forevermore, I am a saint. My identity is new, and I don't identify myself, as being a sinner. You'll see, if you read through the book of Romans, Paul describes this tension, of the sinful, carnal desires, and the newfound life in the Spirit, which desires to be free from that, which even despises those temptations.
And he says, it's not me, but it's sin that dwells in me. That's what's still tempting. It's like, I still have a disease of sin in me, but that's not who I am any longer. And that's the way to win in spiritual warfare. More about that in a few weeks. But for now, when it says, we believe that we shall also live with Him, that on the other side of this, receive the power to live a new life. Grace. You'll hear this word so much, because our whole life now is about grace.
What is grace? Simply put, grace is divine power to live the new life, the way Jesus called us to. He gives us the power on the other side of the grave. You know what Jesus could do after He rose from the dead? His friends were hanging out in the upper room, hiding, and they weren't sure what to do. They weren't sure about Jesus being raised from the dead, or whatever was going on. They heard rumors. A couple of them had seen things, but they didn't know what was going on. All of a sudden, there He is.
And Jesus is there in the middle of the room. He didn't knock on the door. It's like He just appeared out of nowhere. And from there, He goes and He's, you know, across country in Galilee. And His body wasn't subject to the laws of nature. That's how, the laws of physics. That's how different Jesus was. How different you and I are on the other side of being buried and raised from the dead in Christ. It's that drastic, only it's a spiritual thing. So, I'll finish this passage then. Knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again, death no longer is master over Him.
Just like sin is no longer master over us. We now have our actual free will restored to us in Christ. Again, more on that in the weeks ahead, but ponder that for a minute. We're no longer slaves to sin. We're no longer stuck with the things that used to keep us bound. But now we have our free will again. We can choose freedom or we can choose bondage. The death He died, He died to sin once for all. But the life that He lives, He lives to God and so also it is with you and so also it is with me.
We live our life toward God now. God's not just about, hey, stay away from that stuff. God's all about, hey, get into this stuff right here. Live the new life. And I heard a comedian one time describing his journey of not liking the Bible into loving the Bible. And he said when he was a kid, he was a Southern guy, so I have to say it like he did. So when I was little and I went to church, I just hate reading the Bible because I thought the Bible was all about these do's and don'ts.
And then I started reading it when I got born again and I found out that if I do the do's, I ain't got time to do the don'ts. And if I could, I wouldn't, so I can't and so I don't. And it's cool. I can't say it any better than that. If we're doing the new life, we find that we just don't have time for the things that used to keep us bound. So we don't just die to things. We live toward God now. And this new life and adventure of faith is what keeps us away from some of those traps that we used to live in.
Even so, verse 11, consider yourself dead to sin, but alive to God in Jesus Christ. This is the faith of water baptism. I am dead to sin. Even though I still have compulsions, I still have appetites, I may still stumble into it, but now I'm free of that thing and I don't have to remain stuck in those things. So three things that happen in water baptism just to close out today. Number one, our old self is buried with Christ. We are considered in Christ on His cross. That's the power of water baptism.
Second, we are resurrected together with Him into a new life. Now we're living toward God. We have better things to do with our life now than what we used to do that got us into a world of hurt. Three, and this is back to what we opened up with the Great Commission, Jesus said, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Third thing that happens in water baptism, you're born into a new family. You came into the world, remember John 3 from our first lesson? You came into the world with a lot of water.
If you have ever seen a child born, it's amazing how much water there is in that amniotic sack. I've seen birth six times. I'm always amazed at how much water fit in there. And so we came into the world that way. We come into our new family the same way. We come out of that water as it were, like we're being born again, and this time we have a spiritual family. We have a Father who's in heaven who calls you son, who calls you daughter. You now bear His name. And He's never ashamed of you.
And at this point in your life, if you're up to this lesson and you're ready to be water baptized, you cannot unson yourself or undaughter yourself as my friend once said. In other words, you're stuck now. You are in the family of God forever. And the Father will never leave you and never forsake you. You are a part of something brand new. You have brothers and sisters who, by the way, all went through the same process. Nobody came into this kingdom by any shortcut. Nobody got into this new life by their own works.
We all came in the same way as you did, by faith, by faith in the Son of God, by faith in the crucifixion of Jesus, paying what we could never have paid. We all got in the same way. You know what that means? There's no hierarchy in the faith. Please don't look around the church and look at some of the older saints or the ones who've been walking with the Lord that seem to have it all together and let the devil tell you that somehow you're a second-class citizen. You go and talk to them and hear their story and you're going to hear your story. Only they lived it three decades ago maybe but they came in the same way as you.
Don't let that make you feel like a second-class citizen. I say, again, welcome to the family. I'm glad to have you for a brother. I'm glad to have you for a sister. And so is the real family of God. One last scripture to close with. 1 Corinthians 12. For even as the body is one and has many members and all the members of the body though there are many are one body so also is Christ. For by one spirit we were all baptized into one body whether Jews or Greeks slaves or free people and we all drink from the same spirit.
Welcome to the family who have been all baptized in one body. God bless you. I'm going to exhort you now to consider what you just heard and if you've never been water baptized please consider it. Please consider doing it as an immediate act of faith. Or maybe you were water baptized and you did not know what you're doing so you didn't apprehend all of what's in the water. There's a movement in the church history called Anabaptist which means again baptized and it was for baptizing people who didn't know what they were doing. Either they were infants or they were baptized not by faith.
If you'd like to be baptized again why not do it this week? And I mean this week. If you're part of Hillside you just let us know hey I'd like to be water baptized because I want to grab hold of all of what you were just talking about and we will fill that water tank for you and you can be baptized this coming Sunday. God bless you. Enjoy the newness of life and I pray that you'll experience all the benefits of this glorious resurrected life that we've been called into.