Crossway Youth
1 - Why get baptised
2 - Apart from God
3 - The gift of grace
4 - How we now live
1 - Why get baptised
Why should I get baptised?
Obedience to Jesus. In Matthew 3, Jesus himself was actually baptised in water. And his final instruction to his disciples was ‘go into the world and make disciples, baptising them into the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you’ (Matt 28). People around the world for 2000 years have been obedient to Jesus in getting baptised, and we join with them.
Identification with Jesus. Getting baptised is like putting on a label, or a bumper sticker on your car, or a line in your Instagram Bio that says, “I’m a follower of Jesus!” In baptism, we’re letting the world know that Jesus has saved us from our sin, paid the price, and transformed us into new people. Like what a wedding is to a marriage, a baptism is the symbolic moment where I die to my old self, and am born into the family of Jesus. Like a wedding, it is a moment in time that marks a change of status, and a relationship beginning. An event that you can look back, marking the start of a new thing in you.
You don’t have to be good enough to get baptised. If you know Jesus as your Lord and Saviour, then you’re ready to get baptised. There is no checklist, no number of Bible verses memorised, no amount of times you pray per week. If you love Jesus and receive his gift of grace for your sin, then you’re ready to say YES to baptism!
2 - Apart from God
Apart from God
In the beginning of the world, every part of God’s creation lived together in perfect harmony. Then, in Genesis 3, we see that sin entered the world. Sin separates us from our holy God, so when sin entered the world, it created a separation between God and humanity.
Sin is the things we choose to do that we know we shouldn’t do, and the things we don’t do that we should do. Sin distances us from God.
There are no big sins or little sins, just sin. All sin separates us from God.
Sin is not just bad decisions that we make personally, but sin surrounds us communally. When we look at the world, we see sin internally inside of us, but we also see sin around the world and corporately. Sin in the way the world tells us to be. Sin in the way our phones and our screens tell us to behave, think and feel.
3 - The gift of grace
The gift of grace
We’re coming from sin, and going to restoration. So something has to bridge that gap.
Dwell on this: we could never bridge the gap ourselves, no matter what we do.
Jesus walked to his death, so that he could clear your name and mine. We can never pay the price again, because Jesus already has.
We did not earn God’s grace, it was freely given to us.
4 - How we now live
How we now live
The Bible says when we say “YES” to Jesus, and receive his free gift of salvation, we are totally new people!
Look what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5:17:
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here.
Baptism is symbolic in this way. As we go down into the water, we are joining with Jesus in His death. However, as we come up out of the water, we are joining with Jesus in His resurrection. We are totally washed clean of our sin, and we can follow Jesus for the rest of our lives as changed forever.
This is where baptism fits into the equation. Baptism is the public declaration of what has already happened in our hearts.
Once we have been baptised, our thinking needs to catch up to our new status. We are to live as people who have died to sin and risen with Christ to new life. Paul talks about this exact thing in the Bible – should we just keep on sinning so God can keep forgiving us? No! He says in Romans 6:
How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptised into Christ Jesus were baptised 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.