Sinking In

1. Read Galatians 3:21-29. Why does Paul say that all of these other identity markers are not primary anymore?
2. Do you often hesitate in approaching God because you know you can't come to him on your own righteousness? How can you remember your primary identity as his child when your feelings don't match up with what you know to be true?
3. Spend some time discussing your own baptism and faith journey. What was your life like before Christ? How did you come to saving faith in him? What has changed since?
4. Has anyone in your group not taken the step to be baptized yet? If so, what's keeping you from that step of obedience?

Well, good morning. Wow, we have a packed house. Listen real fast while you're seated there, last week we had Vernon Brewer in town. He talked to us about the persecuted church, told us that this Sunday, today, right now, globally, is the day of prayer for the persecuted church. Around the world, people are being persecuted for gathering together like this, for being baptized, for claiming Christ.

They're giving their lives for it on this very day where you and I can sit back and enjoy. It could potentially cost them their life to do it. So would you bow your heads real fast? Let me pray for them. Father, we think about people around the world right now who follow you at great cost to themselves.

The amount of love that they have for you and commitment to you for what you have done in their lives overwhelms us. They have no idea the impact that they have on our lives. Strengthen them and give them courage now to endure what they have to endure to continue to love you no matter what. Whatever shield of protection is appropriate, grant it to them, God, and whatever it is you're going to do with their persecution, I pray that it glorifies you in a way that nothing else can.

In Jesus name, Amen. Okay, so just sort of a brief package. I want to talk to you a little bit about baptism. We have 47 people being baptized today in both services. Great stories.

Oh, my goodness. Some of them are just so remarkable and what God has done in their lives. And it's really a testimony to what God's been doing amongst us, even though we don't always get to see that today on days like this, you get a little glimpse, glimpse into somebody's life and how God has changed it. And so I want to just answer two questions for you real fast. I say real fast, as fast as I am capable of doing it.

I want to give you. I want to answer two questions. What's going on? What does this mean? And then I want to say, how are we supposed to celebrate it?

I think those are two questions we ought to ask. So let's go first to Galatians, chapter three. I want to read three verses to you, and then we're going to look at them. It says this. For in Christ Jesus, you are all sons of God through faith.

For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. And there is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free. There is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise. So much Amazing stuff here.

Okay. Oh, we're going to hit a couple of things. So first, what's going on? I want to give you three things that are happening in this text to tell us what's going on. You get a new identity when you come to Christ.

You get a new life and you get a new community, all right here in these three verses. So a new identity. You can see in verse 26, you become a son of God. You become a child of God. Now, that means you become part of the family.

When you put your faith in Jesus Christ. That means you're intimately related to God. You're loved, you're accepted, heir to all that belongs to him. That's what it means to be a son or a child. You're heir to everything, means you have a glorious future awaiting you.

You say, well, what was I before I was a son? Well, Paul describes it. We're not going to look at it today, but in Galatians, he describes, you were a slave to sin. You were a slave to. You were in bondage.

You were trapped. Paul says, guilty, condemned and cursed under the law. You couldn't survive under the law. It was too high, too moral, too holy for you to achieve it. And so you were bound it and trapped by it.

But to be a son means you're forgiven, you're free, you're given the spirit, new power, new options for living. That's what you're given. Best way, maybe to illustrate it is the story of the prodigal son. Prodigal son tells his father, I want my inheritance, and he runs. He wants to go live it up.

He spends that inheritance, ends up in a pigsty, and he reflects. You know, I thought I was going to be free. I actually was bound. Now I'd like to go home. I wonder if my father will take me back.

Maybe he'll make me one of his servants. I might not be able to be a son again. And you remember when he goes home, that father comes running out to him, brings him in. And I'm sure the son was thinking, I don't know if my dad has enough money to take me back in. I took my portion.

And even if he does have enough money, I don't know if he'll be generous enough. Well, he was both. He had enough to make up for everything you squandered.

And he was generous and loving to start you over again and make you a son, not a servant. That's the story you say, how does that happen? Well, look, you become. You come into Christ in the verse in verse 26, you come into Christ, you're connected to him, incorporated him. Can you put that verse up, Brady?

Again, you become incorporated into in Christ. This is how this happens. So you become a son when you're in Christ, you're incorporated into him. Right before I left this past week, last week actually it was. Somebody had left a dessert in my office and I don't really eat desserts and everybody in my life mostly knows that.

So for it to be there, I was like, what is that? So I found out it was from one of my daughter in laws and I texted her, I said, well, what's in that? Because she knows I'm not likely to eat that. She said, it's a keto, you can eat it.

So I said, well, what's in it? Keto Bolito, I want to know what is, what's in it. So she texts me two cups of almond flour, sea salt, baking, you know, arrowroot powder. I didn't know what that was. It could kill me.

Cinnamon, coconut oil, honey, raw honey, eggs, apples, vanilla, nutmeg, freshly grated. You put it in the oven. And this is what she said. And this is right after I had written this talk because I had to write this last week because I've been gone all week. And so she says, combine all the ingredients in a bowl and stir well.

And she uses the word incorporate to incorporate. I was like, ah, that's what it means to be incorporated into Christ. It all gets mixed in there and all the individual pieces come together into one. You can't see them anymore, but they've all become one thing. That's what it means to be in Christ.

You literally join him. Hard to explain, but it's a real spiritual experience that happens that you are incorporated into him and you sort of almost lose identity a little bit and you just become a part of something else, something greater and better than you were by yourself. That's what it means to be in Christ. You say, how do you get in there? He says, faith through faith.

Now let me tell you what that is because you really need to know what that is if you want this. You got to trust and receive in what Jesus Christ did. You come to rely on what he has done for you to make this possible, to become in the family of God. So here's two quick verses that Galatians use. It's only a six chapter book.

Here's how Paul explains this in verse 1:3 to 5. Grace to you and peace from God our Father and Lord Jesus Christ. Here it is who gave himself for our sins to deliver us from the present evil age. That's how it happens. He gave himself, you by faith.

You trust in that. Look at this next verse. This is Galatians 2:16. He says, you know that a person's not justified by works. It was nothing you did, no works on your part.

It was through faith in Christ. So we also have believed in Christ in order to be justified by faith in Christ, not by works of the law. Because works don't justify nothing you do, nothing you've ever done. And so when you come to Christ and you say, I want to be in the family, I trust in what Jesus did for me. I rely on.

I'm really sorry for all the bad things I've done. And I do not rely on all the good things I've done. I don't rely on them. That's what it means. So when you have faith in Christ, you give up anything that convinces you that you're a good person, Anything that convinces you you're a good person.

And you count only on what Jesus has done for you. Everybody that comes on this stage has verbalized that confession. Nothing I've done. So you get a new identity. You're a son, and it comes through faith.

Here's the new life. Now look what Paul says Next in verse 27, verse 27, he says, for as many as of you as were baptized into Christ. Now he's going to put these two parallel. And I want to put this next slide up because it's the. It's a parallel faith in Christ now baptized into Christ.

So they are sort of function together. All right, now this is really important to see. So whatever happened in the first thing when I became a child of God, baptism is a way to sort of picture what happened up there. Do you see that? That's what the baptism is.

So water graphically depicts what salvation is, what it means to be saved, to be. To come into the family of God. Now, in the early church, this was the next step. So once you put your faith in Christ, the very next step was to be baptized.

There were no unbaptized Christians in the early church. Today, we separate these a little bit more to make sure that nobody thinks baptism saves them, but the early church connected them enough to where. All I could say is, have you been baptized? And what I meant was, have you put your faith in Jesus Christ and gotten in the water? The water doesn't save you.

But it was so closely connected to the picture. And I want to explain to you. Why? Why this moment is so important for anyone who's become a son of God. It dramatizes salvation.

You know, I say you've incorporated into it like a dessert, and you're like, come on, how do I bring that into my life? Well, baptism helps bring that to life, that picture to life, because it shows the extent of salvation for you. Jesus is death, burial, and resurrection. You go down in the water, you die to one life. You come up, you live a new life.

That's the picture. That's what's happened to you on the inside. And baptism pictures that entire process. You have a new identity and a new existence. You're given a whole new life, not just in your heart.

This is important. This is not just something that happens in your heart. It happens to all of you. You get soaked inside and out. You get changed inside and out.

You're all wet in Christ. And so they're together in one sense. If you take them apart, this is what I mean. If you took the baptism piece out, Paul didn't bring that up, then you might spend your life going, well, I got to try to figure out what it really means to have put my faith in Christ. What does that really mean?

Going down in that water and coming up out of it. You go, oh, that really helps me understand exactly what has happened to me. I've died to one life, and now I'm alive to another one. And then he says the next verse, and you put on. Or that same verse, but he says, you put on Jesus Christ.

Galatians 3, still 20, 27. You put on Jesus Christ. That's like clothing for as many of you who are baptized into Christ have put on Christ. What does that mean? Well, they used to put robes on them when they got out of the water.

And so there was this image of, okay, we're going to put new clothes on you, and you're going to live a new life. Not even your clothes are the same. It was sort of a picture. It's a. It's an ethical image.

I used to live like this. Now I put these clothes on, and now I walk and do life ethically. This way, not the same. I don't do the wrongdoing that I used to do. I'm trying to live right now.

So I got new clothes. That's the picture. So it's put on, put off language. I put off an old life. I was buried, I died, and I came to life.

And another picture is, I put off one life and I put on a new one. This is New clothes. So you're all. So you're drenched and you're dressed. When you come to Christ, you're drenched and you're.

And you're dressed and you go on living for Christ. You don't do anything the same. Here's another verse that Galatians 2:20 tries to explain that. I don't think there's a better way to describe it. I've been crucified with Christ.

I don't. It's no longer I who even live. He has completely taken over my life and the life I now live in the flesh with these new clothes on. Essentially, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. That's my new life.

Perhaps a good way to think about baptism is our idiom of let that sink in. Have you ever said that? Well, let that sink in, or you have said it hasn't sunk in yet. Have you ever said that? Okay.

This usually happens because something pretty remarkable has occurred in your life. Very significant, very consequential, with radical ramifications. And we've all experienced this. This new reality, but we all know what it's like when something doesn't or actually can't truly sink in immediately. This happens to people who come to Christ at the front end.

They don't even know all that's happened to them. It hasn't even sunk in yet. Baptism is a way to sink in to this reality. Like somebody tells you you've been given a short time to live, that will hit you hard. It won't sink in immediately or you're told you're going to be a parent.

That doesn't sink in. Okay. I was just told I'm going to be a grandparent again. I'm going to have seven. That's right.

I was told that while I was away this week. And that won't sink in until I'm holding baby number seven. That's when it'll really sink in. That's kind of how baptism is. It'll sink in.

My dad. Where I've been all week is I drew my dad sold his house. I had to move him here to Texas. He's 80 years old. We had to sell his house.

Drove him here this week, all his stuff, and, you know, towed his car behind the truck, moved him here, moved him into an apartment that's us in Louisiana. I took one photo from my wife. She'd have videoed the whole thing if she was with me.

For three years, I tried to talk my dad into this reality. He didn't want to do it. And we fought about it. And I know how hard it's been every step of the way. And when he finally gave in and we decided to put the house up, then we.

Then we sold it. And I'll tell you, it started to sink in when that U Haul pulled up to his house and we started loading it. It started. You can imagine how it started to sink in. Then we drove here.

That whole drive took us, you know, two and a half days because we did it slow. And then yesterday, moved him into that apartment. And you put the key in and you walk into the place you're going to be now. You know, it's been a journey.

It takes a little while for it to sink in. But then all of a sudden, once you absorb it and once you. You have to begin to adjust to a new life. That's what baptism is. You put on these new clothes and you have to get used to these new clothes.

And you. We. We actually went to the store yesterday and bought him some clothes because we didn't have access to everything he had. And now he's going to. In those new clothes, he's going to start living a new life.

He's going to be going different places than he's ever gone. He's going to meet new people. His whole life is going to change, everything about it. That's what it's like to come up out of those baptism waters. You get new clothes and you meet.

Your whole life changes. You say, well, where do you go? You know, you've been drenched and you've been dressed. Where you going in the new clothes? Where you going?

Look at verse 28. He says, you're all one in Christ Jesus. There's neither Jew nor Greek. There's neither slave nor free. There's neither male nor female.

For you are all one in Christ Jesus. Now, I want to tell you what that means because you're going to love this. You look around and you realize, you know, I don't know, whatever it is that happened to me, it didn't just happen to me. I'm with a whole new group of people, a whole bunch of different kinds of people. I have joined.

I didn't just come, become one in Christ. Now I'm one with everyone who is in Christ. Do you see that immediately? You're. It's never just about you and what happened.

You just you and God. No, you've just joined a whole new group of people. This is important because we've been talking about community. This is Paul's way in Galatians of describing it, you're joined to others. And so now you have to live out that new faith amongst other people who are not like you.

Very important for you to really understand what Jesus did for you. And you can't understand it unless you get around a bunch of other people who are not like you. This is important.

Whatever this new life is, whatever these new clothes represent, it wasn't just for me. God didn't just transform me. He created a whole new group of people that I get to join. That's the church, by the way. That's what the church is.

Just look around the room. All different, different stories. You're going to hear it. We all come together and we're all dressed the same in Christ. And it's so radical that it supersedes ethnicity socially.

Whatever your cultural situation is in life. Free, rich, poor, gender, these are all things that are fixed for the most part. Even those things are superseded. You're not just male or female anymore. You're not just in some social class anymore.

You're not just some ethnicity anymore. You're in Christ first. And all those are second. All those are secondary. That's how radical this is.

See? And so listen, I want to say these two final things.

Unless you get into that community, you can't know how Christ gives you the ability to love and serve and care for people who are different than you. Unless you're in a community of people who are very different from you, you cannot know the wonder of loving and serving and how great the impact of Christ's life on you. Where you don't see gender anymore, and you don't worry about what people have or don't have, and you don't worry about where they're from or what they've experienced. You got to be in community to experience that. That's part of the new life.

It's a new community. And then finally, you will never truly grasp if you're not in a community of people like this, you'll never truly grasp that it was nothing special about you that got you in.

You have to be with a bunch of people who are different than you. You walk in there and you go, I thought I was special. Looks like they let anybody in here. You got to know what the. I don't care if you know it.

You've got to live that. You got to walk into a room and go, I guess I wasn't that. I feel. I guess they let anybody in here. Nothing unique about me.

Nothing about where I Was from nothing about my gender. There was. I was a woman who was blank, or I was a man who was. Or I came from. Or this is.

You know, you can never say, well, I was a little better. That's why I came to Christ. I was a little classier. I was a little more attractive than most people. You might say that.

Or you might say, I was a little more fortunate. Oh, you know what? I was smarter than all my friends.

I was more sincere. And you know what? I was just more open than everybody. And you realize you get into a room like this and you realize, uh, it was God's grace that saved you. It was nothing about your openness or your sincerity or where you were from or who you knew or what your family situation was.

Nothing had nothing to do with it. And it's not until you're in a room like this with a bunch of other people who are different than you, then you realize how great God's grace is. You'll never experience that all on your own by yourself at home. You got to be in a room with a bunch of other people to know I'm not special at all. God's grace.

I'm a miracle. All right, final thing, really fast. How do you celebrate that? Here's what I would say to you as a group, as a church. First thing you do is you make room in your heart and in this community for more people and different people.

You fight any instinct, any part of you that says, well, if we keep growing, my kids aren't going to be able to be in the room anymore. If we keep growing, I won't have my parking spot. If we keep growing, my seat will get taken by somebody. That's the part that'll kill you. You say, how do you celebrate 47 people, some of them just now becoming part of the church?

You make room everywhere. Hey, you can have my seat. Hey, you can have my coffee. You can have my place in line. You can be anywhere you want.

Cause my heart's been opened to let you in. And you fight any energy in you to go against that truth. You hear me, Hillside? That's how you celebrate baptism. You make room in your heart, Maybe in your small group.

Well, small group's closed. Is it? Open it up.

Open it up. You see? You see what I'm saying? It's very easy to get. You know, you're not celebrating baptism if you're not making room.

Make room, finally. And then you just marvel at God. I mean, you know, I drove here with my dad, and we were My dad is the one who led me to Christ when I was 14 years old and we got to share stories. He's told me stories this week I had never heard. I got to tell him some stories I've never heard, or he's never heard.

I've heard them. I'm sorry, did I sound a little crazy there? Yeah, well, that trip will do it to you. You take an 80 year old man from Miami to Texas. Yeah, you go ahead.

And we got to celebrate what Christ has done in our lives and that you watch these people on the stage, you just think about the grace God's put in your life. And I'll tell you what, if your heart's not open right now, that grace will pry it apart.