Acts 8:26-40 | Baptism

Baptism Sunday

Good morning church, today is a special day, yes because we are in the house of the Lord, yes because we are in the company of each other and the Holy Spirit, but also because it is baptism Sunday.

Today we are celebrating new life in Christ Jesus. How many of y’all know there is new life in Jesus Christ? Amen.

We are going to be baptizing at each service this morning, Charlotte Cleaves, Three Baptisms, Cole Owens. Praise God.

I am excited because not only are we celebrating Baptism this morning, I get to preach on Baptism and our text fro this morning is a story that gets more and more beautiful the more I study it.

So let’s go ahead and dive right in.

Would you stand in Honor of God’s word and open up your Bibles to Acts 8

Acts 8:26–39 CSB

An angel of the Lord spoke to Philip: “Get up and go south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is the desert road.) So he got up and went. There was an Ethiopian man, a eunuch and high official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to worship in Jerusalem and was sitting in his chariot on his way home, reading the prophet Isaiah aloud. The Spirit told Philip, “Go and join that chariot.” When Philip ran up to it, he heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” “How can I,” he said, “unless someone guides me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Now the Scripture passage he was reading was this: He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb is silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who will describe his generation? For his life is taken from the earth. The eunuch said to Philip, “I ask you, who is the prophet saying this about—himself or someone else?” Philip proceeded to tell him the good news about Jesus, beginning with that Scripture. As they were traveling down the road, they came to some water. The eunuch said, “Look, there’s water. What would keep me from being baptized?” So he ordered the chariot to stop, and both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water, and he baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord carried Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him any longer but went on his way rejoicing.

Let’s Pray.

Okay, let’s jump in here at verse 26

Acts 8:26 CSB

An angel of the Lord spoke to Philip: “Get up and go south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” (This is the desert road.)

Now Philip was a deacon in the Jerusalem Church that was established at the beginning of Acts, but he would become one of the first evangelists to spread the gospel outside of Jerusalem. Here God speaks to Philip and tells him to leave Samaria where this great campaign of evangelism was underway and sends him to a desert road. Literally the road he was sent to was known as the road to the end of the world. Seems like an interesting evangelism strategy but Philip goes where the Lord sends him.

Acts 8:27–28 CSB

So he got up and went. There was an Ethiopian man, a eunuch and high official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to worship in Jerusalem and was sitting in his chariot on his way home, reading the prophet Isaiah aloud.

Philip arrives to the place God had sent him and finds an Ethiopian eunuch, a high ranking official in the Ethopian government. Now, eunuchs existed for the close service to a queen without the risk of an innapropriate relationship developing. And this man was clearly a man who was deeply trusted because he was in charge of the queens entire treasury.

So we have this Ethiopian eunuch, a high official, riding in a chariot, and he is on his way back from worshipping in Jerusalem and was reading the prophet Isaiah. Now try to grasp the extraordinary nature of this:

Jerusalem was 750 miles from the Ethiopian capital, thats at least a months journey in a chariot each way, not including his time in Jerusalem. Our Ethiopian brother took an entire quarter of the year to go worship the God of the Jews. On top of that, he owned a scroll of Isaiah which would have costed a small fortune, and he is reading it aloud as he journeys home.

What I hope you will see is that this is the picture of a man who is earnestly seeking the one true God.

The devastating part of this is that despite his devotion he would never be welcomed into the community of Jews.

See in the temple there was the inner court reserved for the family of God and the outer court reserved for the gentiles and foreigners. A gentile could be converted and welcomed into the family of God through circumcision and allowed to enter the inner court, but a Eunuch was forbidden from this.

In fact there was a wall separating the outer court from the inner court with these words etched in the stone:

“No foreigner may enter. Whoever is caught, on himself shall he put the blame for the death which will ensue."

So you can picture it, after his long journey he would have arrived at the temple mount and walked into the outer court. He might have excitedly rushed towards the inner court, he had come all this way to worship God. But he only got as far as the wall separating the outer court from the inner court to see those words etched in stone.

And the truth would hit him in the depths of his soul, you will never belong here.

Being able to cross to the other side of that wall meant you were one of them. It meant you were a part of the family, the family of God. It meant you had a seat at the table, you had the right to draw near to the holy of holies, you could belong and participate in the family of God.

But this man, no matter his devotion,He could travel hundreds of miles, be as devoted as any Jew, he could give all his money to owning scrolls of scripture but would only ever be allowed to stand in the court of gentiles, listening to scripture from a distance, with a wall of stone keeping him from His God. See he may call Yahweh his God, but he would never join the family of God.

Yet for some reason, despite all of this, something within him, kept him worshipping, kept him reading the scroll, in fact this is how Phillip finds him in verse 29 Acts 8:29-31

Acts 8:29–31 CSB

The Spirit told Philip, “Go and join that chariot.” When Philip ran up to it, he heard him reading the prophet Isaiah, and said, “Do you understand what you’re reading?” “How can I,” he said, “unless someone guides me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.

Now pay close attention here to what they are reading… Acts 8:32-35

Acts 8:32–35 CSB

Now the Scripture passage he was reading was this: He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb is silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation justice was denied him. Who will describe his generation? For his life is taken from the earth. The eunuch said to Philip, “I ask you, who is the prophet saying this about—himself or someone else?” Philip proceeded to tell him the good news about Jesus, beginning with that Scripture.

Philip encounters this man as he happens to be reading Isaiah 53 which is a prophetic text written hundreds of years before Jesus telling the story of Jesus, I just want to read part of this for us. And remember, this was written 500-700 years before Jesus. Isaiah 53

In God’s divine providence this is the passage this Ethiopian eunuch is reading. And he asks Phillip Acts 8:34-35

Acts 8:34–35 CSB

The eunuch said to Philip, “I ask you, who is the prophet saying this about—himself or someone else?” Philip proceeded to tell him the good news about Jesus, beginning with that Scripture.

So Philip shares the good news of Jesus with this man and then Acts 8:36

Acts 8:36–38 CSB

As they were traveling down the road, they came to some water. The eunuch said, “Look, there’s water. What would keep me from being baptized?” So he ordered the chariot to stop, and both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water, and he baptized him.

I love the question he asks… What would keep me from being baptized?

Here is a man, who has traveled hundreds of miles, spending time and money for the sake of devotion to the God of the Jews, kept from joining the family of God because of his physical condition, kept behind a stone wall from the inner courts of the temple, here is a man who has been kept out of the community of believers, hearing about Jesus and asking what would keep me from being baptized? Surely there must be something keeping him from baptism right? All this man has known is what was wrong with him to keep him from God.[PAUSE]

This stopped me in my tracks this week. We don’t know all that Philip and the Eunuch read of the Isaiah scroll on that chariot ride together. But 36 verses after the part we know they read, just 2 minutes of reading aloud after, we find this in Isaiah 56:3-5

God knows what he’s doing… amen Church. Here is this man, with devotion to God in spades, seeking he Lord with desperate ferver, kept from the inner court, kept from the family of God, hearing for the first time that there is nothing keeping him from being baptized. In fact, as Isaiah 56 says, God has a place for him within his walls, not outside of them, a name better than son and daughter, an everlasting name that will never be cut off.

Verse 39 in Acts 8 tells us he went on his way rejoicing. He was rejoicing because he understood what baptism meant. Baptism didn’t save him, he was saved when he confessed Jesus as lord. Baptism was his visible entry into the family of God, the very thing he had been kept from in Jerusalem.

See baptism is this moment where the invisible reality of your faith is made visible to the community of God. It is when you officially join the family of God, you are no longer an outsider, you are no longer a guest, you are a brother or sister with a seat at the table and a name on the door.

Everyone who confesses Jesus as Lord and believes God raised him from the dead is saved, and the first step of obedience is baptism. All believers are called to be baptized and baptism comes after confession and belief.

There are some in this room who need to put their trust in Jesus. All of us are sinners, and the cost of that sin is death, the good news the eunuch heard on that chariot was that Jesus died on a cross and paid the price we should have paid. Three days later he rose again from the dead proving that he has authority over life and death. If you will confess that Jesus is Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead you will be saved. What is holding you back this morning?

Others in this room have made that confession but have yet to be baptized… What are you waiting for? What is keeping you from being baptized? Follow the eunuch’s example, he was immediately baptized. Take your seat at the table, join the family of God. Grab a connection card in the seat back in front of you and write I want to be baptized.

Others here have been baptized and look back on it with Joy! Praise God! I pray that the rejoicing of that day stays with you every moment of your life. Remember that, hold dear to it, that God for it! But for some of us, joy hasn't been the whole story.

The truth is, life is hard. Maybe you were baptized years ago, and if you look at your life you see broken pieces, a wandering heart, an empty seat at the table you are too ashamed to take.

My Grandfather, my Opa, told me a story once… See my Oma and Opa fostered and adopted kids for nearly 50 years. One of their kids had some issues, and ran away from home. Before he left he made sure to tellOpa that he would never be his Dad. Opa responded by saying I may not be your dad but you will always be my son. A few years later Opa got a letter in the mail from this kid, it read, Dear Dad, I’m sick and dying. Pray for me. LONG PAUSE

Just because you stop calling God father, doesn’t mean he stops calling you son. LONG PAUSE

What does Isaiah 56 say: “I will give you an everlasting name that will never be cut off.”

When we celebrate baptism, we celebrate entering an eternal, visible, family of God where you can never be disowned, you can never be cut off, and there is nothing keeping you from the love of your heavenly father.

In just a minute we are going to celebrate baptism together. We will welcome a brother or sister into the family of God. What a beautiful moment. May this remind us of our seat at the table, the one we have taken, or the one we have yet to take.

Let’s pray.