Two Ordinances, Two Commands

I have learned many things about marriage in 21 years of being married to Annette. Of course, she might disagree with that statement. At the very least, I suspect she would tell you I haven’t yet learned ENOUGH.

But the truth is that I’ve learned a few things that have made our lives together better. I’ve learned, for instance, that I ALWAYS make a better impression with her by my side than I do on my own.

And I’ve always suspected that you guys actually hired her to be the pastor’s wife and you just got stuck with me as part of the package.

I’ve learned that she’s a light sleeper who doesn’t like to be awakened. And that’s tricky, because we keep very different schedules. She’s a morning person, and I’m a night owl.

And so, most nights, I’m crawling into bed just as carefully and quietly as I can, hoping not to wake her, because I know she has a hard time going back to sleep when I do.

But this is very hard to do, even though she wears earplugs in bed to soften the noise from my snoring.

I tiptoe into the bedroom as if the floor is covered in kittens. And then I ease the covers back on the bed like a bomb technician peeling back the cover of an IED.

And things can go south in a hurry, much as they can for that bomb technician.

If I so much as blink too hard, I can set off a chain of events that certainly isn’t as ugly as an inadvertently tripped IED but one that’s nonetheless packed with its own drama.

So, yeah, I’ve learned a couple of things in 21 years of marriage.

And one of the most important early lessons was that I’m not the boss of her. Now, I don’t know how things were in your home, but when we got married, I just figured that I’d get to give the orders.

That didn’t last long. As it turns out, if I’d wanted to give commands, I probably should have become a computer programmer or something like that.

Annette is absolutely wonderful about responding to polite requests. And sometimes she’s even open to suggestion. Occasionally, pleading and puppy dog eyes can do the trick.

But commands just never seem to have the desired effect, and it didn’t take even this big dummy long to figure that out.

Now, what does any of this have to do with this series we have been studying through about the church?

Well, as it turns out the church, the Bride of Christ, did, indeed, receive orders from her groom before He ascended back to heaven in his risen and glorified body.

You’ll recall that He gave us a mission:

Matthew 28:19–20 NASB95

“Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Go and make disciples. Or more literally, “While you are going, make disciples.” We’ll talk more about what’s included in this mission in a few minutes, but for now just remember that this is the mission of the church.

As we are thinking about how this church will look during the next five or 10 or 20 years, we don’t have to spend a lot of time coming up with a mission statement, because there it is in black and white — or perhaps red and white, if you’ve got a red-letter Bible.

So, we know the mission of the church. And perhaps you’ll recall the marks of the church.

I told you near the beginning of this series that there are at least four marks of the church — four characteristics that should be evident within any church that is serving the Lord.

Do you remember them? The church should be “one.” It should be characterized by unity. This doesn’t mean that we all agree on everything, but that — even in disagreement, we followers of Jesus demonstrate love and submission to one another.

There should be unity of mission, since the mission statement was so clearly dictated by Jesus. There should be unity of the Spirit, since all of us who have followed Jesus in faith have within us the same Spirit of God.

And there should be unity of love, the same self-sacrificing love that is evident among the three members of the Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

So, the first mark of the church is oneness or unity. The second is holiness, which means being set apart for service to God.

We are not here to serve anyone but Him, but we serve Him most often by serving one another and by serving the community and even the world.

Just as Jesus came in His incarnation to serve — even to the extent of giving His life on the cross to redeem sinners — we as His body and His bride are called to serve others sacrificially.

So, the church is one, and the church is holy. And perhaps you’ll recall that I said the church is also little-C catholic.

Before it was co-opted by the Roman Catholic church, this term, “catholic,” meant “all-encompassing or universal.”

And the idea here is that the true church consists of Christians from all times in all places and from all walks of life. We are A church here, but we are not THE church.

The final mark of the church that we talked about was its apostolicity. The fact that the church is apostolic means that it is built upon the teaching of the apostles.

And so, our primary source material when we want to try to understand anything about how the church is structured or how it is to complete its mission must be the writings of the apostles as found in the Bible.

So, we know the mission of the church. We recognize the marks of the church.

And we’ve talked about the responsibility of the church as the embassy of the Kingdom of God in the realm of this lost world. We are here to show the world what God’s kingdom is supposed to look like.

We are here to help bring “foreigners” — those who are presently excluded from His kingdom because of unbelief — into God’s kingdom through faith in Jesus Christ and His sacrificial death and supernatural resurrection.

But unlike me, Jesus has the right to give commands to His bride, the church. He founded the church. He is Lord over the church.

And it is His Holy Spirit who birthed the Church, who empowers the Church, who seals the Church, who indwells the Church, and who sanctifies the Church.

So, we should not be surprised that Jesus had some commands for the Church to follow while it awaits the blessed hope of the appearing of His glory and its rapture to heaven before the tribulation.

What’s surprising to me, frankly, is that Jesus gave us only two commands. I might have expected Him to give us more.

But instead, He gives the Church much latitude to operate within the bounds set by Scripture and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

And the two commands both have to do with remembering Him and His sacrifice on our behalf and with proclaiming to the world that we belong to Him.

The first of those commands that we’ll consider today is baptism. And you’ll recognize that this command — it’s often called an ordinance — appears in those verses we read a few minutes ago, the Great Commission.

“Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you.”

In fact, baptizing and teaching are both PART OF what takes place in discipleship.

Indeed, teaching is the core of discipleship. Teaching is what Jesus spent three and a half years doing with His disciples during His ministry here on earth.

In that respect, we do discipleship here every Sunday, and we do it during our Zoom Bible studies on Wednesdays, and we’ll do it during Sunday school, when that starts again and during youth group meetings when we begin those — hopefully very soon.

Teaching is foundational to discipleship, and it doesn’t just happen during classroom sessions or from the pulpit. In fact, the best kinds of discipleship training include some type of life-on-life experiences.

It happens much the way that Jesus’ training of His disciples occurred as they were walking from place to place, while they sat around campfires, over meals, and everywhere else they shared life together, every time they watched how Jesus interacted with people and responded to life’s challenges.

But it seems clear from Scripture that there was some point early in their time following Jesus that His disciples were baptized as believers.

And it is certainly clear that He directs us to baptize new believers — and, from a different perspective, for believers to submit themselves to be baptized.

In a few moments, that’s just what we will be doing today, as Jane and Ainsley Chipman come before the church in obedience to this command to be baptized as believers.

One will come as a new believer. And one will come as a longtime believer wishing to affirm the significance of her faith in obedience to Jesus’ command.

But first, I want to make a couple of points about baptism and about its significance to the believer and its significance to the church.

The first thing to note is that baptism should be one of the first steps of obedience to Jesus in the life of a new believer.

in the Acts 2 church, we see thousands come to faith in Christ following the Apostle Peter’s first sermon.

When Peter had reached the end of his remarks in the street outside the house where the Holy Spirit had come upon them, Luke records that the reaction of the people was visceral.

Acts 2:37–38 NASB95

Now when they heard this, they were pierced to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Brethren, what shall we do?” Peter said to them, “Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

They were pierced to the heart. They came to the desperate realization that they needed forgiveness for their sins.

And this forgiveness could come only by turning to Jesus in faith that only His substitutionary death on the cross could pay the debt that they owed, that we all owe, for our rebellion against God.

And they understood that only His resurrection could give them hope for complete redemption. It is because Jesus died and then ROSE from the dead that we can have hope of eternal life — everlasting life the way it was meant to be, in the presence of and in fellowship with God and with Jesus.

What shall we do, they asked. These are the people who just a few weeks earlier had called for Jesus, the Son of God and the promised Messiah, to be crucified. What hope do we have? How can we possibly stand before God, having sinned against him so terribly?

Your sins and mine put us in the very same position as those people in Jerusalem that morning. We have sinned against God in great ways and in small ways.

It was your sins and mine that drove Jesus to the cross, just as much as it was theirs. He died for you and for me, just as surely as He died for them.

And the answer to us today is the same as it was to them. Repent and be baptized.

Repent. Admit that you are a sinner — that your rebellion against the perfect, holy, and righteous creator and king of all puts you in a position of divine judgment before Him.

To repent from something means to turn from it. And so, what Peter was saying was that they had to turn from their sin. The same is true for us.

To be saved from God’s just judgment, we must turn from following Satan, the ruler of this world, who draws us into sin.

And we must turn toward Jesus. We must follow Him in faith that He paid the entire price for our rebellion, and allow Him to lead us into righteousness.

This is what Ainsley and Jane have done, and now they are ready to take the next step, to be baptized in obedience to Jesus’ command and in keeping with the earliest traditions of the Church.

But there’s a significance to the Church in this ritual, too. For Ainsley and Jane, this is a proclamation that they now belong to Jesus.

But for the church, this is a proclamation that they are sisters in Christ, that they now share the same Holy Spirit who indwells each of us as believers and the church as a whole.

For the church, this ritual is a proclamation that we share unity of the Spirit, unity of love, and unity of mission. We are one in Christ.

It proclaims that they are set apart with us for God’s purposes. It proclaims that we are all part of this little-C catholic church that has existed since that first Day of Pentecost after Jesus had ascended back into heaven.

And it proclaims that we continue to hold to the apostolic teaching that has been handed down to us in the Bible.

In this ritual of baptism, we demonstrate the four marks of the church, and we celebrate the salvation of two souls who had been lost, but now are found.

Jane, can you come up front with Ainsley?

Now, there is a tradition within the church of asking a series of questions before baptism to ensure that those who are being baptized have truly given their lives to Jesus.

The idea behind this tradition is that, because baptism normally results in membership in the church, we want to make sure that only those who have made the decision to follow Jesus are baptized.

There is no saving grace in what we will do here today. These ladies have already been saved by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone for the glory of God alone.

I have spoken to both of them and have concluded that both of them have made a true profession of faith. Now, we will do the same as the church.

Jane Chipman, do you acknowledge that you are a sinner, and that you can do nothing to earn God’s favor by you own merits?

Do you acknowledge that God’s only Son, Jesus Christ, is God’s only remedy for sin and that placing your faith in Him is your only way to be saved from the just penalty for your sins?

Do you acknowledge that by identifying with Christ through faith — in other words, taking His name as a Christian — that you have died to sin and been raised to newness of life in Him?

Do you then commit yourself to living a different kind of life because of your faith in Jesus and the new life you have in Him?

Now, I think you said you wanted to say something here.

XXXXXX

Excellent. Now, go ahead and step into the water.

Jane Chipman, I now baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

DUNK

Buried with Christ in the likeness of His death, and now raised with Christ in the likeness of His resurrection. Welcome to the family, sister!

OK, now Ainsley, I’m going to ask YOU some questions. But they won’t be hard to understand, like the questions I asked your mom.

Ainsley Chipman, who is Jesus?

And what did Jesus do for you?

Does Jesus love you? How do you know?

Do you love Jesus? How can you show that you love Him?

Excellent. Now, go ahead and step into the water.

Ainsley Chipman, I now baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

DUNK

Buried with Christ in the likeness of His death, and now raised with Christ in the likeness of His resurrection. Welcome to the family, sister!

Now, let me pray with you both before you sit down. Could I get the deacons to come and join me here, please?

PRAY

OK, that’s just wonderful! Amen?

THIS is how the true church grows. It doesn’t grow by people who come to visit once in a while.

It doesn’t grow by outreach events that are designed to get people in seats. It doesn’t grow by having slick praise bands that play all the newest contemporary Christian music.

All those things are valuable for attracting new people into this building. But the true, universal Church grows when lost people turn to Jesus in faith.

And when people of faith either take the step of obedience in baptism or present testimony of already having been baptized, then the local church grows, too.

In the church of Scripture, there was no such thing as a member who had not been baptized as a true follower of Christ, and there was no such thing as baptizing someone who did not then become a member of the church.

And as a side note, I’m wary of baptizing children as young as Ainsley. Jane and Chip can tell you that I dragged my feet on this for a while.

And then I sat down with them and talked with Ainsley at great length about her salvation and this baptismal ritual. I wanted to be sure that she understood what was happening, at least to the degree that most 6-year-olds can do so.

And I do feel confident that Ainsley has made a true profession of faith. But I have counseled Jane and Chip that they will need to press Ainsley as she gets older to make sure that she has a growing faith and that she has a growing understanding about it.

Frankly, that’s what all Christian parents should do with their children, no matter how old those children are. That’s discipleship, and good discipleship should always begins at home.

Now, I’m so excited that we have been able to follow this first command of Jesus today, the church’s ordinance of baptism.

But I’m even more excited that it coincides with our observation of the Lord’s Supper, because this is the second command of Jesus for the Church. And because it’s wonderful that Ainsley, in particular, will be able to participate in this ordinance for the first time as a new Christian.

Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper in the upper room in Jerusalem, where He ate with His disciples on the night of his arrest, before He was crucified the next day.

There, He taught them some of the most important things they would learn, and He prayed for them, and He said things that were intended to give them hope in the days between His crucifixion and resurrection and then after He had returned to heaven.

He told them to repeat this observance after He was gone to help them remember what He was about to do for them and for us.

This is a memorial observation. We do this, in part, to help us remember the great price that Jesus paid for our salvation.

In his letter to the church at Corinth, Paul says we do it also to proclaim the good news of salvation.

1 Corinthians 11:26 NASB95

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.

Our participation in the Lord’s Supper is a portrayal of the message of the gospel — the good news that God Himself came to us in the person of His unique and eternal Son, Jesus.

That He lived a sinless life as a man so we could see what perfect obedience and fellowship with God looks like.

And that He gave Himself as a sacrifice on the cross, taking upon Himself the guilt for OUR sins and bearing the punishment that we deserve for them.

And, finally, that He rose from the dead on the third day, demonstrating His victory over death itself and His ability to keep His promise of eternal life for those who follow Him in faith.

This is what we proclaim to the lost world when we partake in the Lord’s Supper.

But there is also something that we proclaim to ourselves and to one another as believers. We proclaim that we bear the marks of the church.

We proclaim that we are one in Christ, sharing the same savior and sharing the Holy Spirit who has been given to us as a seal of our faith and of God’s promise.

We proclaim that we are holy, set apart for Him and blessed to share in the bread and the juice as symbols of how, as Paul put it, we have been crucified with Christ.

We proclaim that we are little-C catholic, partaking in the same ritual that Christians of all times and all places have always observed.

And we proclaim that we honor the teaching handed down to us from the apostles in God’s holy word.

Now, the conditions during the Last Supper were different than the conditions we have here today, but the significance of their observance was the same as it is today.

While the deacons are distributing the bread and juice, I’m going to ask Andy to play What a Friend We Have in Jesus. After that, we will pray and then eat the bread.

SONG/BREAD

Jesus told His disciples that the bread represented His body, which would be broken for our transgressions.

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:26 NASB95

While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.”

As Jesus suffered and died on that cross, his blood poured out with His life. This was always God’s plan to reconcile mankind to Himself.

“In [Jesus] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.”

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:27–28 NASB95

And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.

Take and drink.

“Now, as often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”

Maranatha! Lord, come!

Here at Liberty Spring, we have a tradition following our observance of the Lord’s Supper.

Please gather around in a circle, and let us sing together “Blest Be the Tie that Binds.”