Sermon Tone Analysis

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:

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.

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.