There
is a deep resource for all of us who have received Christ as Saviour and been
baptized and that resource can be drawn on across the pathway of all of our
life.
The
overflowing river of life of the Holy Spirit coming upon the person for the
purpose of ministry and mission. Every one of us have a ministry to live
out—whatever it is in your particular vocation, to have the Holy Spirit
enabling you by the power of Christ to serve what you were made to be. Every
one of us also have a mission in life—a specific target that our life is about.
It takes the power of the Holy Spirit for that to occur, and the Lord wants to
open up that resource to us.
Baptism
is a meaningless exercise if a person doesn’t believe in Jesus the Saviour.
Many people are sincerely wrong that by having at some time or another been
baptized, that covers the issue of salvation with God. However sincere their
motivation or the motivation of their parents, baptism is only a human work
that can earn nothing from God apart from coming to Christ and receiving
salvation as the free gift. Then baptism is a sign of our obedience to His
lordship. He calls us to be baptized. There is something about the beauty of
Jesus coming to baptism, and something about the Father’s confirmation of the
absolute purity of His Son that speaks to not only our hearts of who Jesus is,
but speaks about something that we need for ourselves as well.
When
you know that you’re born again, you know you have relationship with God, but
sometime this week, at some moment, there was something that occurred and you
felt less than really like an effective, efficient, pleasing son or daughter of
the Most High God. It could be because of something you did that you knew
displeased the Father, and having done that, presumably, you then confessed to
the Lord—Lord, I’m sorry. I ask You to forgive me. But those are moments the
Devil loves to capitalize on, recognizing any failure on our part, takes great
delight in not letting us off the hook. Condemnation is the name of his game.
Everything that he can do to rub your nose in it. Make you feel that you are a
total flop. The argument goes something like this: God’s okay with it but don’t
expect anything significant to happen in your life now. You’ve taken yourself
from the possibilities of anything worthwhile happening.
There’s
other things besides condemnation—a whole pattern of inability to deal with a
situation or with life that many people feel. In the brokenness of our society,
there are hosts of people who have enough abuse from past relationships they’ve
been through—not necessarily violent abuses, but things where relationship was
mistreated and violated and there is something that it’s done to you that can
reach as far back as your childhood or teenage years. The wound leaves a
residue in your soul that anytime anybody talks about relationship—or if they
don’t talk about it—still, relationship has always got a shadow over it as far
as you’re concerned. Even though you know in your head that you have a
relationship with God through Jesus Christ, but there is something of a
deficiency of confidence that you live with all the time. It hinders you
feeling a bold person for the Lord. It drains off the joy of the Lord that’s
intended to be strength to you. It has to do with a residue of rejection that
you feel from things past.
Just
as surely as Satan comes to condemn for failure, there are things of failure by
other people that impact you. It takes away from that sense of confidence of
who you are as one of the Lord’s own. These things are so counterproductive to
our being that the person the Lord has re-created us in Christ to be. God has
brought us to Jesus in order that we might know the release of the full sense
of God’s pleasure in our lives.
When
we come to the Lord and gain that initial sense of forgiveness, He says, I want
you to come to the waters of baptism because in that moment, as you designate
your obedience to My Son, I want to tack down at a specific, inescapably clear
time and place on earth. A physical action you can refer to for the rest of
your life. You put your trust in the Lord in a moment and it happened between
your heart and heaven. But there’s something about having come to a time and
place and the God who created us and know the degree of our attachment to earth
and say, I want to nail down a time and a place and a moment, and it will be
marked, and at any time in your life you can point back and say, at that point,
I pleased the Father’s will, and I am not a person who will live or accept
these kinds of pressures that come from the liar, the devil who would condemn
me, or from the things that creep around the edges of my mind from any residue
of my own past brokenness.
I
am a person to whom God has spoken over me the same thing He spoke over His
Son, and for the same reason. God said of His Son, You are
My Son in whom I am well pleased. And
the reason is because Jesus was sinless to that moment and He always remained
that way. And of you and me, when we come from the waters of baptism, God is
making a statement that is equally true—that in the eyes of heaven, because of
my having put my faith in Jesus Christ, my Saviour, and having obeyed His call
to me to come to the waters of baptism, the Father says through the Cross,
where My Son died, I have cut away the record of any residue of remembrance of
sin against you, in the eyes of heaven, you have been made sinless. I call you
one of my sinless children, and I am well pleased with you. You have your
conversion moment and now you have an obedience moment that cannot be taken
from you – it is marked in heaven so to speak.
When
people say they felt so good at their baptism that is not just an emotion,
that’s a sense of divine pleasure God wants everybody to know. But beyond that
moment the Lord wants anybody in a situation in which the adversary is trying
to suffocate you with doubt or condemnation, the same fund of His pleasure may
be drawn on no matter how long ago you were baptized.
Baptism
provides a setting for spiritual breakthrough in your circumstance
In
Mark 1, the heavens parted, the verb that occurs is a different one than used
in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke where it speaks of the heavens were “opened”
to Him. The drama of how that opening took place is forcefully put in Luke. The Bible is saying there is a tearing open
in the invisible realm. This was not just a slit in the sky that allowed you to
see further than before. This was going on in perception; Jesus will go from
this moment with a greater capacity now that you have obeyed knowing you are
willing to grow in the Lord and in your ministry. This obedience shows that you
have submitted your life to the Lord Jesus for sanctification.
Ministry
has to do with taking what you have to give and giving it to the moment, as in
“to minister His life through you wherever you are.” One of the most
destructive ideas in the whole mind of the church is that ministry is isolated
to a pulpit. The reason for the existence of pulpits is to help all the people
to learn how to live in their ministry and to be what they were created to be.
Through baptism we offer through obedience our lives to learn by the Holy
Spirit to carry out our ministry and mission, God has ordained for each of us.
Look at Peter for example after the Holy Spirit filled him. Please do not look
only to the emotion – look to the truth of Scripture. For that to take place,
there needs to come a sensitivity to the reality of the spiritual realm. Matt.
4: From this moment, Jesus is going to go into an immediate situation of
confrontation with the powers of darkness. The Bible says, “Immediately, He was
driven into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.” In that season of
temptation, you have two factors: There’s a period of time that’s extensive,
and there’s also a confrontation where the enemy tries to break you down. Look
at what he did to Jesus and each time, Jesus responds with quotations from the
Word of God. That becomes a devastating impact against the devil. It cuts the
capacity of the devil to withstand Jesus.
This
kind of capacity to lay hold of what God has said in His Word, where it becomes
vibrant and alive to you, is something you see as other than just a set of
ideas. That’s something that comes because of spiritual breakthrough, a parting
in the heavens. The invisible realm becomes real to a person. God did not raise
up the church and then give a band of gurus to tell people how to live. A
pastor should not be a substitute for somebody else’s spiritual growth. A
pastor’s mission should be to help people find out what the Lord wants to do
with them so they can come to the fulfillment of the purpose of the Living God
through you with the same resources that God poured out upon His Son Jesus. The
door is now opened for you to go to the Holy Spirit to be taught and ministered
to. Amen. With having said that let us pray.
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