Baptism - Why the Disputes (1st in Series)

if you look at your bulletin you will see that finally the day has arrived after months of teasing and interruptions and other serieses we finally get around to getting back to what we had been doing about a year ago and that is i began a series on the subject of the ordinances of the church many even baptists have used the terminology sacraments of the church the only reason that i don't default to that terminology is because of how much work i have done over the years in dealing with roman catholicism so you'll forgive me if i prefer the term ordinance but the reality is we spent if i recall correctly five four or five sundays in that series looking at the lord's supper and i think that's very important it's a much ignored subject but when people asked us ask us what kind of a church we are and we talk about our confession it is the london baptist confession of faith and the reality is that once you hear that term baptist that says something i'm not sure these days exactly what that something is there are people today who identify as baptists and almost the only theological consistency between their practice and belief and mine is the size of our baptistry there are many baptists today who are not even trinitarian they don't believe in the resurrection they don't believe in miracles they don't believe that the bible is the word of god they they don't believe in justification by faith and so unfortunately when you tell someone you're a baptist all you're telling them in many instances today is about one aspect of ecclesiology it says nothing about your your church government though frequently it has some aspect to that certainly when someone identifies themselves as a as a lutheran there is a much narrower spectrum that would go within that realm though again any historical terminology today is getting wider and wider there are believing confessional lutherans today but they're also wild leftist liberal lutherans that uh in that situation the believing conservative lutheran has so much more in common with you and i than they have with their liberal liberal counterparts that use the name lutheran and so the problem that faces us is that term baptist is not overly descriptive of almost anything else that we believe and that's why we have a confession of faith that's why why we direct people to that and and why we want to make sure that we understand it and have a full orb theological understanding of the faith but as you know that term when it is put together with the term reformed becomes absolutely explosive and i don't just mean on twitter on facebook though it certainly is there as well there are many who do not believe that you can put reformed and baptist together it's an oxymoron it's a contradiction because in their minds there is a specific kind of covenant theology and a specific ecclesiology that must exist for anyone to be considered reformed it's interesting to me that some of those who hold that position will actually consider people reformed who are who have much less of a living active faith in the sovereignty of god and salvation than i do but from their perspective this one issue is far more definitional than whether you truly believe in the sovereignty of god in all things if you believe in predestination election and you order your life in light of the sovereign decree of god well that's that's nice but if you got one of those things back there you're not really reformed there are many people that take that perspective i understand that we in this church are just stinking weird okay i'm just going to be straight up front with you you're wearing a cowboy hat sitting in the front row what do you what do you want and boots i see at the same time those are those boots are ready for kicking right there that's all i can say we're weird we're weird because we don't fit into a lot of molds there's no question about them but we're also weird because of our catholicity now before you start throwing the hymnals let me define what it means we have a willingness a broadness of spirit to work with a number of different people with whom we would have non-definitional disagreements non-definitional regards to the faith in the gospel and so we have people that we work with people who come to reform khan uh people that that we will we will say hey this guy what he's saying is great but he's a presbyterian and we don't say that but he's a presbyterian in the sense that you know we're gonna pat him on the head someday he'll get it that's not the idea i will tell you right now having lived in the reformed world for longer than many of you have lived in the natural world that reformed baptists know more about the arguments of their conservative pato baptist brothers than almost any pedo baptist i have ever met knows about our arguments that has been my experience i have dear brothers who are presbyterian pastors but when we get to this one subject it's just like i'm not not listening i'm not listening it's been my experience the first debate i ever did on pato baptism i sat right there in this room in this church that was 25 years ago yeah a little over 25 years ago now quarter of a century and i continue to desire to have deep and close relationships with men that i would also be willing to debate on this subject and many of them thankfully will have me stand in their pulpits and preach and i am thankful for that i truly am some of you know that last march before weirdness became the norm i was supposed to fly up to moscow idaho and i was going to have two debates with doug wilson while also recording stuff for canon press and we were going to debate the textual issue the texas receptus and things like that and we're going to debate pedo communion and we're going to do that in front of the whole new saint andrew's body and things like that and i still want to do it it's just a long drive now and we'll we'll make that happen and yet in a couple weeks doug and i will be recording another sweater vest dialogue on the subject of the incarnation so we're weird because there's a lot of people who think look if you have disagreements on these things you just simply have to shut the door and have nothing to do with these individuals and i am not downplaying the importance of baptism when i'm saying what i'm saying right now the westminster confession of faith says we're in sin and i think a fair reading of the london baptist confession of faith would say that's a mutual idea we're not saying it's unimportant we obviously believe it's very important but we don't believe it's definition of the gospel and we do believe we should talk about it and it shouldn't just be one of these yeah yeah i've heard all of your baptist arguments yeah yeah i've heard all your pato baptist arguments some of you know that the debates i've done and by the way may i point out that every debate i have done on pato baptism i was the one that was challenged to do it i don't run around uh you know posting 95 theses on all the presbyterian church doors you know um debate me or you're a big chicken you know as it's some people think that's what i do it's not um but if you've watched those especially the last two where i actually knew what i was talking about the last two went two different directions because the presbyterians that i was debating have fundamental disagreements with each other and so there are still issues to be addressed and there are still new arguments that people bring up and in this series what we as members of this church need to understand is that because of our desire to bring the gospel to the world and to cooperate with people who recognize they see what's happening in our culture and they they recognize what what abortion really is and how the world view is be standing behind all of these things we especially just simply out of respect for god's truth and love for those that we are going to be participating in these things with we need to be very clear in our understanding of why we stand where we stand i understand that we have people in our midst who are going to disagree with what i say i just hope you will hear i hope you will understand i hope you will uh no matter what your background is that you will listen and understand why it is we come to conclusions that we come to now what is important here is how do we even begin a study like this we recognize there are differing views of baptisms baptism amongst protestants just as of course then you look at roman catholicism you look at eastern orthodoxy they're going to have their different spins and takes there were tons of differing views in the early church including adult immersion on profession of faith as we do it emergency infant baptism because we need to realize up until only recent days um infant mortality was sky high maternal mortality was sky high we live in a very blessed day there were times in europe's history when a woman would have to have 10 live births to get one child through to maturity think about that we live in a very blessed day so there was there developed something called emergency infant baptism there was a really interesting concept in the second and into the third century of adult delay of baptism until close to the point of death you've all heard of emperor constantine in the council of nicaea well he delayed his baptism until close to the point of death there were differing reasons for that we'll talk about that much later down the road and then quickly baptism in the history of the church becomes not just a means of grace but the means of regeneration and you end up with a fundamental view of baptismal regeneration that becomes traditional and hence you end up with a massively nominal church a nominal church is a church in name only all sorts of people have been baptized as children but they have no idea what the gospel is that is part of our history now most studies in most churches would start with our confession and then we'd go to the text of scripture and you'd substantiate the church's position there from that's fully understandable i am not in any way criticizing that but because of the uniqueness of our fellowship and the uniqueness of the connections that we have with dear brothers i think of my i think my dear brother chocolate knox ah chocolate knocks we all listen to cross politic and he can't finish a program without saying something about getting your babies baptized and yet he'll have to admit he has a little bit of a tick whenever i'm around him because he knows i'd debate him on it any day and i love him and so i want to i want him to hear when i speak about my position i want him to be able to understand what i'm saying and understand that i say what i say out of conviction and out of even love for him and so it's fully understandable how people go but because of where we are because of the chocolate knoxes of the world i want us to start off in this first study really considering if there's all these different viewpoints doesn't that say something about the sufficiency of scripture because people will make that argument roman catholics will make the argument see even you protestants can't agree on baptism so obviously you need something more than scripture right they'll make that argument you have to hear that argument you can't just can't just dismiss it how should we address something where there is such a historical division and indeed a historical confusion i have books in my library that are literally this thick just on the early history of this doctrine in the church but there are only 96 references in the new testament 15 of those are to john the baptizer so we can sort of take them out we don't take john's baptism out we will talk about that that's very very important but you take those out and you don't have it's not like this is some huge massive amount of of scriptural data that you have to be analyzing there's only so many verses that you're going to be looking at and what's interesting is many of the references in paul's epistles for example assume an already understood theology of baptism and so where is much of the conversation going to be focused acts because in acts that we see baptism taking place in the early church we see who's being baptized we see why they're being baptized but they're examples very rarely in those situations is there a sermon about baptism attached to baptism outside of maybe pentecost and pentecost is a unique situation you've only got jews there so you can see that what we need to do today is to step back and go what's the best way to lay the proper foundation for an understanding of this subject while we confess the doctrine of sola scriptura and this will have implications for many other subjects as well okay so what must we do first i have six items if you want to take notes you have that little neat page in your bulletin six items number one we must define the term clearly we must define the term clearly because and that's especially the case here why well if you know anything about the history of the term baptize and baptism the verb and the noun forms you know that they are not english words that these are actually transliterations out of the greek language so what's the transliterations when you take the word in the original language in this case in greek and you just make an english version of it so baptizo becomes baptized well that doesn't help you much does it because that's not really telling you what it means and so there is a great deal of dispute about what baptize means there's really no dispute among scholars of the languages about what baptize means because we can not only look at the old testament especially the word bapto but we can look at all sorts of contemporary documentation around the time of the new testament and we know if you said baptized to a greek speaking person of the first century what that meant there is a default meaning now that does not mean that you cannot take that word which has a clear meaning and by the way yes it means to immerse but you can take that meaning and you can use it metaphorically so you can be baptized into someone you can be baptized into a name for example that doesn't change the meaning of the word it just means in that particular instance you are dealing with the reality of a metaphor but the meaning of the word is very very clear we have to start with the definition of the terms that's first thing and we'll be doing this but i want to give you the six things we need to do define the term clearly number one number two carefully recognize the distinctive nature of the new testament starting with john the baptist what other prophet did what john did who else did the incarnate son of god come to for himself to be baptized but john the baptist john's very important and what he was doing is very important and we are told in john chapter 4 as i recall that jesus himself well via his disciples was baptizing more people than john was before the cross that's sort of important we need to recognize that even from our own theology our confession of faith the westminster confession of faith says that baptism is an ordinance commanded by jesus christ it is his it has his authority behind it and so we need to recognize the distinctive nature of the new covenant and the new testament not i'm not for a second saying that we should ignore colossians chapter 2 that we should not look at old testament paradigms or anything else of course not you you can't you can't do meaningful new testament interpretation if you separate it from the old everybody recognizes that we all should recognize that but it is a distinctive action that the prophets of the old covenant did not do it needs to be recognized we need to know where to look number three we need to analyze each example of baptism in the new testament determining who does the baptizing who is baptized and upon what conditions that's not difficult to do it might take some time but that's not actually difficult to do there are only a certain number of instances where here a baptism takes place now there's all sorts of texts i would argue that in paul's epistles when he addresses the church he can assume that every single person in that congregation is baptized there's no such thing as an unbaptized christian in his experience it's just obedience to christ's command so there's all sorts of baptisms that we have no description of but there are specific instances and the book of acts provides them and we have a couple references where paul says i'm thankful i didn't baptize any of you except the households christmas and gaius and and we can talk about what households mean believe you me we will spend some time on that um very very important but it's important to look at each example and put it in its context and ask ourselves the question when we look at for example the day of pentecost is there anything unique or different about the day of pentecost than the normative practice of the church was there something unusual about that day you know like the holy spirit descending and speaking in tongues and you know tongues of fire and things like that did anybody see that going on last sunday well it should have been should it have been how come we see things in acts 2 we don't see in acts chapter 26 isn't there a progression isn't there something going on even in the course of the book of acts and if that's true in those areas might it be something that we need to keep track of as we think about the subject of baptism specifically we are going to see instances of people who've been baptized who don't receive the holy spirit until laying out of hands we need to understand why that is and why that's not the normal practice elsewhere why was it in some instances and not in others we have to look at these things number four we need to analyze each reference to the accomplished fact of baptism meaning of baptism primarily in paul once in peter in light of the apostolic practice established in acts so in other words when you see passing references on paul's part where he is assuming that everyone he's talking to has been baptized you don't start there create a theology and then try to force that onto what we see in acts acts is giving us the beginnings of the church how the apostles worked through the relationship of jew and gentile how they work through the gospel going to the gentiles which remember all the way through acts chapter 15 there are jews going whoa wait th this is all wrong and then you've got the jerusalem council and things like that we have to see where we can derive an understanding of who's doing the baptizing who's being baptized what's the what's the context of all of these things that has to determine what we then understand when we see passing references when paul will say something like you've been baptized into christ he's assuming you can talk to the whole church you've already experienced baptism well how do they experience baptism well actually tell us acts will tell us number five we will need to consider the voices of the early church in light of their circumstances the development of the canon etc so we're not going to ignore the early church our roman catholic friends our eastern orthodox friends and even some of our presbyterian friends may faint when we do those sermons because let's be honest let's be honest the vast majority of baptists not reformed baptists but the vast majority of baptists and those those are the people that most of our presbyterian friends have talked to about the subject of baptism not us most baptists don't care what the early church believed that's just a reality i was raised in a fundamentalist home and the reality is the early church and what the early church thought and taught was primarily viewed as being a bunch of roman catholics and so they they didn't get it i remember jack chick you know remember remember you know the jack chick tracks come on how many how many have ever seen a jack chick track oh only about 10 of you oh goodness i got sent to the principal for passing out jack chick tracks in fourth grade on the playground i did and i've told you that before so i walked into the principal's office and gave him one too um but and the the great irony of all that is that eventually once i wrote the king james only controversy jack chick decided i was the antichrist so take that um you're all going he did yes he did actually uh they they're they're interesting people but you look at jack chick stuff and that was what i was passing out that was my mindset and there wasn't any concern about having a consistency with the early church or stuff like that instead we had a not always but in some of the churches that i was in we had this little thing called the trail of blood anybody ever seen the trail of blood anybody one of course you've seen it eric um and i have one three-year-old in the back that has seen the trail of blood right there um uh got one over here okay all right uh and that's the book that basically says that the real true christians down through history have all been baptists like us and they all dress like us and had a southern twang in the whole nine yards um and uh it's it's the idea that there is this remnant the small remnant type thing and it's it's historically really bad but it's it's popular out there and uh so when when we say no i want to know i i want to struggle with what tertullian said and tertullian for example gives us a real clear example of how transitional things were in the middle of the second century and how they're differing views of baptism i i think that's important to know we we are concerned about that because we believe christ has been building his church for 2000 years and he's going to continue building that church and so we need to consider those voices and we need to i think you need to be aware of why there were people in the second century who would profess the name of christ but who would not be baptized until they figured they're about to die not just so you can know why that's wrong but so that someone can't come along and hit you with that and say if you didn't know about that how can you say that what you believe has any validity to it we need to know about our own history most of the time you can really defang the skeptics of the faith by just knowing our own history that's that's how they do it and finally number six we need to conclude by looking at the confessions of faith of the reformation and the dispute on the subject amongst the reformed and so we will we will listen carefully uh to the arguments of our pato baptist brethren in light of what we've already seen and we will do so from a covenantal understanding of how god has dealt with his people now there isn't just one understanding even amongst reformed baptists of these things i understand that i understand that but we will recognize what the arguments are so that hopefully we'll be able to give a meaningful response to those who asked questions of us so let us begin i mentioned to you before make a note 96 references in the new testament uh 15 references to john the baptizer there are 15 references in paul and hebrews and it is interesting that the hebrews references are not actually to christian baptism primarily which might tell you something there most of the key texts are in acts and hence are descriptive rather than specifically prescriptive in other words we don't have a book of baptisms we don't have a a instruction manual that that we would like to have on exactly how this is to be done etc etc but turn with me please to the gospel of matthew we will be brief i realized that saying that from this pulpit with uh with jeff's experience normally means which means we got about an hour to go that's not sorry jeff i'm sure jeff is watching over there somewhere uh we will actually i will show you what brief means it is an english word it does have a meaning and we will attempt to to define it properly he's not here there's absolutely nothing you can do about this it's sort of fun of course there is next week but um anyway matthew chapter 3 now in those days john the baptizer or baptist please recognize that has nothing to do with the domination in those days i i've met people that thought it did so i i just want you to understand now in those days john the baptizer came preaching in the wilderness of jesus saying repent the kingdom of heaven is at hand for this is the one referred to by isaiah the prophet saying the voice of one crying in the wilderness make ready the way of the lord make his paths straight in the way of the lord there is the way of jehovah yahweh now john himself had a garment of camel's hair and a leather belt about his waist and his food was locust and wild honey then jerusalem was going out to him in all judea and all the district around the jordan they were being baptized by him in the jordan river as they confessed their sins but when he saw many of the pharisees and sadducees coming for baptism he said to them you brood of vipers who warned you to flee from the wrath to come therefore bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance and do not suppose that you can say to yourselves we have abraham for our father for i say to you that god is able from these stones to raise up children to abraham and the axe is already laid at the root of the trees every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire as for me i baptize you with water for repentance but he who is coming after me is mightier than i and i am not fit to remove his sandal he will baptize you with the holy spirit and fire and his winnowing fork is in his hand and he will thoroughly clear his threshing floor and he will gather his wheat into the barn but he will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire so first what a unique man we don't have in matthew the lucan background of his special conception angelic ministrations and everything else but we know about it so he is in one way the last of the line of the prophets but he's also unique in and of himself we know that he is he is preaching a baptism of repentance for sin repentance for sin but he also recognizes that he himself is the forerunner he recognizes that he is making the way straight for one coming after him and he recognizes that the baptism that he will bring is of a different nature than his own which may in some sense explain that brief confusion that he has remember the story of john later on he sends some of his disciples to jesus and he hears the things that jesus is doing and remember jesus disciples are baptizing people as well and he asks are you the one we're looking for should we look for someone else it doesn't mean that john had lost faith a lot of people think see john's in prison certainly easy to lose faith in prison and and things like that no that that's not that's not what's going on there was a great deal of speculation as to the nature of the messiah and what the messiah would do during the inter-testamental period the literature of that period tells us that there's all sorts of different understandings and it'd be easy to understand why that would be but when he here's what he's doing and he hears about the preaching of the gospel he sends disciples and he wants confirmation of what he has been preaching all along and jesus provides that confirmation to him but he knows he is not fit to remove his sandals and he knows that the baptism that he will baptize with is with the holy spirit and fire and verse 12 is clearly in the context of judgment in the context of judgment there will be judgment that will be involved with this one who is coming so with that as a background we continue on then jesus arrived from galilee at the jordan coming to john to be baptized by him can you imagine this there's clearly something spiritual going on here because we don't know because remember their cousins we don't know anything about their their past or anything like that but something exists to where john clearly knows this is the one coming after we know in the gospel giants behold the lamb of god but john tried to prevent him saying i have need to be baptized by you and do you come to me now that's that's humility that spiritual insight all of the gospels record this and one of the reasons that they may have recorded this is we seem to have some indication that there continue to be disciples of john remember in acts years later you run into into in ephesus you run people have been baptized by john and there was a need for these people to understand john was the one that pointed to jesus if you want to fulfill the baptism of john you need to be a follower of jesus and so john tried to prevent him saying i have need to be baptized by you and do you come to me but jesus answered saying to him permit it at this time for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness now there's not some big long discussion well you know if this is repentance that means that jesus is admitting he's a sinner or any of these things because john had said he's lamb of god that takes away the sins of the world that's not the issue jesus is identifying with all those who have been obedient to john's baptism he is identifying with those for whom he will provide the means of salvation and by doing so he's demonstrating this is the forerunner these are the fulfilled prophecies and i am the one that these prophecies have been pointing to permitted this time for in this way it is fitting for us to fellow righteousness then he permitted him and after being baptized jesus went up immediately from the water and behold the heavens were opened and he saw the spirit of god descending as a dove and coming upon him and behold a voice out of the heavens saying this is my beloved son in whom i am well pleased now there is the real reason the full reason for why this baptism needs to take place there are few places where you have in the gospel account such a clear testimony as to the identity of jesus heaven's approbation on his work and you have father son and spirit who will be the key names at the end of matthew as well this is sort of a bookend type thing where remember father son spirit back in matthew chapter 3 well now we're in matthew 28 and there they are again same god now we understand what's going on but we do need to note something in passing that is important to that first point of what we need to do and after being baptized jesus went up immediately appa to judatas out of the water that doesn't work if what john the baptist had been just done was he was standing there with a bowl and he went like this okay now i know that the early church allowed for that but that wasn't normative they allowed for it in emergency situations they allowed for it when there wasn't enough water around to do it have any of you been to the jordan river maybe just a couple of us i was at jordan river a couple years ago the the october 2018 i think there wasn't much to it um and i'll be honest with you even if i had been offered the opportunity to go down into it i wouldn't have i've seen cleaner water after a thunderstorm in the desert i mean you'd go down that stuff in one of those nice white robes and all these eastern orthodox folks that were doing it we were we did a i did a study uh right on the banks of the jordan river with our group and uh he knew we were doing it i think i've told you before we had a jewish guide brilliant guy oh my goodness he was brilliant from like new york or chicago or something like that moved to israel and he's a guide there and knows the bible knows the new testament and so all of our studies we did for him so i was doing a whole study on prophecies about jesus in the old testament for him on the banks of the jordan river while there's all these eastern orthodox folks getting baptized down in the most filthy muddy green brown water you would ever want to see i mean it's wow okay but they all went down into the water there's no question about what's going on here you literally have to close your eyes to the reality that given the meaning of the word to immerse something in something else that here you have a description in jesus's baptism that he went down into the world that's why john's there if john's just sprinkling or refusing he can do that anywhere he doesn't have to make people go all the way out to the jordan he can do that in the streets in jerusalem just carry a thing of water around and ding ding ding think and you're and you're good but he didn't do that because that's not what baptism is now we aren't told exactly what this means as to how the baptism was done i mean the easiest way to baptize is for one person to hold the other person and support their back and do what i do whenever and those of you who i've baptized cadence clementine down there uh what did i do beforehand i said now here's the key to a non-flailing baptism if you don't want to be one of those people whose feet end up in the air and and everyone's rushing to get you out of the baptistry this is what you do when you start going back you bend your knees trust the person that's doing it bend your knees put the weight on that back hand and that way well he can just pull you right back up and i've seen i've seen a 5 foot 545 pound guy baptize this dude that has squatted i think his squat record was 814 pounds okay he didn't weigh 814 pounds but he squatted 814 pounds and this fellow in his late 60s was able to one person baptize that big guy if you know how to do it now we sort of figure that's just do you know how it was done in many places in the early church other way face first face first you know how it was done in other places in the early church three times baptizing in the name of the father and the son and the holy spirit or whoosh or maybe just whoosh who knows the only thing we can know for certain is there was immersion because you can immerse somebody in different ways so the point is that jesus comes up out of the water he was down in it he comes out of it and that's when the heavens are opened and john sees the spirit of god descending as a dove and coming upon him and behold a voice out of heaven saying this is my beloved son in whom i am well pleased and so there is a testimony that is given we know this is followed by the temptations and the very very important initial [Music] aspects of jesus's entering into public ministry he's been on earth for decades but now the ministry begins and from this point onward it is not on a map a straight line but in reality a straight line directly to the cross and jesus knows it jesus knows it and yes this is i think one of the key texts on the doctrine of the trinity there is a distinction between the spirit of god the incarnate son and the father speaking from heaven our mormon friends are confused when they look at a text like this and can't tell you how many times i've heard it mormon missionaries will say to you what was you think you think the jesus was a ventriloquist he was throwing his voice because when they hear us say that god is one they think we're modalists they think we are saying that the father is the son and the son is the spirit and the spirit is the father and this is all just a play-acting thing like you have in oneness pentecostalism that's not what we believe you have the persons distinguished from one another this is the key text in debating oneness pentecostals so it's very very important and it's associated with the baptism of john his role as the forerunner and we can in looking at this incident at least emphasize the fact that in this instance and just mark it down because we're gonna have to make the argument later on okay in this instance clearly baptism is full immersion like that okay and i think everyone can understand that there might be instances where you can't immerse someone in baptism that you you might literally live in a place where you just can't put together that much water there are there are places in the sinai peninsula like that there really are and so the early church had exceptions but the point is here's jesus's baptism and it tells us that baptism is by immersion and so you just put that down we'll make an argument later on that that should be normative for all of us if we can do it and in the vast majority of instances we can and that becomes one of the first incidents that we're going to be looking at we when we look at the gospels not much there outside of this but the gospels and then we look at acts and is there any reason to believe that what they were doing in the early church was different than what we've seen here and so we want to be very careful in our arguments we want to be very concerned about looking at the text and not assuming things just because we already have the goal we want to get to in mind that's important when whatever we're studying in any situation now believe it or not i'm ready to wrap up what the reason's really simple to do this study properly is going to require of us a fair amount of patience because we're going to have to keep bringing back to mind the process of interpretation that i've laid out for you i'm aware of the fact that teaching on how to do meaningful exegesis of the text is not the kind of sermon to get everybody going man i wish he'd preach more often it's normally man i'm glad he doesn't preach all that often at all that's what that what that does but the reality is our conviction is that when you exercise the discipline of doing meaningful and fair exegesis when you come to your conclusions you can stand before not just the people of god but before all people and say thus saith the lord and what you will be saying will be completely different than all of those charlatans on certain channels between 20 and 22 which i'll never mention but it's between 20 and 22 who sit there and say thus saith the lord and then they tell you what their bosom is feeling right now i think one of the main reasons that you're in this church and not in many others is you're sick of that anyways you don't want that and we're committed to not giving you that when you do the proper work of exegesis you are honoring god and the result truly is god's speaking that's why we come here that's why we do the work and so when i laid out the process what i'm laying out for you is this is how you address when you believe in solo scriptura this is how you address a theological issue and you do it fairly you do it in a proper fashion it may not be the flashy way and i'll have to keep reminding us remember you know six sermons ago which was you know four months ago we said this okay let's keep that in mind in fact just in passing maybe you might want to keep your notes maybe you might want to you know if you're if you're making actual physical notes maybe you might want to not get rid of that set keep them so you can have reference to them if you're doing it on a computer on your phone or whatever like that is start a running series of notes so that you can refer back to and we can make sure that we're being consistent in the methodology that we are using to apply these things to scripture because there is there is a reason to be sad that while i am invited and love to stand behind the pulpit in dear presbyterian churches which i don't even know these days with everything that's going on that i'll even be able to get to many of them even united states anymore but i've had that great privilege and i've preached the gospel and i have great fellowship but i could never be an elder there on either side i wouldn't think it appropriate and neither should they we have a fundamental disagreement and it impacts how far we can go in fellowship and that should sadden us that should sadden us i would like to be able to think that in this life we could come to a conclusion all these things and maybe in god's time that could happen but the reality is we all have our traditions we all have our traditions and what is the greatest red flag red light that says ah you just touched someone's tradition you know what it is in my experience here's what it is you can be working with somebody in this text of scripture and you're just right with each other all the way down you're using the same rules the same standards and then all of a sudden their methodology of interpretation changes all sudden it changes and you're like why you just stepped on a tradition you just stepped on a tradition we need to be sensitive that we have our own and if we truly believe in solar scripture we will examine our own traditions in the light of the highest authority don't sit there and say well yeah i'm awful glad i don't have any tradition what have i said for years now i'm sure jeff has quoted it the man who says he has no traditions is the man who is the most enslaved to his traditions you know when i you know when i came up with that line sitting in the studio at kpxq in 2000 when i was interviewing dave hunt who now knows how many traditions he had because he's in glory i'm sure he's saved and he's probably going oh my but dave hunt said to me because he was came from a brother and background if you know anything about the brethren you don't have traditions nobody has traditions brethren and i said to him he he mangled john chapter six just mangled it i said i said i said dave that's your tradition speaking he said to me james i have no tradition that's why i say to all of us we have our traditions it's good to know what they are so that we can subject them to the higher standard of the word of god but if you think you've got none you've got the most of all and you're not in a position to examine them we can't be in that situation i do not want the conclusion of this series on baptism to be here's our tradition and we just simply defended our tradition i want us to be convicted and convinced by doing the study correctly so the next time whenever that is i don't know when that is the next time that we look at this then we have to do what well we need to start off with some of the lexicographical stuff oh that sounds exciting but what i'll do is i'll provide you with lexical sources and with contemporaneous documents with the new testament and before the new testament demonstrating what baptizo and baptismas what these this word group meant to anybody who would have heard it and then we can start making application as we start working our way through the text there will be some sermons where we can cover two or three texts wow for us that's fast but there are others where i think for example the philippian jailer deserves his whole his own sermon because that's just that important it's just that important okay so i recognize some of this is almost more like a seminary classroom than a sermon sometimes that's what we need it's not all ooh excitement but at the same time if you think back on your baptism i hope it means something to you when you can go that was honoring to god that was honoring to his truth i think there's something truly valuable in that let's pray together our gracious heavenly father we we do thank you for your word and we thank you for the history of the church and we thank you for our brothers and sisters with whom we have disagreements about this but lord we confess we believe that your word can answer these questions and father we desire to be serious students of your word so that when we stand and say we believe this that we can do so with true conviction help us during this series help us to learn to understand to make application of these things to other areas as well grow us in maturity because this is what we desire we want to be more like jesus we thank you this time we pray in christ's name amen you

Channel: Apologia Studios

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Keywords: jeff durbin, apologia studios, apologia church, james white sermons, baptism debate, james white baptism, is baptism necessary for salvation, credobaptist, infant baptism, defense of infant baptism, baptismal regeneration, baptismal regeneration debate, james white debate, does baptism save us, baptist history, infant baptism debate, should we baptize babies

Id: 99gmXTt-5Tk

Length: 57min 55sec (3475 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 15 2020