What is Baptism and Why Infants? with Pastor Ryan Braley

Amen, you be seated.

Good morning everyone, good morning.

So here's what we're going to do.

We are going to talk.

It's our final week of our you Pick series, in which we've let people sort of pick and choose what they wanted to talk about or what questions they have or had.

And the question this morning is a great one, as what is baptism and why do we as Lutherans this is a Lutheran church now realized and recognized too that many of you in here would consider yourself or call yourself a Lutheran.

Some of you wouldn't, and that's okay, we're Lutheran enough for everybody, so you don't have to sort of be a died-in-the-wool Lutheran.

That's fine.

We often have Baptists who marry a Catholic and end up here.

Wonderful, we're just glad you're here.

But I want to give you sort of the Lutheran like theological reasoning behind baptism, what it means, what it does and why we baptize infants.

Now don't stone me right away.

If you don't agree with all of this, it's totally fine.

This is our stream, how we think of it, how we talk about it and just so you know, when we baptize people and we do baptize all ages, but we will baptize infants and I love baptizing infants, and I'll tell you why?

In a little bit.

But you are welcome to be like that's me, I'm all in 100%.

And you're also welcome to be like I don't know about that, ryan, no problem.

Some of the things too, just to give you a heads up, like sort of the elephant in the room.

Some of these things are gonna sound maybe a bit mystical for you, like what is all this sort of this ephemeral or like I don't?

You know, you can't quite put it in the laboratory and examine it under a microscope, and that's normal.

So bear with me for faith.

According to Hebrews, faith is living as though the things you hope for are real.

And we all have a faith in something.

Some folks have a faith that there is no God, that this is all that we see and that all that there is and that's, you know, humanism, materialism or atheism fine, fair enough.

That's a faith.

Though Others of us have faith that there are things that transcend the material world or are embedded within the material world, that we cannot always see, but we can sense or feel or we kind of have an idea.

That's wonderful too.

That's a faith as well.

And so baptism and even communion, these are things that are like.

They're sort of like hooks that hook us into that sort of transcendent way of thinking about life.

And so if it sounds a bit woo-woo to you this morning, that's okay, but life is a bit woo-woo, am I right?

I mean, there's a lot of things going on in our lives like I don't know how to explain a lot of this, but I'm gonna just do my best and live life and be faithful.

So fair enough, okay, now?

That being said, it's getting a little warm in here already.

That being said, I do encourage you to buckle up, and here's why this might feel like a different sermon, because I want to give you guys a lot of content, because this is important stuff, why we baptize how we baptize what it does.

So, to help you, I made a little cheat sheet and the ushers are gonna pass these out.

So do not feel obligated.

But if you're like, hey, I'd love to follow along in an outline and fill in some blanks and do that kind of thing to help keep your attention or to help you digest the info, raise your hand and we'll get one of those for you.

So raise your hand now and we'll have an usher get that for you.

Awesome, again, I don't feel obligated.

I don't feel bad.

I'm not gonna judge you for very long if you don't take one, but if you ever like, what does it mean to be a Lutheran?

This might be one of your sermons you wanna perk up for, so we'll get those.

Also, when we're done, I'm gonna give out some more resources for those who might want them, and even give you some, and also after that.

I just got a lot going on after that.

If you're like, hey, I still have 10 questions or I wanna argue some more, ryan, great, I love that.

I don't mind arguing or talking.

This is what the rabbis would do.

Come and grab me afterwards or let's get coffee.

I would love to talk about this.

I've got 20 minutes maybe 30, depending on how mad Ken will get at me and we'll kinda unpack as best we can.

Fair enough, but again, this is like these are things that theologians have wrestled with for years, and so we'll do the best we can.

All right, who's ready?

Okay, Katie's ready.

Luther, towards the end of his life, was holed up in this castle, and you might know the story.

He was there.

He was transiting the Bible for the first time from the Greek, which is the copy he had into German in order to get the Bible into the hands of ordinary people like you and me that couldn't read Greek or study Greek.

They needed it in their own language.

So Luther was in this castle for a long time transiting the Bible.

Now, while he was there, on many occasions now this might sound familiar to you too on many occasions he fell victim to or succumb to what you might call despair or discouragement or depression or anxiety.

He just fell overwhelmed with this task and what he might.

He also called spiritual warfare, like sort of the attack of the evil one, and it was a shadowy thing.

And when he would do that, when he would feel this, he would like flip out and he was known to throw his ink pot at whatever he thought was sort of tormenting him.

That's why I love Luther.

He would just sort of lash out, have all this crazy, but he would also stop and he would yell out, wherever he was, I am baptized.

He would just yell it out Not, I was baptized, but I am baptized.

Whenever he thought despair, discouragement, angst, anxiety, while doing this incredible task that I felt gotta give him, he would yell I am baptized.

Now you could do a lot worse.

The next time you're feeling discouraged or in despair or like you're being tempted by the evil one or engaging what you might call spiritual over, you could do worse than take a page from his book and yell out I am baptized.

I thought that was pretty cool.

I guess no one else is that impressed by this, but I liked it.

Now, by the way, if you're here this morning and you're not baptized and at the end of this sermon you're like man, I want to get baptized.

I just feel like it's something in my heart.

I'm going to have you come forward and we'll do it this morning.

You don't have to no pressure.

I'm not here to pressure you, but I don't care.

I mean, I care, I love you.

But so you know, we're going to do a few things in response to the sermon.

One of them is if you want to get baptized, we will baptize you.

Which raises the question what even is baptism?

Well, it comes from the Greek word baptism.

Everyone say baptism.

It looks just like baptism.

So there you go, figured it out, and baptism could mean one of two things.

It could even mean immersion underwater, or it could mean a cleansing or a washing of water.

So baptism is this cleansing they often call the Christians, often call the great bath of the Christian church.

You can look that image up there, sarah, that immersion, or there we go.

It's a once in a lifetime immersion, cleansing the great bath of the church.

Now, how the water was applied, luther said doesn't really matter.

Sometimes we want to argue in our certain church circles well, you better dunk the people.

No, it only counts if you sprinkle it on them.

No, no, you got to just wash them with it.

Luther said it doesn't matter, the form of how it's done doesn't matter.

So you might ask why don't we dunk people at central Well?

We don't have a pool.

I mean, luther preferred the dunking because it gives us great image of like a death and a resurrection or a, you know, going down and coming back up.

I like dunking as well, but we can't fit babies in this little pool, so we're gonna just pour water over their head.

But how the water is applied doesn't matter.

What matters is the presence of the water alongside and I'll go into this a little bit more alongside the promise of God and the command from Jesus.

So it's the word and the water that are important to Luther and others, not how it's applied.

So if you ever want to baptize somebody, you can dunk them, you can sprinkle on them, you can wash them, you do whatever you want, as long as it has water and the word from Jesus.

And of course, it goes back in the Christian tradition all the way to John the Baptist, who was a son of a priest who was working in the temple.

He leaves the temple, the institutional hub of all things, religion.

He leaves it and goes out into the wild.

Oh, by the way, in ancient Judaism, like other cultures and religions, they often had cleansing rituals.

This is a mikvah Everybody say mikvah.

It's where they would wash and cleanse themselves ritually to go into the temple to worship.

So this idea of cleansing and bathing in order to worship God was not new to people.

But John does something different.

John leaves the system.

He goes outside the box, the container, if you will and he ends up out here.

Go ahead for me, sarah.

And this wild part of that's not John, that's me actually.

This is the Jordan River, though.

In this wild, untamed place, it starts dunking people underwater and he declares this is a baptism, a cleansing and immersion for the forgiveness of sins.

Now is the moment where it becomes something different.

It's something unique.

He's shouting out loud as for the forgiveness of sins, if you're a Jew and you're hanging around which some were and you hear this, this is an announcement of the end of sins, or the forgiveness of them.

And remember, jews had spent a majority of their life in their story in exile as a direct result of their sin.

So what John is announcing theologically is like, hey, the exile is now over, what's gonna happen next?

Baptism, and of course, jesus, who comes right away, will be the end of the exile.

Now, if you're in the temple, in the institution and some ragtag, you know, harry Wildman is out there announcing the forgiveness of sins, you'd be upset.

Like that's our job.

We're the ones who have the market corner on this forgiveness of sins.

Don't be trying to steal our business, john.

And this is part of why John gets killed.

And when John does this, a bunch of people show up Jews, Gentiles, soldiers, pharisees.

A whole bunch of folks show up and the doors are flung wide open for anyone to join this renewal movement of baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

It's wonderful.

And wherever there's forgiveness of sins Remember this wherever that happens, there's always life and salvation.

Sin is this heavy thing that weighs on all of us, like big S sin and also little S sin.

These things weigh us down, they cause us all kinds of turmoil and tumble in our lives.

So whenever we're free of sin and sins, there's life and salvation.

So John's announcing a baptism that results in life and salvation.

Are you with me?

So far, great Half of you are Awesome.

The early church picks up on this and the early gatherers, who now are focused around Jesus and what he does, his life and his work, his death and resurrection, and asks to they start doing this.

Now, why would they do this?

It's not really clear, but they start doing it.

They say, hey, repent, which literally means to turn around the direction you were going.

Stop going that way, just sort of turn around, go a different direction.

Remember, for Jews, repentance was about your aim and life.

Repent and be baptized, everyone of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of sins.

Now it's a baptism around Jesus.

That is still, though, for the end of the exile, because many of us today are still in exile.

Are you with me?

So it's the forgiveness of sins.

So it's an invitation to participate with Jesus.

In the name of Jesus.

Come and be a part of his life, his teachings, his instruction, his death, his resurrection.

And it's also an invitation to the participation of the church.

Come and be a part of what we're doing.

So baptism was an invitation to a new way of living all the way around.

That's how great baptism really is.

It's not just a once you know well, I'll get there in a minute but it's this invitation to community, to be with others, to be part of the teachings of Jesus, to follow in his way, his footsteps, to break bread with each other, people we didn't even know before, strangers, complete strangers.

To break bread, to share a meal, to engage in prayer, to do life together.

So they were doing around the name of Jesus for the forgiveness of sins, and wherever there's forgiveness of sins there's life and salvation.

So by the middle of the second century, so you know, in the hundreds or the hundreds, baptism in communion becomes significant markers of Christian practice.

These didn't exist in this way before Jesus.

Now, out of all the things they did, the two things well, there was three, but the two things they did most often was they baptized each other and they shared in the meal together.

The third thing was they were missional, they always went outside of the walls.

So if the church ever stops doing those three things, it's time to leave.

You hear me, if we ever stop baptizing, sharing the meal or reaching out to others, and they actually, if that happens, they start to die on their own.

If you haven't noticed, churches that don't reach out, they die on their own and they're closing their doors by the year.

But that was the marker of the early church and these, by the way, the baptism in communion.

We call these something.

What do we call these?

You know what they're called.

They're.

Look at you guys.

This is great.

This is like catechism all over again.

Sacrament, now, if you're not a Lutheran or a Catholic, or maybe you've never heard, I get, here's where a sacrament is, just a heads up.

Lutherans only have two, catholics have seven.

We, the Lutherans, want to get easier on you, so we only have two of them.

But here's why, for a Lutheran, a sacrament is any time there's a command from Jesus and a promise from Jesus.

This is why we only have two, because there's only two of these that exist in the scripture.

The command for the baptism is Matthew.

At the end of Matthew, jesus says hey, go into all the world, make disciples and baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

That's the command and the promise comes from Mark 16.

Mark 16, 16, which we'll get to, I think, later says that whoever believes in his baptized is saved, because wherever there is forgiveness of sins, which is what baptism does, there's life and salvation.

So for John or, excuse me, for Jesus, for the early church and for Lutheran, for us Lutherans, a sacrament is a command and a promise.

A command is that go into all the world, preach, make disciples, baptize them, and the promise is salvation, life and salvation.

Now, oftentimes there's also an earthly element.

So what's the earthly element for baptism?

Water, now for communion, what is it?

Wine, and you guys are humming.

I love it.

So now, by the way, just to clarify up front, this is not a requirement of the law.

So if you want to go really deep into the weeds, read Galatians.

If justification came through the law, then Christ died for nothing.

So Galatians says I love it If you try to earn your own salvation, your own justification, to justify yourself before God.

Oh God, I'm so good.

I've been praying for five hours a day.

I memorized the book of Genesis.

Pastor Ryan, I buy his coffee when we go out.

I'm aren't I so good?

It doesn't matter, because if that worked, then Christ died for nothing and Christ didn't die for nothing.

So it's not a requirement, it's not a ladder.

You're not climbing the ladder to God.

It's not a ritual where you're trying to earn God's favor.

It's not a, it's not a work to God.

It is an absolute gift from God.

Here's the thing behind the thing for baptism.

So write this down in your notes.

I think it's in there Baptism is for you, it's a gift for you, but it's not about you.

Now follow me on this one.

Baptism is not about what you do or about you.

It's about what God does.

You in fact, do nothing in baptism.

You just sort of stand there.

If you're a baby, you lie there.

You might cry or scream and make lots of noise, but you don't do anything.

When I was I think I was like 13 when I got baptized I grew up in an evangelical uh, non-denominational church.

So different, right, I was 13.

In our tradition it had more to do with like like I'm, I'm going to declare my faith and I'm going to sort of say out loud in front of the public what I believe is true.

Now, lutherans might say, uh, it's kind of hard to know what we believe and and we often in our modern world think of belief as like a cognitive assertion.

But early on in the church I didn't think about belief in that way.

But here's the thing when I was there, I was like man, am I really ready?

Though Like I wanted to be ready to be baptized.

You know, as, as this 13-year-old kid, I was like am I ready?

Do I?

Do I feel it enough?

Is this really God, am I?

And if I could go back and tell myself, I would say this young man, it doesn't matter if you're ready, it doesn't matter if you feel it enough or not, cause this is not about you, it's about God and what God has done in and through Jesus Christ.

So it doesn't matter.

Our daughter, age Addison, was baptized when she was a little baby.

She must have been I don't know how many months old, a few months old and she screamed and cried the entire time and I was like, oh, so stressed out.

Our good friend and uncle, kurt Hinkel, who was the youth director before me, baptized her and I was like, oh, this is like this is going to ruin this perfect day.

Oh, she's screaming.

And maybe you're like, oh, when I baptized my kid, like, oh, my dress was a bit wrinkled or the pictures didn't turn out so well, or I was raining that day, or Aunt Susie couldn't show up, or brother Tim was upset with me.

Here's the bottom line.

None of that matters, because it's not about you, it's a gift, for actually, to you, it's God's action to you.

It doesn't matter if you're ready or if you're enough or if you're perfect, because God is all of those things.

So what does baptism do then?

I'm glad you asked.

Let me tell you, because why would Luther yell that?

Why would he, in the middle of despair, yell I am baptized.

Why would he say that?

Here's the bottom line Baptism brings life and salvation.

So, titus, check it out.

Titus says this he has saved us not because of things that we have done.

Your righteous deeds don't matter for that.

They're good and keep doing them, but they don't matter for your salvation.

It's not dependent on your righteous deeds, but because of his mercy.

You are saved by the mercy of God, thank God.

He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal, by baptism or by the Holy Spirit.

Okay, go ahead for me, sarah.

So notice a few words.

Salvation, because this idea of washing is Titus is definitely, and Titus, he's talking about baptism here.

So we're saved somehow because the mercy of God Through the washing and the rebirth and the renewal.

And who's the activator of the washing and the rebirth and the renewal?

Are you the activator?

Are you the activator?

Who is the Holy Spirit?

There you go.

So he saved us.

Also, mark 16 says this.

I already told you this, but here it is again those who believes and are baptized are saved.

Romans, I love this, my favorite verse about baptism.

Romans 6 says this Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ were baptized into death?

This is, by the way, how you're saved.

You're saved in death and resurrection.

So there you go.

There's your good news for this morning.

Therefore, we have been buried with Christ by baptism in the death, so that, as Christ was raised from the dead, so we might also be raised from the dead and walk in a newness of life.

Where there's baptism, there's forgiveness of sins and life and salvation.

Baptism is not a reward.

It's the mercy of God to us, it's an act of kindness.

Titus tells us it's dependent on the loving mercy and grace and goodness of God.

It's God who saves us.

Now here's what I mean by salvation, because some of you are out there like wait a minute.

So baptism is salvation or I have to be baptized to be saved?

Now, the one obviously great example of all this kind of going up in the air, up in smoke, is the thief on the cross who wasn't baptized, didn't go to catechism, didn't do any acts of service.

So it's the grace and mercy of God that allows us to be invited into this place with the Father, son and Holy Spirit.

So never forget that.

But here's what I mean by salvation, just so we're all clear.

So baptism is about what God does, and if it leads to salvation, then salvation is not about what you do, but what God does.

Many of us in some traditions will think I will be saved if I do X, y or Z, if I say the right things, if I read the right things, if I act in an appropriate way and I get all that.

But your salvation is not dependent upon you for any reason.

It's what God does in and through Jesus that leads to salvation.

Now you can live in tune with that and in congruence with that, or you can live in rebellion to that.

That's up to you.

But how you live in response to God's saving work is up to you.

But it isn't about you.

Lest anyone should boast, paul writes so baptism, then, is not some kind of magical thing where I just sprinkle baby babies, sprinkle water on a baby's head and voila, they go to heaven when they die.

Because salvation is not voila heaven when you die, right.

It's not an insurance policy to avoid hell or to get into heaven when you know, in case anything happens.

Salvation means abundant life.

You've been invited now, here, in this time and in this place, as well as in what we would call the age to come or after you die, into an abundant fullness of life, freedom, liberty, life, salvation.

This is what it means to be saved, not just to be like, oh, when I die, I'm going to heaven.

Because if that was the case, if it was magic, I would just sprinkle everybody and then I would be like just go and live your lives, I'll see you when you die and I do your funeral and I wouldn't care if you came back, but I want you to come back, because salvation has everything to do with the here and the now and the tomorrow and your 3 o'clock appointment on Tuesday and so on.

Salvation means freedom from the tyranny.

And Luther would say this way go ahead I think it's on the screen from sin, death and the devil.

We're freed from sin, death and the devil and the tyranny of those things and we're invited to all the benefits of the kingdom of God.

Now I'm gonna skip those examples, sarah, but know that we've been in, we've been rescued, set free, saved from the despair, exile, anxiety, emptiness.

We've been invited from that through baptism, into life, into freedom and to liberty and the wholeness, completeness, healing these kinds of things.

So how does, how does water do that?

How does baptism actually save us?

Well, acts to again I have it on the screen acts to says this Go ahead for me.

Sarah Says repent, you have to ask For the friggin sense.

So this, this idea of baptism, it's got this movement to it.

So baptism, like this vehicle, that sort of takes us, sort of into salvation, if you will.

And Baptism does it in a cut, in three ways I think.

Of those three ways, one it reminds us that we belong to Jesus.

There's a question of who owns you or whose you are.

Baptism reminds you that you are a beloved son or daughter of the Most High, and it does so by uniting us with the death and resurrection of Jesus.

So I read that in Roman 6 already.

I think I have it up there, though, but so, yeah, go ahead.

Go back for me, sarah, would you please?

Yeah, there we go.

So it reminds us that we belong to Christ and it unites us into his death and resurrection.

Okay, number two.

It also unites us with other Christians and other people that are under Christ, which means this friends, what unites us?

Look around the room, look around real quick.

What unites all of us is not doctrine, which is why we can have Lutherans in here, some Baptists who snuck in, even some Catholics.

Ah, that's okay, that's actually a good thing.

We probably look a lot like the early church.

We were really just Jews and Gentiles.

That's what they were trying to figure out how to live together in this way, because what unites us is not gonna always be doctrine.

It won't be a standard of holiness Whose level.

10 holiness.

You're all invited in.

Everybody else.

Go to that church over there and you can.

You know, it's not that either.

It's not it, not even our denominational lines that unite us.

What unites us is Baptism in the Christ.

So 1 Corinthians 12, in case you want to know, says this for in one spirit we were all baptized into one body Jews, greeks, slaves, free males, females, all of us.

This is what unites us and we're all made to drink of one spirit.

So number three, what it does for salvation it delivers us I mentioned from sin, death and the devil and gives us the benefit of the kingdom.

Now here's the other elephant in the room.

This is where Paul is brilliant.

You might be thinking to yourself man, I don't feel like I'm free of sin, death and the devil some days.

I don't.

I got it.

I'm there with you and we do live in that in between time, in between sort of the Garden of Eden and the future restoration of all things that Jesus promises in Revelation and other places.

So there's a tension, like the victory of God has been won in Jesus on the cross, he's risen from the dead, done deal.

But we live in this sort of this enactment stage where we're there but not yet, and we feel the tension.

This is why Luther yells I am baptized, because sometimes you've got to remind yourself or those around you or the evil one like I'm baptized.

This is not who I am.

I'm the beloved son of God.

I'm the beloved daughter of God.

That's fine.

So remind yourself and remember that we live in this tension of the in between here and not yet.

Also, this is why we do confession and absolution.

You don't get baptized more than once because there's only one baptism.

So if you fall back into sin or back into, like you know, sort of your own self, love run amok kind of ways, then you come back and you can be rebaptized through I mean quote unquote through confession and absolution.

So we do confession all the time.

So come back and receive forgiveness of sins from God and renewal from God again and remember you're baptized.

So there you go.

Now here's some images.

I'll go through them kind of quickly because I'm burning daylight.

Here are some images in the New Testament for baptism.

Baptism is about a new life or new birth.

It's also about go ahead a washing, or a cleansing, a bathing.

Here's some scriptures for that.

I'm gonna write them down.

So baptism is about cleansing.

It's a cleansing bath.

It's a washing away of sins that your sins were once as scarlet, now there's white as snow.

It's also here's another image Sealed.

We tell babies you've been sealed by the Holy Spirit.

That means you've been sort of branded by the Holy Spirit.

You now belong to God.

Right, you've been deemed or sealed as authentic.

You're really the beloved son or daughter of God and we announce in front of your whole family, the whole church and even you, even though you're in many cases a baby.

It's also about you've been invited out of the old creation, the old way of doing things, into a new creation.

This one's about, I asked Olivia.

I go, olivia, find me a slide or an image about adoption, and of course Olivia, the animal lover, picks this one about a dog being adopted.

Fair enough, you get the idea We've been adopted as sons and daughters into the family of God and this, my friends, is an absolute gift.

But can water do all that?

It's just water.

I mean water is powerful.

I mean it brings life.

When it rains it can bring death.

When there's flooding or in the ocean, it's powerful, it cleanses.

I mean, think about the power of water when all these cosmological problems have been solved in the shower of all places.

Am I right?

Just me then?

I spent about 15 minutes in the shower and only about half of one minute is actually spent cleansing myself.

The other 14 and a half minutes is I'm solving all my problems in life and in the world.

Water is powerful, but it's not water alone.

It's not, this is just water.

But when it's water tied to the promises of God which are in the water, and with the water, the command and the promise of Jesus and the faith, it becomes something unique.

And when I say faith, I mean this, not faith you muster up.

I gotta be ready for baptism, I gotta be good enough for God.

I gotta believe with my brain that God is.

I don't mean that.

I mean the faithful, because it's not about you remember.

I mean the faithfulness of God, that when you were a sinner, god was still faithful.

When you went astray, god was still faithful.

This is what we depend on and rely on.

It's a refusal of God to give up on us, even no matter how far down that dark hole you've gone.

So you can cling to.

I am baptized.

It's also about the faith of your family, who brought you to baptism, the community around you.

Hey, we're gonna help raise you and teach you and love on you and we're gonna live as though these things are real the command and the promise of Jesus.

What if they were real?

Now, quickly.

Why do we baptize infants?

Well, here's one reason why because I want to do this one day.

I want to change how I do it.

I want to do it like this from now on.

Maybe I got a video I want to show you.

Yes, look at that baby's face.

Man, oh man, that solves the crying problem.

That baby was not crying, he was trying to breathe.

I wonder if I could do it in this little Okay, quickly.

There's not any scriptural evidence for or against infant baptism.

So just put your mind at ease.

You cannot find any proof.

Text like this is why we're going to.

They says there's a command to baptize infants or only a command to baptize adults.

That's why I will baptize anybody, I don't care, but it's more of a theolog.

There are some instances where there are adults baptize.

In the early days of the church, for example, it was all adults, that was all that there was.

There was like first generation baptized, you know, but they also baptized whole families.

There's several examples.

I got them on that sheet.

I think they're on that sheet.

It's not come finding In Acts and 1 Corinthians.

A number of most of them baptized whole families, which would mean infants as well.

More than a scriptural proof text, though, it's a theological picture of what God is doing, so it's always an image of God.

To us, faith is not dependent on your rationalistic terms, rather their relational terms.

You don't do anything.

It's about God's work in us.

Discipleship also begins at birth and baptizing a baby, an infant who can do nothing, it's a beautiful picture of the unconditional love and mercy of God.

Think about it.

Babies are just a general drain on us.

They don't do anything.

They've not given their tithes or offerings, they've not volunteered once, they've not done catechism class, they've not memorized any Bible verses.

And I love it.

It's a proclamation of the gospel that baby's just been a burden on everybody.

But we don't care.

We're going to love them and dunk them anyway, because we love babies, amen.

So that's what we baptized, and I can go on for another hour on that, but I don't have time.

So this morning central, may you know that God has come to you in Jesus on the cross.

You didn't earn that, you didn't deserve it.

He just did it because he loved you and he went.

Oh, I don't have time for that either, but he wants to come to you.

Because you can't go to God, it's just impossible.

And so stop trying, because God has already come to you in Jesus and in baptism.

So this morning, here's what we're going to do.

If you're here this morning and you're like, hey, we're going to sing a song, we're going to give some of our offerings and then we're going to close in prayers, we're going to pray for our little ones and their backpacks and that whole thing I got some water here and, if you want to, this will be confession and a number of other things happening at one time.

During the song.

You're going to hand that diana place.

You can come forward and take the water.

You can make confession in your own heart as you come forward and lay the things down that you need to lay down and get things right with God on your end God's already done it on his end, but on your end, sort of get your heart back, repent, turn around, that kind of thing.

Come forward, you can dip your thumb or your finger in the water and to mark yourself with the cross of Christ and remind yourself.

You can do it out loud if you want, I don't care, or do it quietly, I'm baptized, you've been forgiven, you've already been saved.

Jesus did that, not you.

Jesus did that.

So that's one option Come forward and you can dip your thumb in the water.

You can just rub it on your finger and dunk yourself, or whatever you want to do in the water and remind yourself that you have been baptized and remember your baptism.

Or, if you're right, I've never been baptized.

I would love to be baptized.

Then I'm going to come over to this font here and I'll baptize you, and we'll do it right here, right now, this morning, and other than that, we're going to sing and pray.

Fair enough, ok.

So may you remember, central, that God loves you and God forgives you and God wants to raise you from the dead, and baptism is one of those ways, sort of the vehicle through which it happens for many of us.

And, more than anything, may you know that God has come to you in Jesus, amen.