Our theme this morning is baptism, a means of grace, and as we know, because of the covenant and God's one way of saving us throughout the Old and the New Testament, the foreshadowing of baptism was circumcision, the sign of faith in the Old Testament, as baptism is the sign of faith in the New Testament. So we begin our study of baptism this morning with Genesis 17, verses 1 through 7. When Abram was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, I am God Almighty, walk before me and be blameless. I will confirm my covenant between me and you and will greatly increase your numbers. Abram fell face down and God said to him, As for me, this is my covenant with you. You will be the father of many nations. No longer will you be called Abram. Your name will be called Abraham, for I have made you a father of many nations. I will make you very fruitful. I will make nations of you, and kings will come from you. I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come to be your God and the God of your descendants after you. The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you, and I will be their God. And then we'll turn to Matthew chapter 28, the familiar passage known as the Great Commission. Where baptism is instituted by Christ. Matthew 28, verses 16 to the end of the chapter. Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to a mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshipped him, but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you, and surely I am with you always to the very end of the age. And then we'll turn to Romans chapter 6, and we'll read verses 1 through 11. what shall we say then shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase by no means we died to sin how can we live in it any longer or don't you know that all of us who were baptized into christ jesus were baptized into his death we were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that just as christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the father we too may live a new life. If we have been united with him like this in his death, we will certainly also be united with him in his resurrection. For we know that our old self was crucified with him, so that the body of sin may be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin, because anyone who has died has been freed from sin. Now if we died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him. For we know that since Christ was raised from the dead, he cannot die again. Death no longer has mastery over him. The death he died, he died to sin once for all, but the life he lives, he lives to God. In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus. And also from Colossians chapter 2. We'll read the verses 8 through 15. See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the basic principles of this world, rather than on Christ. For in Christ, all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form. And you have been given fullness in Christ, who is the head over every power and authority. In Him you were also circumcised in the putting off of the sinful nature, not with the circumcision done by the hands of men, but with the circumcision done by Christ, having been buried with Him in baptism and raised with Him through your faith in the power of God who raised Him from the dead. When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code with its regulations. That was against us, and that stood opposed to us. He took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. Therefore, let anyone judge you by what you eat or drink, or with regard to a religious festival, a new moon or celebration, or a Sabbath day. These things are a shadow of the things that were to come. The reality, however, is found in Christ. Dear people of God, this morning we witnessed baptism in the first service, and so I chose to preach on baptism this morning. Baptism, a means of grace, as you see in your bulletin, is a title, and there's three different points. Baptism is an outward sign and seal of a spiritual reality, namely God's covenant of grace with us, the gospel declared and sealed to us. Baptism is an action on God's part marking us and an action on our part submitting to God's marking us as his own. It is a sign and seal that is to confirm our faith, a means of grace. God has used the word through the Holy Spirit to create faith in our hearts, and he uses this sacrament of baptism to strengthen our faith and confirm our faith. We're slow learners, and so he gives not only his word, but he also gives us a physical, visible sign and seal that we can see and touch and feel and taste, like in the Lord's Supper also. And so he helps us to believe his promises. Let's begin our study of baptism this morning by noting the first point then, that baptism is a mark of our identity. In the spring in Montana, the calves and the cows are rounded up. The baby calves are born in January and February. And then in March or April, when a nice spring day comes and it's dry outside, the cowboys go out and they round up the cows and the calves. They used to round them up with horses. Now they round them up with four-wheelers. And then they take those calves and they rope them or catch them or put them in a stall. And they used to take and have a big fire and put a brand in the fire. like the Lazy H or the CA Ranch. Each farmer had his own brand. When the brand became red hot, they would take the brand and they would apply it to the back hind quarter of the calf and they would put a mark on that calf. And the reason they branded calves is so that rustlers could not steal the calves and get away with it because when they took them to market, there would be that brand in every calf or every full-grown cow. now would be checked at the marketplace to see if the brand matched the farmer's brand. They don't do that anymore. Today, they poke a little hole in their ear, and they stick a number in that ear, a tag. In fact, I'm told by dairy farmers that they're not even going to do that anymore. They're going to take a computer chip and put a little chip in the ear of each cow and each cow. And that little chip will tell the heredity, the bloodlines of that calf. And that little chip in the cow will tell how much milk that cow produces according to how much feed it eats, the efficiency of the feed-to-the-milk ratio. And so when they get really good at this, the cow will put his head in the bunk and automatically the machine will dump a certain amount of food down, which that cow deserves because he produces so much milk. But the point of all this is to say that you and I have been branded. We've been marked. We've been identified by our owner, God the Father, and our Savior, Jesus Christ. And that mark is our baptism. I am Jehovah's, you are Jehovah's, I am God's child, I am Christ's person. That's what we are witnessing to and saying when we are baptized and when we have our children baptized. Isaiah 44 verse 5 says of God's people, This one will say, I am the Lord's. Another will call himself by the name of Jacob. Another will write on his hand the Lord's and surname himself by the name of Israel. That's what we are doing when we are baptized and when we have our children baptized. We are testing to the fact that we belong to God, to our faithful Savior, That he has sealed us with his Holy Spirit. That he will work in our hearts. And that the salvation that he has begun he will bring to completion in Christ Jesus. To be baptized is to acknowledge your identity. Now for you and me to be baptized and for our children to be baptized is not a costly thing. Of course to be identified as a Christian living in 21st century America is getting to be a thing that may bring upon you some amount of verbal abuse or perhaps even some forms of persecution. But primarily we are very free to worship God in this country as we believe. But to be baptized in other nations is a very costly business. To be identified as God's child and God's person is to deny the gods of the people with whom you live. And to be baptized may be the mark of martyrdom. You may suffer the ultimate persecution of death because you have been marked as gods. And you have denied the gods, the false gods of the culture in which you live. And you may be shunned by your family and driven out of the community, imprisoned, and maybe even killed. So boys and girls and young people and adults, if you've been baptized, the first words out of your mouth when someone says, who are you, should not be that I am van so-and-so or vander so-and-so. Should not be, I'm an American, I'm a Californian, I'm a Republican, I'm a Democrat, I'm a cadet, I'm a Jim, I'm a Kiwanis member, or whatever. The thing that most clearly and comprehensively defines who you are is your baptism. I am the Lord's. He has put his mark on my life. And that mark on my life determines how I think about myself. It determines how I talk, and it determines how I behave. I say I belong to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. Baptism also is to be remembered. Martin Luther said, when Satan comes knocking at your door, if Satan comes to you and he wants to place doubt in your life and he wants to keep a burden of guilt on you and tell you that you are unworthy to be God's child and that you're kidding yourself and that God can't begin to forgive all your sins because you keep on sinning, all you have to do is remember your baptism. God's guarantee, God's declaration, that your sins have been forgiven through Jesus Christ. If Satan comes to you and he says, do this and you will live. Do this and life will be better. You can say, no, Satan, I don't belong to you. Your mark is not on me. I've been set apart for a different way of life. I have a different Lord and Master. I chose to be the servant of the Lord Jesus Christ and not your servant. And I don't have to listen to you anymore. And my baptism proves my identity. So baptism is, first of all, a mark of identity. Secondly, baptism is a sign of the covenant of grace. It's a sign of your relationship with God through the gospel. The covenant of grace, the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. As it's said in the Old Testament to Abraham, it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you, and it will be a sign of the righteousness of faith. In the New Testament, Abraham received circumcision as sign and seal of the righteousness which he had of faith. So it's the same for us, except the sign is now not bloody, but the sign is baptism instead of circumcision. A visible sign and seal appointed by God, our confession says, to fully declare and seal to us the promise of the gospel. Now what exactly is the promise of the gospel? In the first service this morning, I said that and nobody raised their hand. And I said, do you know the gospel? How many of you know the gospel? Well, it's a rhetorical question, so you don't have to raise your hand. But it's a very important question. If you've been here more than one Sunday, you ought to know the gospel. And it's a great way to talk to people. This week I was at graduate fairs all week, and I sat next to Lassier College, which is a Seventh-day Adventist college, and the young man there was from Jamaica, and he told me that over half the people in Jamaica are Seventh-day Adventists. And we talked for a while, and then I said to him, What is the gospel? What is the gospel according to how you believe? And I was very happy with what he said. He said, the gospel is that Jesus is my savior from sin and the Lord of my life. And I thought, he could have been reformed just from that. But anyway, asking people what is the gospel is a great way to get to the heart and core of what they believe. I sat in a plane a couple months ago back in July on the way back from Salt Lake. And I was sitting next to an Olympic athlete, a big tall swimmer from Argentina. And he had just lost the Olympic finals and he wasn't going to get to go to the Olympics. But he had in his hand the Da Vinci Code. And so I thought I'll engage him in some conversation and ask him if he knew what the book was about and on and on and on. And finally I got to the big question, what is the gospel? And he was a Roman Catholic, and he gave me a works answer. And so we talked about the gospel from Salt Lake until we landed. What is the gospel? You have to be completely clear about it. And baptism is a declaration of the gospel and a seal, a guarantee of the gospel. Now, the gospel is what we read in Colossians 2, 11 through 14, and in Romans 6, verses 1 through 4. The gospel is that you have died to your sin. That while you were conceived and born in sin, as Paul says in Ephesians chapter 2, and that you are a child of wrath, that your nature is to do the things of your sinful flesh, that your inclination is to have futile thinking, that while you were dead, God in His great mercy came to you and made you alive in Jesus Christ. The gospel is that you have been united with Jesus Christ through faith and baptism is a symbol and a sign of that and that you have been crucified with Christ and that he has nailed to the cross all your sins. That you have been united in his death, though that his death counts for you, as well as his perfect life, his sin atoning death. And the gospel is that just as Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, that God gives you regeneration. The Holy Spirit comes and powerfully awakens within you faith and reinvigorates your will and transforms your minds and motivates you to live a new life of gratitude to God. That's the Gospel. The Gospel is that you were a sinner bound for hell and now you're a saint in Jesus Christ given the gift of eternal life. That's the gospel, people of God. The righteousness of faith sealed to Abraham in the Old Testament. The righteousness of Jesus Christ imputed to us in the New Testament. The gospel is the good nose. And that's what baptism fully declares to us and seals to us. 1 Peter 3, verse 21 says, Baptism, which corresponds to this, now saves you, not as the removal of dirt from the body, but in appeal to God for a clear conscience through the resurrection of Jesus Christ. It's a different way of talking about baptism, but one that is very profound and very shocking. How many of you have a clear conscience this morning? How many of you, if you died right now and stood before the Father and had to give account of everything you've ever done, would have a clear conscience? Standing before God, he's looking right at you, you're looking at him, and you could say to God, I have a clear conscience. I want to read something to you from our Confession of Faith. Question and answer 60 of the Heidelberg Catechism. How are you right with God? Only by true faith in Jesus Christ, even though my conscience accuses me of having grievously sinned against all God's commandments and of never having kept any of them, and even though I am still inclined towards all evil, nevertheless, without my deserving it at all, out of sheer grace, God grants and credits to me the perfect satisfaction, righteousness, and holiness of Christ as if I had never sinned nor been a sinner, as if I had been as perfectly obedient as Christ was obedient for me. All I need to do is to accept this gift of God with a believing heart. Peter is saying that if you've been baptized and you understand you're in baptism and you embrace your baptism, you can have a clear conscience before God. Because baptism fully declares the forgiveness of your sins. And it's God's guarantee that your sins have been forgiven just as surely as the water has touched your body. I am to consider myself dead to sin and alive to God. As water in California is very important because it's a desert and desert land hardly grows anything. Some doesn't grow anything. It's just sand. But when you bring the water, it turns into a life-giving place and it's lush and green and all kinds of produce is grown. It's a symbol of life and so is baptism. Resurrection from the dead. God places His Holy Spirit in our hearts and we're reborn and regenerated so we can produce the works of the Holy Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit, good works that God ordained for us to do when He called us in Jesus Christ. That's what baptism is about, death to sin and new life for God. That's the gospel. I'm a changed person, a new creation. It's no longer the old me that lives, but Christ lives in me. So it's a sign of the gospel. And it's a seal of the gospel. And you know what a seal is. It's a guarantee. And this guarantee has the backing of God, who speaks with ultimate authority. And He makes wonderful promises. And His promises are sure and can be absolutely dependent upon. And so baptism guarantees those promises. guarantees to us that He forgives our sins, guarantees to us that He who began a good work in us will bring it to completion, guarantees to us that He's given us His Holy Spirit and that Holy Spirit will work in our lives and none of us will be taken away from Jesus out of His hand and be given over to the evil one. If we embrace the truth of our baptism, it is a guarantee of our salvation. So baptism, a sign and a seal of the gospel. Thirdly, baptism is an obligation to be believed and to be lived. In the Old Testament, Israel received wonderful promises from God. The patriarchs and their sons and the 12 tribes of Israel were given wonderful promises from God. But it says in the book of Hebrews that they never entered in to the final rest. They never received the promises. And why not? Because they didn't embrace the promises by a true faith. Esau was born in a covenant family. Esau had all the blessings of being born and raised in a covenant family. He had all the promises of God. He had a spiritual inheritance. But Esau did not embrace by faith that which was his by circumcision. Rather, he became a covenant breaker. He was indifferent towards these promises. And he sold his birthright for a cup of soup. Hebrews chapter 10 verse 29 is a great warning to covenant people and to covenant children. It's a great warning that we do not become like Esau and not embrace our baptism. Hebrews 10 verse 29 says, One who has trampled under the Son of God underfoot, counted the blood of the covenant by which he was made holy as an unholy thing and insulted the Holy Spirit of grace. If we don't embrace our baptism, that's a description of us. We count Jesus' blood as worthless. The water that symbolizes the blood in baptism, if we don't embrace our baptism, we are dishonoring Christ and his sacrifice. And trampling it underfoot. And baptism is a symbol that we're set apart and made holy for God. And we're taking that holy symbol and making it unholy. And we are looking at the Spirit who was promised to us in baptism and saying, We don't want you. We count it of no effect. And so boys and girls and young people, when you're old enough to understand these things, you are under great compulsion to profess your faith in Jesus Christ, to accept your baptism. Baptism is a tremendous blessing. This morning when I was given the privilege of ministering baptism to my grandson, it's a great privilege to know that that child is not neutral before God, that that child is not negative before God, but that that child is positive in God's presence. Our children do not stand waffling as neutral and they're not negative anymore under the wrath of God. Our children are in a very special relationship with God and they need to grow up to embrace that. And boys and girls who are covenant children, you have a great blessing to be received by faith and embraced. And if you don't accept that blessing, it becomes a curse. Then you are far worse off than the children who were born in Sodom and Gomorrah and didn't know the truth about God. Because you have these great privileges, you must embrace them. How shall you escape if you neglect so great a salvation? Anyone in the Old Testament who was part of the people of Israel was to receive the sign of circumcision. And if they did not receive the sign of circumcision, they were to be cut off from God and his people. And God took that very seriously. You know the story when God called Moses to lead the people out of Egypt. Moses went towards Egypt and he was on the way and God stood before him and said, Moses, you're not going to pass. I might even kill you because you haven't circumcised your children. Go back and circumcise your children before you can live, before you can be used of me. Circumcision was very important and baptism is very important also. And not to recognize your baptism, accept your baptism, is an affront to God. It must be received by God as the great blessing and promise it is. And in so doing, you take an oath of allegiance, a vow of consecration. An adult who is baptized says, I will be God's person and I will pursue godliness. And the parents of children who are baptized take a vow and say, I will do everything in my power to raise this child, to instruct this child, to give an example to this child of what it means to be a believer. So it's an oath of allegiance. It's a vow of consecration. It's something that we promise to believe and to do and to live out in our daily life. So those three points this morning. It's a mark of identity so that when Satan comes your way, you can say, I don't belong to you and I don't have to listen to you and remember your baptism. It's a mark of your identity. It, more than anything else, defines who you are, how you think, and how you will behave. Secondly, it's a declaration and a guarantee of the gospel of Jesus Christ. And thirdly and finally, it is that oath and that obligation to be believed and embraced and to be lived in your daily life. Let us pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you. We thank you that even though we were born and conceived in sin and were by nature children and men and women under wrath because we had original sin and we also do actual sins, we thank you, Father, that you did not leave us in that state bound for hell, but that in your great love you came to us and saved us in Jesus Christ and you gave us the sacrament of baptism to identify us as new people. That this is the sign of our relationship with you, our new relationship and our new life. We thank you, Father, that this sign and this guarantee is not only given to us as adult believers, but it's given to our children. Lord, how would we dare to bring children into this world of brokenness and sin and into post-Christian America if it were not for your precious promise that these children are not born in a state in which you are indifferent towards them or in which you hate them. That they are born under the covenant of love and protection and your promise to work in their lives. And Lord, we pray for our children this morning. We pray that every one of our children who was baptized has embraced their baptism and they love you. And we pray, Father, for those children who have been baptized who have not embraced that you will not give them any rest, that you'll trouble their conscience and that you will bring them to their knees and that they will accept their baptism and the precious promises of your covenant of grace. And Lord, we pray that you will help us to be faithful in the proclamation of the gospel to the world and that you will gather to yourself all those among all the nations and tribes and tongues and that they may become baptized. And we pray, Father, that as those who have been baptized, we will follow through and we will also be taught all the things that you commanded us and that we will discipline ourselves and become disciples and disciple-makers. And, Lord, when we fail and when we sin, thank you for the precious promise that you're with us to the end of the age and that you will not forsake us and that when we are faithless you will be faithful and that you who have begun the work in our lives will bring it to fruition. And thank you, Father, for baptism that signifies and seals that to us. We thank you for all that you've done for us in Christ your Son. In Jesus' name, amen.