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Why Die?
Presenter: Larry Kirkpatrick
Location: Mentone Seventh-day Adventist Church, CA, USA
Delivery: 2008-11-01 22:07Z
Publication: GreatControversy.org 2008-11-01 22:07Z
Type: Sermon
URL: http://www.greatcontroversy.org/gco/ser/kirl-whydie.php
A Baptism Sermon
Today, baptisms; living, breathing human beings will, of their own free choice, voluntarily renounce their old life, in symbol being buried and resurrected. But why? Why would anyone choose to take such a step? Why die?
A Moral Problem
No two people share exactly the same values. Still, there are points we hold in common. We needn’t look far afield to recognize that people have problems with morality. All we need do is look at our own hearts.
Looking at your own heart is a hard thing. Who wants to admit faults, accept responsibility, acknowledge foolish and even wicked things one has done? Who wants to revisit thoughts, imaginations, fantasies even, and admit to their content?
Everyone has some glimmer of conscience; we all fear it somewhat. Taking a close personal inventory means seeing our evil, admitting we have become rebels, confessing that we have sinned against man and against God. We prefer to silence the voice of conscience, put-off reckoning, forestall judgment. We want to leave moral matters suspended, unresolved, delayed. A more convenient time is preferred.
But there remains in us another desire. We suppress, but it persists. It too is powerful. There is a longing to improve, an urgent search for meaning. We indulge ourselves any number of ways, but still there is a sense of incompletion, a gloomy feeling that we are meant for something better, that we have been living far below our privileges, that by our own choices we are setting our course toward some final destruction. There is in us, not only an appeal from evil but also from the good.
Romans 2:4 tells us that the goodness of God leads us to repentance. Jesus said, “I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto Me” (John 12:32). There is a reason for this.
Jesus is the source of our life. He is “the light which lighteth every man” (John 1:9). Like attracts like. Every man is made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27). Jesus is “the express image” (Hebrews 1:2).
Even those who are evil desire to give good gifts to their children (Matthew 7:11; Luke 11:13). A certain entertainer was interviewed, one known for her production of sexually-suggestive videos. They asked if she permitted her children to watch MTV (where the videos regularly play). She said that, No, she did not permit it, that, in fact, she would not even let her children watch television. What is going on here? This unsavory entertainer has a higher standard for her own children than she does for herself. She wants to give them good gifts.
Every human being has in himself an attraction to righteousness, justice, and mercy. We are wired to be receptive to, and to have an inward curiosity about, goodness. Some forget this. They emphasize only that in the unregenerate heart there is love for sin. That is part but not the whole picture. Yes, in the unconverted there is a habitual cherishing and excusing of sin. But still to there is attraction to the good. The most evil person can appreciate a beautiful sunset, delicious food, or a soothing back rub. God sends His rain and His sunshine upon the evil and just both. His mercies are new every day—even to those who refuse Him.
Alas, although He draws us, there is in each of us a bent to evil. When Adam and Eve rebelled against God they distorted their humanity. Sin brings corruption. To steal brings shame. To strike a fellow human being made in God’s image lessens your own sense of self worth. To do wrong is to cheapen your own picture of yourself. Every decision for moral compromise triggers certain changes in your feelings, and by some small increment rewires your brain.
You want to do better, but you find otherwise. You want to give yourself to God, but your resolve is weak. You find yourself controlled by the habits of your life of sin. Your promises to God are like ropes of sand. It seems that you cannot control your thoughts or even your feelings. You know that you have broken promises, and this weakens your confidence in your own sincerity. You come to feel that God cannot accept you. You condemn yourself, you give up, you feel that you cannot even approach God.
In our own power we are helpless to resist. Left to ourselves, we trend relentlessly downward. We are condemned and alone and hopeless. And so we hear Paul, “I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now, if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law that it is good. . . I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out” (Romans 7:15b, 16, 18b ESV). We are trapped in a moral world without the power to be moral. It was not God’s doing nor was it ours.
A Moral Solution
We are born, then, beholden to our disordered humanity. We have two inclinations, one to right and one to wrong. The good that we would prefer to do we are powerless to do, while the evil we would prefer not to do we can accomplish immediately. We are not responsible for this situation. Still, there is a right and a wrong, still God is judge and our lives will be evaluated.
In our fallen estate we may live 70 years. (Any more is but a bonus.) Here is a problem: we are not immortal. We do not have life in ourselves. Scripture presents our life as a candle flame or as grass, up quickly, then dying and dead (James 1:10, 11). Made in God’s image, with the entrance of sin we are perishable. We need a life that endures but we do not have it. Here Jesus speaks as John records:
He that heareth My word, and believeth on Him that sent Me, hath everlasting life, and shall not come into condemnation; but is passed from death unto life (John 5:24).
God has everlasting life. He gives it to whom He will. He will not force people to change, He will not force them to be good. He does not force salvation down anyone’s throat. At the same time, He gives life and opportunity to intentionally and intelligently choose one’s orientation. Will we choose unselfishness and life, or selfishness and death? He offers to help.
He instructs us in the way we should go. But in order to receive this instruction we must hear it. To hear in the means to obey. Will we hear God and obey Him?
Some have been taught to think of Christianity as a list of rules set up by God. If we obey these rules then He is obligated to save us. On the contrary, God gave us a brain because He wants us to think; He gave us a conscience because He wants us to weigh right and wrong; He gave us the ability not only to think but to do because He wants us to do good in His world. The Christian walk is not about a cold, distant list of rules; it is about God telling us what He is like, what love is truly like, what holiness is really like, and urging us to echo it into the world.
We are to hear and believe on Him. If we believe on Him we will be seeking out His will. His goodness will be seen in us. His example will be imitated.
How do we do this? It is crucial that we closely consider what God is teaching us in the Bible. Not the traditions but the Scriptures provide us this. We believe on Him by doing what He says.
Jesus said that we must be born of water and the Spirit (John 3:5). Clearly, this was reference to the two baptisms:
I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but He that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: He shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, and with fire: Whose fan is in His hand, and He will throughly purge His floor, and gather His wheat into the garner; but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matthew 3:11, 12).
In baptism today, we signify both repentance and reception of the Holy Spirit. Baptism is the death of the old you, the you who lived according to the siren call of the flesh. Baptism marks a fresh beginning. The old has passed away, all things are become new (2 Corinthians 5:17).
The first part of baptism is death in symbol. It represents going down into the grave, into burial; it represents death. Commitment to the old nature, one’s fallen humanity, and the corrupt character one has up until then built atop it, ends.
Is this the death of the person then? Is this the end, does God swirl the person away down the drain along with their filthy sinful history? Not at all. The one baptized, going down into the water, buried in the grave so to speak, is raised up immediately out of the water. She rises in newness of life. The second part of baptism is resurrection in symbol.
There does come time when our bodies are resurrected, but even before that time, even in these old bodies, we live the resurrected life. The Christian lives as though resurrected.
Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death? Therefore we are buried with Him [Jesus] by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life (Romans 6:4).
When are we to walk in newness of life?
Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 6:11).
Nor is this only a “New Testament” experience. Hear the prophet Isaiah long before Paul:
Or let him take hold of my strength, that he may make peace with Me; and he shall make peace with Me (Isaiah 27:5).
The Christian has made peace with God. He is fighting a battle against his long-held inclinations. In the renewed heart there is hatred of sin; there is determined resistance against it. The Christian still must grow, but now He enlists God in his battles. God helps if we will receive His help. It is the grace that Jesus implants in the soul which creates in a person enmity against Satan. Then there is conflict where before there had not been. The alliance that had existed between the tempter and tempted flesh is intercepted.
And so there are persons who are fighting the battle with Satan and are cooperating with God do as to be made new creatures in Christ. And there are persons who are not fighting the battle with self at all. They lay there on the ground supinely as Satan kicks them over and over again and makes them over into his own image.
What is Baptism? It is symbolic death and rebirth. For the converted person it testifies to an inward reality. Even if we are converted, we must be converted anew each day. Why die? Why be born again? Because in our unconverted situation we are a danger to ourselves and to others. We are just broken people in a broken world. When people are looking for hope we have no hope for them.
We die because as converted people, our lives are changed, our motives are renewed, and we become agents of hope in a doomed world. We become lights in the dark. Jesus is our personal Savior and the world will know it. May God give to this poor world more lights in the dark. GCO
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