Baptism of Our Lord

Holy Baptism gets its power to be what it is and do what it does only because Jesus is baptized. Baptism would never have the power to do anything more than simply be a symbolic ritual if the One who takes away the sins of the world had not united Himself to us in this way. Jesus is the Word made flesh; as Luther famously put it, 'Apart from the Word in the water, the water is just plain water, and there is no baptism, but with the Word of God, it is a baptism.' That is life-giving water, rich in grace, and a washing of the new birth of the Holy Spirit.

When Jesus was baptized, the power of God entered into the water with the baptized people of God. It was like putting a live, high-voltage cable into the water where everyone was bathing, and it was instant death for everyone who was in the water. Apart from the cable in the water, it's just plain water, and nobody gets hurt by it. But when the cable goes into the water, it becomes deadly water.

When Jesus was baptized, He brought His death on the cross into the water with Him, and when you were baptized, you were united into His death, so His death became your death. Listen to this - you died while you were still alive! When Jesus was baptized, He brought His resurrection from the dead into the water with Him, and when you were baptized, you were united to His victory over sin, death, and the power of the devil. Listen to this - you rose from the dead before you were buried in the ground (Romans 6:3-4)."

-Rev. Paul Nielsen  

Dinner Table

Stop and think about it. At your dinner table, your heavenly Father is going to actually be giving you food that sustains your earthly life. You're going to go on living because something has died. I'm not just talking about your meat but even about your vegetables; something dies. It gives its life to go into you so you can go on living, and this is a gift to you from your Father in heaven. And so, you approach this gift with reverence and awe. You get to go on living; something else has given life up for you. An image of something far, far greater in the church, having a table where we receive supernatural food from the Father."

-Pr. Will Weedon

Religion or Relationship?

Part of our post-modern, politically correct world is constantly changing our vocabulary. Certain words become bad, and one of them is religion. The sad thing is the one place where Christians have participated in post-modern political correctness the most enthusiastically is in trashing the word religion. It's a thoroughly biblical word, and what has been put in its place is relationship. We hear it again and again, Christianity is not a religion; it's a relationship. Implying rather strongly that religion is a bad thing and relationship is a good thing. Is that necessarily true or an either-or?

You won't find the word relationship if you read through all of Scripture. What you will find are words like fellowship and communion. What does fellowship mean? What does communion mean? Communion and fellowship are communal things that take place, not individual. So, in this relationship, if you want to say there is individual faith, we are brought into a collective body - the body of Christ, His Church. And within that body is how we communion with Christ and one another.

What's odd about this relationship idea is that Scripture is very clear on how we have that relationship with Jesus; he calls it communion. What is communion? That's the Lord's Supper; that's the fellowship. Jesus is coming to us in His body and blood in the bread and wine to give us His life, salvation, and forgiveness of sins. You can't get any closer to Christ than that. So when we see how the New Testament speaks, it blows this whole idea; "it's not a religion; it's a relationship" out of the water. Even the relationship they think and want to have with Jesus is nothing compared to the communion we individually and collectively have with Christ.

Pr. Richard Futrell

Do This In Remembrance of Me

 Most Protestant churches don't have an altar; they have communion tables. You will almost always see "In remembrance of me on that table." To them, that is the most important thing, thinking back on Jesus' sacrifice for you. If you take that as Jesus meant, how do we know what Jesus meant? Jesus was a Hebrew and spoke in Aramaic, not Greek, even though the New Testament was written in Greek. He spoke Aramaic, and in Aramaic and Hebrew, the word 'remember' means 'continue the action,' bringing the reality of the past into the present and continuing the action.

-Rev. Dr. Charles Spomer

Doctrine Of The Trinity

Anytime you undermine a proper understanding of who Jesus is, the true Son of God who became man for us and our salvation, you undermine our salvation. It's always the atonement, it's always the cross, and the work on the cross for us and our salvation. So if Jesus is not God, then we cannot look to the cross and say there is God for me, defeating death, sin, and the devil and rising again for my justification. If He is not God, whatever He is doing, He can only do for Himself; He cannot do that for me. He cannot do that for the world. It is always the heart of the Gospel that gets compromised when we compromise things like the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of Christ, and so forth.

- Dr. Carl Beckwith

Accommodating Worship

Dr. Joel Elowsky, professor of Historical Theology and Director of the Center for the Study of Early Christian Texts, on the subject of making a church service more accommodating for unbelievers he said: "The early Church would have a real problem with that, and it seems like in the early period of the Church they made it harder to come into the Church, and it was all part of this habitus if you will; nobody could come to Church without a sponsor. They actually had people who watched over the doors, called porters or doorkeepers. The early Church would close the doors when the worship began because they didn't want shall we say, 'cast their pearls before swine... so to be trampled upon.'

When it came time for communion, those who were unbaptized or not catechized were asked to leave the service. So when it came to worship, the early Church didn't let the culture color what they were doing; they saw the church service, i.e., the liturgy, as a way to be refreshed so as to go out into the world the next week to serve the Lord. Still, they didn't see this idea of accommodating their worship for the culture.

-Dr Joel Elowsky

Folded Burial Clothes

Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the face cloth, which had been on Jesus head not lying with the linen cloths but folded up in a place by itself." (John 20: 6-7)

"How often has John given us the little details that are pregnant with meaning? They came to the burial site, and the burial garments which their Master had been wrapped by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus with all those spices were still there and not only so, but folded and with the face cloth folded up in a place by itself. Do you realize what this means? On the most stupendous morning in human history, God in the flesh woke up, took off his burial wrappings, and folded them. He made up His bed, if you will. He is that sort of God, not of confusion, but one who loves to do all things decently and in order.

St. John Chrysostom, the great commentator on John from the fourth and fifth centuries, writes, 'Now to separate and to place one thing by itself and another after rolling it up by itself was the act of someone doing things carefully and not in a chance way and as if disturbed.' You see, he sees the care given to the clothes as a sign that there absolutely was no grave robbery here, as the women might have feared. Rather, there's deliberate care setting aside what He no longer needed - clothes for burial. He is alive!"

Pr. Will Weedon