Selected Scriptures

August 8, 2021

Lord’s Day Worship

Sean Higgins

Or, Baptism, Discipleship, and Discipline

Selected Scriptures

Introduction

The identity industry is building bigger banks to hold their dollars these days. It has been for a while, even while it’s updated it’s branding over the last decade. Buy these shoes and you’ll be like Mike, buy this toothpaste and your breath will be sexy, gorge yourself at this restaurant and being fat never tasted so good. More up to date advertisements promote apps to connect you to an online doctor who will send you meds in the mail so that you can stop being a male, or try to be a male. The ultimate sale’s pitch came a long time ago when a woman heard that if she ate some fruit then she’d have the identity of a god. We’ve been rebelliously attempting to redefine certain identities since.

Knowing “who you really are” usually requires less backpacking across Europe and more reading of the Bible. It really doesn’t demand questioning everything, rather it more demands listening to wisdom. They’ve taken wisdom off the shelf and into the backroom these days, but God gives it to those who fear Him (Proverbs 2:1-8). As it turns out, when we fear the Lord, when we seek Him, we come to know ourselves as the kind of beings who can’t be explained without reference to Him.

All of the above belongs in a discussion about the realities of baptism into Christ, the process and progress of discipleship to Christ, and membership in the body of Christ. These issues relate to our morning liturgy of worship, our pastoral aim to see every man loving like Christ (1 Timothy 1:5), the command to fathers to raise their children in the nurture of the Lord (Ephesians 6:4), and even church discipline. What we have in front of us is all about identity, and how it points toward telos-level love and telos-level glory to God.

God is the one who decided that, after forming Adam from the dust of the ground and Eve from Adam’s side, every other human being would be born into the world, and born as a baby. Humans always start tiny, immature, albeit cute, which helps, because they are needy. Every newborn has some built-in characteristics and desires; they are one sex rather than another (regardless of what the American Medical Association lies about), and have other markers of identity that can’t be changed, even if they are developed and directed. Kids will eat, but they need to learn not to eat dirt, while also identifying some things to eat that grow out of the dirt. They need to learn not to eat deodorant but also to apply it. They have to learn how to speak and what is acceptable speech. They have to learn to walk and work and worship.

They are humans, not monkeys or donkeys. He is male, she is female, born of this mother not Mother Earth, born in a given town and nation, given certain opportunities but not endless ones.

We do not withhold food until they can prove that they are hungry, we do not wait to give them chores until they show us their resume of experience. Everyone has to start at a place they usually don’t end at.

Somehow, the church—and her pastors and the families within her—has gotten super confused, convoluted, carried-away, and counter-productive. We’ve taken Solomon’s observation that the end of a thing is better than the beginning (Ecclesiastes 7:8) and we’ve tried to put all our projects immediately into the grave so we can be done. We’ve also lowered the standard/definition of the “end” so that what used to be a beginning is now an end. The process is gone, or at least our appreciation of it (in others), or our persistent purpose in the middle of it (which, by the way, Solomon also praises in the second half of Ecclesiastes 7:8).

Take baptism. Baptism is a public profession of faith by the one who is being baptized. Unlike circumcision, which was give[...]