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 I’ve shared this, uh, before, just after Shelby and I got married, um, I had a friend tell me, oh, he asked me, he said, how did you know? What was the moment that you knew Shelby was the one that you were going to marry her, that you were going to buy the ring and do all of that.

And I had to think about it for a long time. And I realized I, I did not have an answer. Like there was no moment. There was nothing there. I mean, we had a, it was just a gradual realization. We started dating in college. And at some point I was like, I should probably buy a ring before she leaves. I guess, I don’t know.

Like what else is kind of how it goes. Right. Uh, And that’s how it went. It was a gradual realization that this is the person I wanted to spend, um, my life with. And now we’re married and we have two kids and everything’s great. Most yeah. Wow. Great story. It’s the worst. People are like, how did you, it’s, I don’t know, man.

It just, it’s what you’re supposed to do. But this is a common theme throughout my life. All my major decisions, every milestone. been marked by a gradual realization. People ask me about my testimony. I used to do that thing in youth group where, uh, you’d be at like summer camp or something and it was the end of the week and everybody would get up and they would share about how God saved them.

And they had a really powerful testimony of God saving them from like drugs and crime and like hard, you know, high school student stuff. And my testimony was like, I got saved at 15. For I think my mom says I prayed, I think I got baptized when I was nine ish. I don’t really remember it. I know that my mom affirmed me.

I met with a pastor. He affirmed me, but I’ve been following Jesus all my life. The rest of my life has really been about what does that mean to follow Jesus? I just kind of assumed that I was a follower of Jesus. I never really doubted that. This is again, a gradual realization. I don’t have a powerful story of God saving me in a moment.

I’m sure that happened. I believe that happened. I just don’t know when that was. Uh, I was young, my parents are Christians, I grew up in a Christian home, but over time I’ve learned, especially these past few years, that just because it doesn’t happen in a moment doesn’t mean it’s not happening. That’s kind of the theme of this whole, uh, series that we’re working through right now, uh, moments and marathons.

And the idea is that, that God, God works in marathons, something, something happens. God gets a hold of you and he starts a slow and often unnoticeable work within you. That’s the marathon, right? Uh, you think of Being a person that you want to become. Think about who you want to become. Uh, what David Brooks calls, um, uh, obituary values, obituary traits, not the things you want to accomplish.

A lot of the things you want to accomplish can happen in a moment, but the things that they’re going to talk about at your funeral, how loving you were, how kind you are, how patient you were, that doesn’t happen in an instant. It can oftentimes though. It’s. Us continuing to show up time after time, routinely doing the things that don’t feel like they’re doing anything in us or through us.

And you look back and you realize that God has actually brought you from a place that you were to a new place, that you’re now a new person. That’s a marathon. But God also works in moments, that God gets a hold of you and he does something right then and there. Salvation, the moment you get saved, happens in a moment.

Ephesians talks about it like you’re being brought from death to life. That’s not a gradual process. That happens in an instant. The Holy Spirit gets a hold of you and he saves you. You are now in the family of God. Repentance can happen in a moment. You realize that you’re wrong about something and you repent from it.

You turn. Miracles happen in a moment. Healings can happen in a moment. Some of you have experienced something that happens in a moment. This morning, we’re looking at a moment. What happens when God gets a hold of someone and they respond. So Acts, chapter 8, we’re just gonna work through it, uh, line by line, uh, and pull out some things that I think are really helpful for us, specifically as it pertains to baptism.

Just a heads up, a little disclaimer, uh, transparency, this is gonna be, uh, it’s pretty, like, heady today, it’s a lot of information, uh, and so we’re gonna, it’s gonna be, it’s, yeah, not preachy, more teachy, is that alright? Good, it’s my birthday, so you have to see us. Yeah, yes. Okay. Acts chapter 8, verse 26. An angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, Get up and go south to the road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.

This is the desert road. Meaning it’s an empty road. This is the middle of nowhere. So he got up and went. There was an Ethiopian man. A eunuch and high official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of her entire treasury. He had come to worship in Jerusalem, and was sitting in his chariot on his way home, reading the prophet Isaiah out loud.

Now, let’s pause for a minute, because there’s a lot there. Uh, I told you, we’re going to get in the weeds, it’s going to be good. Uh, who was Philip? We talked about this last week. Philip is the main character in this story. Remember, Luke is telling a story, so he’s introducing, this is a little mini sort of vignette, a little story here, and he’s introducing the main characters.

There are two Philips in the Gospels. A lot of this you learned about last week. There’s Philip the Apostle, who is called alongside Nathaniel to be one of the twelve disciples that Jesus has come and follow him and learn from him. There’s also Philip the Evangelist. Philip the Evangelist was called to serve as a deacon just two chapters earlier in Acts chapter six.

So there’s a need that arises in the church. He’s selected as one of the people who are meant to go and help meet the sort of administrative, practical needs of the community. This is Philip the Evangelist that we’re reading about. This is not Philip the Disciple. This is Philip, the deacon, and he’s honestly had a pretty eventful season of ministry.

So he’s called a deacon. He starts serving, uh, some widows and people in the church. And then, uh, we saw at the beginning of this chapter last week that he’s out and about out in the world. He’s healing. He’s doing miracles. He’s preaching. He’s witnessing. He’s baptizing sorcerers with the whole Simon, the sorcerer thing.

It’s very bizarre. But then he’s called by God to go to the middle of nowhere. Literally just go out to the middle of nowhere and wait. So deacons, take note. Uh, no, this is really powerful. I think God, a lot of times the deacon role gets sort of thrown as this administrative thing. God can use you, no matter what, you’re a deacon or not.

Be open to the promptings of the Spirit. God can use you to do more than just what your assigned job is. Now, the eunuch. Who is this eunuch? Uh, being a eunuch in the ancient Near East was actually pretty common, uh, actually more common than it was now. Uh, and it could be that he was born this way, that there was something, uh, about his body, the way he was born, uh, that made him a eunuch, or more likely, he was castrated for spiritual or religious reasons.

Uh, or the most likely because he’s in a government position, uh, he was castrated in order to work in that government position. And this was really common for people who were working in close proximity to royalty, especially the female members of the Royal family. They would, uh, castrate, uh, the people, the servants that would be working with them just as a means of protection sort of a thing.

And honestly, on the surface, we don’t know much about this eunuch. It feels really random, kind of like a joke, like a, uh, disciple, a eunuch and Chariot or on the road and they, you know, I don’t know. But again, Luke is highlighting some very interesting details. And when you’re reading narrative, when you’re reading a story, you have to slow down and ask questions about why Luke is including these details.

So here’s some things that we do know. Uh, first he’s wealthy. So we’re told he’s a, he’s a high government position. So he’s in charge of the entire treasury of basically what exists as Ethiopia of the time. So in charge of a lot of the money, he’s also traveling in a chariot, which is like the Mercedes Benz of the ancient Near East.

If you have a chariot, you’re doing pretty, pretty well. Uh, but last thing, he also has an Isaiah scroll. And that’s really fascinating because obviously what we call the New Testament today hasn’t been written yet. The letters and the stories that we have now in our Bibles don’t exist. So at this time, all you had was the Old Testament.

But where we have it in a nice sort of book to look back on and flip pages through, uh, they had it in scrolls. And there weren’t many of them. It actually took a lot to write out these scrolls. You had to have, uh, several, uh, rabbis kind of over, looking over your shoulder as you’re writing it down. You had to make sure every jot and tittle was like, Exactly right, because this was the word of God.

And if you messed up, you had to start over. So if you had a scroll, most of the scrolls were relegated only to the temple, to the Jewish rabbis that would read from it and teach from it. This is not a Jewish rabbi. This is an Ethiopian eunuch that somehow has purchased what was likely a very expensive scroll of the prophet Isaiah.

And that’s the second thing we know about this Ethiopian eunuch. He has some connection to the Jewish faith. So Judaism wasn’t very common outside of Jerusalem. Uh, he’s reading what we would call Haggah. He’s literally out loud, which was really common in the ancient near East to read and mutter scripture out loud as you’re meditating through it as a way to connect it from your head to your heart.

It’s a very helpful practice. Uh, if you want to try that on your own, I’d encourage it. Uh, and he’s traveling from Jerusalem where he was worshiping. So he’s coming home from a kind of pilgrimage, likely from one of the three, uh, popular Jewish festivals, Passover, uh, Shavuot or Sukkot. Now, all this begs the question, why the eunuch?

Why is Luke telling us this story? Why do we have to read about Philip and this maybe Jewish eunuch? Who exactly is he? Well, I’m glad you asked. Scholars are divided. Some argue he’s a Jewish convert from Ethiopia. So they say, look, he’s, he’s Jewish. Clearly he’s going to, uh, Jerusalem to worship because he’s Jewish and he lives in Ethiopia, but he’s still a practicing faithful Jewish person, uh, who wants to partake in the festivals and do his due diligence as a Jewish person.

Uh, Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians was actually a title. Uh, so he’s the secretary, uh, high official of Candace, Queen of the Ethiopians. Uh, the, the king of the Ethiopians was considered a god. Uh, and if you’re a god, you don’t do much. Um, Candace would have been the king’s mother. So she would have been the one doing all of the like royal duties.

And so this is basically like her right hand man. And it’s actually not the first time Ethiopian or an Ethiopian queen is mentioned in the scriptures. Uh, first Kings 10 King Solomon, who’s one of the most popular sort of built the temple and everything has a lot of wealth and wisdom. He’s visited by the queen of Sheba.

And that means she’s the queen of Ethiopia. And she’s so impressed by Solomon’s wisdom and his wealth that she leaves acknowledging Yahweh as God, and some argue she took Judaism back with her. And they would say, look, this man is a result of that. That happened hundreds, thousands of years ago. Uh, Judaism got root in Ethiopia and people were faithful there.

And so this man is just traveling on a pilgrimage. I would argue though, that that’s not the case. I think it’s more likely that this man is not Jewish. Ethiopian in Hebrew actually translates to burnt face. This is a black man. Uh, which means he would not have been looked, uh, well upon even with his high status and authority.

Eunuchs in general were not looked well upon. So, uh, a eunuch who’s also, uh, black, uh, and outside of the city of Jerusalem, literally on the fringes of the known world at that time, would have been seen as a barbarian. And he didn’t understand Isaiah. One of the most foundational prophets in the Jewish faith.

As we’ll see, Philip goes up to him and he says, do you understand what you’re reading? And he’s like, no, I, how can I, unless someone explains it to me? And yet he’s heard something about this Jewish God. I would argue this is not a Jewish convert who’s going to do his due diligence. I would argue that this is something, this is somebody who, Who has heard about this appealing God of Yahweh, who created the world out of love, not out of anger or spite, like the other religions that he’s probably used to.

There’s something about this Jewish faith. There’s something about the Jewish people, the community that they have, their devotion to this loving God and their commitment to each other. This eunuch has seen something and he wants to be a part of it. So let’s keep reading verse 29. The spirit told Philip, go and join that chariot.

When Philip ran up to it, he heard him reading the prophet Isaiah and said, do you understand what you’re reading? How can I? He said, unless someone guides me. So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him. Now the scripture passage he was reading was this. This is from Isaiah. He was led like a sheep to the slaughter.

And as a lamb is silent before its shearer, so he does not open his mouth. In his humiliation, justice was denied him. Who will describe his generation? For his life is taken from the earth. The eunuch said to Philip, I ask you, who is the prophet saying this about? Himself or someone else? Then Philip proceeded to tell him the good news about Jesus beginning with that scripture.

The end.

Now, why does Luke cite this specific passage in Isaiah? If the only point of the story is to show that Philip is open to the promptings of the Spirit, and that he’s able to witness to somebody who’s outside of the Jewish faith, all Luke had to say was, there was an Ethiopian man reading Isaiah, didn’t understand it, Philip explained it, the end.

Actually, that’s exactly what happens in Luke’s earlier gospel. The gospel of Luke, uh, he tells a very similar story. Jesus is on his way after his resurrection on his way to a city called Emmaus. And he comes across two people who are arguing about the scriptures and they’ve heard about this dead rabbi that they thought was maybe the Messiah that people are saying, maybe he’s resurrected.

And so they’re in this conversation with each other. Jesus walks up to them. He says, what are you guys talking about? It basically, do you understand what you’re talking about? And there, Luke only says that Jesus starts with Moses and explains the Old Testament, how it points to him. Luke doesn’t give us a specific passage then, but he gives us a specific passage now.

Why is that? Again, I’m glad you asked. Isaiah is actually key to understanding this whole story and acts. So let’s talk about it in this passage that, uh, the Ethiopian eunuch is reading. It comes from Isaiah 53, uh, Isaiah in that chapter of his book is actually answering a question that the biblical authors have been asking since Genesis.

And that question is this, how will humanity be saved? So the story goes like this. Yahweh creates the world to be good, and he designs humanity to be good. That’s where the story starts. Early on in the story, though, as soon as humanity has freedom, they abuse it. And from there, things only get worse. The rest of the biblical story is about how sin spreads.

So, God creates the world, humans wreck the world, God promises to save the world, but in Genesis six, things get so bad that God says, you know what? The world isn’t worth saving. I’m going to scrap the whole humanity earth project and start over. And so he sends the flood. And if you’re reading the scriptures as a narrative, you get to this point and you’re wondering, well, who’s going to save humanity?

If God’s going to destroy the world, who’s going to save it. And so God preserves a family, a family, uh, with a man named. Noah, Noah and his family after the flood, they survived the flood. They build the ark. Everything’s going great. Genesis chapter nine. Tell us that Noah and his family are fruitful and they multiply.

They fill the earth in subdue it. Where have we heard that before? Genesis 1, yeah. So readers are thinking, oh, these are the ones who are going to save humanity. These are the ones who, they’re doing the things that humans were created to do in the garden, the things that they were commanded to do. And so you think this is it, Noah’s going to save the world.

But right after that happens, there’s this weird story, literally situated right after the flood narrative of Noah and his family falling into sin. It’s really odd that it’s about drunkenness and nudity and something weird happens and we don’t really know what’s going on there. But the point is this, uh, Noah is not going to save humanity.

Uh, Noah’s not even going to save his own family. And so in Genesis 12, God makes a very clear promise to restore and bless humanity like he intended to in the Garden of Eden. And he’s going to do it through one man and his family to bring salvation to the whole world, starting with Israel and expanding to other nations.

And he makes that promise to a man named Abraham. Which we talked about in pretty much all of our peacemaking series. And from there, the entire Old Testament is summed up like this. Israel wants God to save them. God will choose someone to save them. That person will fail. Israel will fall into sin, again.

And they want God to save them. And it goes, and it goes, and it goes. It’s a cycle. Moses is chosen. He leads, and he fails. He never makes it into the Promised Land. Joshua leads, and he doesn’t fail, but he dies. Samson leads, and he fails. Saul, King Saul leads and he fails. David leads and he fails. Solomon leads and he fails.

King after King come to lead and they all fail. Eventually God’s people are exiled, wiped out, waiting for the one that God promised to save them. And so we get to Isaiah. The prophet to a sinful exiled people, meditating on the very scriptures that promise salvation from a King. Where’s the King that’s going to save us?

It wasn’t Noah. It wasn’t David. Preach it. You’re not just teaching. Yeah, come on. And then he gets the image. The king that God will use to save his people won’t look like those other kings. In fact, he’s not going to look at all like what Isaiah was thinking he would look like or what the Israelites are expecting.

This isn’t a king who’s going to have earthly status, earthly authority, and earthly power. He’s actually going to have the opposite. This is a king who will do what Israel could not do, which is bear the weight of the sin and shame of the whole world in order to properly deal with it. The wickedness of the world.

This is a king who looks more like a suffering servant, like a lamb led to the slaughter than a conquering deity. In other words, this is a king that the Ethiopian eunuch can relate to. Someone with status and authority and yet rejected by the people of God. And so the message for the eunuch and for us this morning is simple.

You can have status, wealth and authority, but you’re still in need of a suffering savior. And I wonder what it must have looked like for this Ethiopian man, this man with high status and position still excluded from the family of God to find his healing, his identity and his salvation in this Isaiah passage in the middle of the desert road, not from a king, but from a humiliated, slaughtered and resurrected rabbi.

Despite his own authority, his wealth, his status, and his position within a royal family, this eunuch would still have to submit himself to a suffering servant. A god who describes himself as lowly, humble, and gentle. Unlike Simon the Sorcerer, which we talked about last week, this Ethiopian eunuch learns his lesson.

I can’t buy this king. I can’t buy his loyalty. I can’t buy his position. My own position doesn’t translate to the family of God. It doesn’t matter what I have. God bless the things that I have, but there’s something better here on offer. The power of God doesn’t come from brute force, earthly status, or human authority.

Jesus is the climax of this story. He’s the king this Ethiopian man needs and who can relate to. So that’s the moment he gets it. Here’s the good news. And this is how he responds. Verse 36. As they were traveling down the road, they came to some water. The eunuch said, look, there’s water. What would keep me from being baptized?

So he ordered the chariot to stop and both Philip and the eunuch went down into the water and he baptized him. When they came up out of the water, the spirit of the Lord carried Philip away and the eunuch did not see him any longer, but went on his way rejoicing. So why does this eunuch want to get baptized?

Again, you have to ask these questions. Why is Luke including this detail in the story? We’re going to end this way. I want to give you three reasons that really matter for this eunuch that explain a lot of what’s happening here, but also for us today. These are three purposes of baptism. So number one, declaration.

The eunuch was baptized. Remember, he’s a high official. He’s not traveling by himself. He has a caravan of other people, probably other Ethiopian guards, people making sure that Philip doesn’t do anything weird to him. Uh, and he gets baptized presumably in front of his entire enclave of other Ethiopian officials and guards.

Baptism is a public declaration of your faith in Jesus. First and foremost, that’s all that baptism does. Baptism is a way for you to say to the world, Hey, it’s not just me and Jesus. When you get saved, when you choose to follow Jesus, it’s not just you, Jesus, and your morning coffee in a journal. Although that’s great.

And Ephesians talks about it this way. You’re adopted into a family. When you get baptized, the very first thing is you’re showing the world I’m in. In this family of God, you’re also showing your other the family members. Hey, I’m, I’m choosing to declare to you. I’m being a part of this family. We baptize in public, not in private.

That’s why we do baptisms out, excuse me, here in church. We’re not, you know, that’s why we don’t do baptisms in like a home or something like that. Baptisms are a public declaration for that very reason. Second thing is renunciation. Yeah, that’s a good point. Uh, from what I understand it, at least until the reformation, before someone was baptized, they actually went through a minor exorcism.

Uh, don’t freak out by that. We don’t do that. Although we’ve talked about it. Um, no, we haven’t. Here was the assumption. Um, when you, prior to being saved, you are coming from the dominion of Satan. Uh, which is the world. Thank you so much. You could tell. so much. Dino’s got me. Shout out to Dino. Let’s give a Thank you.

While I drink this.

Here is the understanding. When you join the family of God, you are coming from what the scripture authors, authors of scripture would call the dominion of the worlds where Satan has rule and reign over it. And the idea was this. When you come into the family of God, you are coming from an old way of life.

You are leaving behind not just your dead self, your old self, but you’re also leaving behind the world that you’re coming from. So the presumption was that you were vulnerable. To what Paul would call the powers and the principalities. Baptism demonstrates your death to your old self. So literally we, we, we believe in immersion baptism.

So you go under the water. It’s like you’re being buried and that’s your old self going under the grave, just like Jesus went under the grave. But then we bring you out of the water and that’s your new self coming up. The new self that’s empowered by the Holy Spirit to walk, live, and love the way of Jesus.

Just like Jesus rose again, you are coming to the new life in Christ. But it also represents death. And the continued renunciation of your old self. So this is why in some traditions, uh, baptism actually comes after this question, do you renounce Satan and all his works and empty promises? In other words, are, do you renounce the way of the world?

Are you renouncing Satan? Do you recognize that the pull and sway of the enemy is so strong? It feels like a promise, but it’s actually empty. Do you acknowledge that and admit that the way of Jesus is better? Baptism does that. Now, most of us stop there and that’s good. Those are all good and true things.

There’s one more purpose of baptism though, that I think often gets overlooked because baptism represents far more than that. See, baptism was a tradition. A lot of people wonder this. This is just free for you. Where did baptism come from? You ever wondered that? Why do we baptize? Why do we, oh, we’re Baptists, so, I mean, there’s that.

Why, why does John the Baptist baptize? Well, baptism was actually a tradition reaching back to the first stages of Judaism long before Jesus was on earth. In the Mosaic law, ritual water purification happened in a bath called a mikveh. A mikveh was a place where you would purify yourself, cleanse yourself after you were exposed to something that would defile you.

So it could be like a dead body or something like that. And the idea was that you’re coming into the waters of baptism. You want to join in the family of God, but you have to ritually and ceremonially purify yourself from, uh, the stuff that you’ve defiled yourself with. And so that would happen in a baptismal called a mikvah, uh, is used in all sorts of water purification rituals that again, would allow someone into the temple to offer their sacrifices.

This is really popular amongst some groups, uh, like the Essenes were basically the monks that lived out in the wilderness. So again, John the Baptist, when he’s baptizing people, he’s basically saying, I can baptize you, I can help you clean yourself. If you’re Jewish and you want to, you know, come into the family of God again, you’ve been exposed to something, let me baptize you and then you’re on your way.

But here’s where it gets really interesting. See, the Jews actually would have had a law directly addressing this eunuch and his attempts to do exactly that, which is join the family of God through baptism. Deuteronomy 23. This is the message version. Cause it’s the most, uh, clean says this no eunuch is to enter the congregation of God, pretty simple.

That’s Deuteronomy 23. You can look there in the CSV and see what it says on your own time. So when this Ethiopian man went to worship in Jerusalem. He would have been relegated to the outer courts, which is the space designated specifically for outsiders, for Gentiles, people who are not in the family of God.

Now he had done that, and he’s coming home from a worship experience, but still excluded from fully being in the family of God until he meets Philip. And Acts 35 tells us that Philip explained the whole gospel message to this eunuch. Beginning with that scripture, Isaiah 53, the text that this Ethiopian man was reading.

But I wonder if Philip continued explaining Isaiah just three chapters later, until he got to Isaiah 56, where it says this, no foreigner who has joined himself to the Lord should say, the Lord will exclude me from his people. And the eunuch should not say, look, I am a dried up tree. For the Lord says this, the eunuchs who keep my sabbaths and choose what pleases me and hold firmly to my covenant.

I will give them in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name better than sons and daughters. I will give each of them an everlasting name that will never be cut off. Why is that significant? Where is this Ethiopian man coming from? Jerusalem. What was he in Jerusalem to do? Worship. In a temple.

Now according to Deuteronomy, where was this man not allowed? The temple. When is this man actually welcomed into the family of God? It’s not in the temple in Jerusalem. It’s not in the outer courts for the Gentiles. He joins the family of God on a desert road somewhere between Jerusalem and modern day Sudan.

The eunuch gets the king in Isaiah 53, but he also gets the kingdom. He asked for baptism because he wants to fully join himself to the family of God. There’s a good chance. He wasn’t able to baptize himself in the mikvah when he’s on that journey for one of those feasts, but he is now. Here’s his mikvah.

What’s to stop me? He says, why can’t I join the family of God now? And that’s the third thing. Association. See, baptism isn’t just about leaving and renouncing your old life behind, though it is that it’s about you joining yourself to Jesus and his people, associating with God’s people, showing your allegiance to God’s kingdom and becoming a part of God’s family.

Now there’s a verse in there you might have noticed if you’re an astute observer of, uh, the biblical text. Verse 37 is missing in your Bibles. And there’s a lot of reasons for that. You can ask me later. Uh, none of it really matters. It shouldn’t make you distrust the scriptures. It has more to do with how it was put together.

Again, asking about that later, but the verse that was removed says something along the lines of, uh, Philip answers this man, why can’t I get baptized? He says, you can, if you believe that Jesus is the son of God who died for your sins and the eunuch says, I do. And Philip says, let’s dunk you. Let’s do it.

You’re in the family now. There’s a lot of reasons why that’s not included. Basically, I said you could ask me later. It basically because it, um, it’s not in the earliest manuscripts that we have, but it was kind of assumed that the eunuch believed that. The eunuch says, I want to follow this king. He doesn’t have to prove himself.

He doesn’t have to do anything. He doesn’t have to, all he has to admit is there’s a king named Jesus who has come to save me from my sin, from the life that I’m leaving behind, the life that’s held me in captivity. I’m putting my trust, not in my wealth. Not in the moments that I can create for myself, but in the marathon of salvation, I’m putting my trust and my allegiance in this King Jesus.

I want into the family of God. That’s all he had to do. And that’s all that baptism is for baptism is the starting point. The minute that you decide, I want to follow Jesus. We would invite you to get baptized because here’s the good news. Just like this Ethiopian man, all of us are born as outsiders. We are separated from God.

We are separated from each other. Peacemaking. Apart from Christ, we are cut off from everything that we deeply desire, unconditional love and full belonging into a community. Everything we had in the garden of Eden that was taken from us by that we gave up because of our sin. Like this Ethiopian man, however, we are welcome fully and graciously into the family of God.

If you’re in Christ Jesus, this is what baptism is. Your past no longer defines you. Your status doesn’t bar you. And your sin doesn’t separate you. God’s kingdom is here and it’s open to everyone. That’s why Luke tells a story in Acts chapter eight. It’s the gospel message. You’re an outsider. And apart from Christ, you have no hope.

You could be as high and official as you, but you create as much wealth for yourself as you want, but you still need a suffering savior to save you from the things that you can’t save yourself from your sin. Baptism doesn’t save you, but it does show the world that you’re declaring, I put my allegiance to Jesus.

I’m leaving my old life behind and I am attaching myself to this body of believers. They can hold me accountable, keep me true to the way of Jesus, where I can live and look more and more like him. Why don’t we respond through prayer?