Walking in the Light of His Glory:  Part 1
       Bringing the Father Great Glory!
Mark 1:4-11

I.H.S.

May the grace and mercy of God, our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ help you to see how you please the Father, as you dwell in Jesus!

1. Why?

That simple chorus and prayer has a lot to do with the baptism of Jesus that was described in the gospel reading this morning.

In my life, in this church, in our homes, Lord, be glorified. Simple prayer… one desperately needed this morning.

If we start with those places, if we begin to see God’s glory revealed in our lives, in our churches, and in our homes, we will soon be seeing God’s glory revealed in our community, spreading out from there, much as the glory of God spread out from Jerusalem and Judea into Samaria and to the end of the Earth.

As this prayer is answered, as we see God’s glory revealed in us, we will realize we walk in the light of the Lord, in the light of His glory, and the result, that we will hear,

You are my dearly loved child, and you bring me great joy.”

• I get why we are baptized!

Why does He get baptized?

That is a big question.

I know why we are baptized.

It’s not because we decided to, or someone else put pressure on us or decided that we should be baptized. I mean, that may cause us to be baptized, whether we are 2 or 3 weeks old or 94 years old.

The reason we are baptized was to show repentance in our life.

Because our hearts, souls, and minds are polluted with sin, we needed a change; we needed repentance to become a reality in our lives.

But repentance isn’t being sorry for our sin.

It means to have the change of how we process things, consciously, and subconsciously. That does mean we grieve when we consider our sins, but also that we turn and cry out to God.

That kind of repentance, that transformation of heart, soul, and mind, is found throughout scripture.

²⁵  “Then I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean. Your filth will be washed away, and you will no longer worship idols. ²⁶  And I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit in you. I will take out your stony, stubborn heart and give you a tender, responsive heart.  Ezekiel 36:25-26 (NLT2)

⁴  But—”When God our Savior revealed his kindness and love, ⁵  he saved us, not because of the righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy. He washed away our sins, giving us a new birth and new life through the Holy Spirit. Titus 3:4-5 (NLT2)

this is always God’s work… as Paul tells Timothy,

²⁵  Gently instruct those who oppose the truth. Perhaps God will change those people’s hearts, and they will learn the truth. 2 Timothy 2:25 (NLT2)

This is because, as the reading from Romans talked about this morning – that baptism unites us with Christ’s death and His resurrection.

We are sinners, we need to be transformed, we need to come to repentance. God promises to do that to give us this new heart and mind and attaches that promise to our baptism.

But what does that mean for Jesus….

He didn’t need a new heart and soul and mind. He didn’t sin, so why did He get baptized?

• So Why did He?

We know in our baptism, we are identified with Christ’s death, so that we can be identified with His resurrection.

Working from that, we can see that Christ is baptized into our lives, to take on the sin of the world.

Consider these words,

Barth says, poignantly, that the situation “went right into [Jesus’] heart … so that their whole plight was now His own, and as such, He saw and suffered it far more keenly than they did.” Jesus “took their misery upon Himself, taking it away from them and making it His own.” ^8[1]

This is what God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit had planned from before creation.

That Jesus would take on our suffering, our iniquity. “Our” as in the whole bleeding world. All that have been damaged by sin, all that have sinned. The baptism of Jesus pours on Him every sin, that every sin would be taken from Him, and paid for with the blood of Jesus.

He was baptized into our death, that when we were joined to His, we would be joined to His resurrection. He would take our dead hearts and replace them with His. It is seen in what Paul tells the church in Corinth, “But we understand these things, for we have the mind of Christ.”

That is what this is all about – whether it is the epistle that tries to help us see the incredible blessing that being united with Christ in His death provides or the gospel that sees Jesus willingly embrace our sin and our death when He was baptized.

To see that occur, as the doors to eternity are opened to people who believe and are baptized… and united with Christ’s death and resurrection, we will hear the words of the Father…the same words that were said to Jesus…

You are my dearly loved child, and you bring me great joy.”

Because He came into our world, took on our sin, and gave us His life.

in that life, He will be glorified…. Just as we prayed as we sang.

Let’s pray!

⁸ Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2: The Doctrine of Creation: The Creature, trans. H. Knight, G. W. Bromiley, J. K. S. Reid, R. H. Fuller (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1960), 211.

^[1] Ronald J. Allen, Thinking Theologically: The Preacher as Theologian (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2008), 52.