P.O. Box 53055    
Los Angeles, CA 90053   

BAPTIZED FOR A NEW TOYOTA PICKUP

Have you ever witnessed what we might call a baptism gone bad? Maybe it’s even happened to you. At one point in your life, you were christened or sprinkled or immersed. You went into the water and you came out clean, a new creature in Jesus Christ. But then, maybe several years later, you could look into the spiritual mirror and say: “What happened? The loyalty this represented, the commitment, has faded away. It’s long gone.”

Here in the book of Ephesians, we have a side-by-side comparing of all 31 verses of chapter four, as rendered in the King James and also the New International Version. Interestingly, verse five is identical in both — and it’s exactly six words long:

“One Lord, one faith, one baptism.”

I’m the first to concede that there are a host of ways that Christians are baptized. In my Adventist denomination, along with our friends the Baptists and many others, it’s always immersion. One hundred percent of the time — we go into the water and people are completely buried beneath the waves. I’ve stood in swimming pools in Caracas, in streams and rain barrels in the Philippines, in the beautiful beaches of the Cayman Islands . . . and it’s the hugest of blessings each time. But it’s always the same: “One Lord, one faith, one baptism.”

Back to our question, though. Baptism, of course, is a statement of loyalty. In fact, check that — it’s the defining statement of SUPREME loyalty. We mentioned yesterday that becoming a Christian is — and has got to be — the overriding identity of a person’s life. All other things in your life — marriage, citizenship, job, hobbies — have got to line themselves up as numbers two, three, four, five, and down the line. The Bible Commentary for my church has this to say about “One Lord, one faith, one baptism”:

“Here is the supreme object of loyalty. Those who give complete submission and allegiance to the same Lord are not at enmity with one another. He is Lord by creation and by re-creation, and all authority rests with Him. Utter surrender to Him is a requirement, but such a surrender may be the Christian’s greatest joy.”

Speaking of baptisms gone bad and lackluster loyalty, you very likely remember reading — in the aftermath of 9/11 — about how difficult America and its partners thought it would be to stitch together a coalition out of Afghanistan’s many competing tribal forces. A Newsweek article by Evan Thomas and Melinda Liu had this headline: “Victory may take bribes as well as bullets.” And the two staff writers observed about the fickle warlords:

“They can be bought off. That’s the way things work in Afghanistan.” A General Hamid Gul, part of the Pakistani ISI, the intelligence service, admits: “They say you can always rent an Afghan. But you can never be sure you own them.” And the Newsweek writers conclude: “During the long struggle against the Soviets and the ensuing civil wars, some warlords survived by transferring their allegiances to whichever side was winning — at that moment. One commander switched sides no fewer than six times; another was jokingly said to practice a kind of seasonal loyalty: in the brutal summers he escaped Kandahar in the south, while in the equally rugged winters he defected from Kabul in the north.”

Sometimes it took money. Sometimes it took a new souped-up Toyota pickup truck. A general would literally get on his cellphone and offer to switch sides – along with his 300 men. A regiment could be – on Tuesday – firing upon the same men they had been marching with and eating supper with on Monday. A CIA analyst trying to sort out all the shifting sands of the Northern Alliance took a rather cynical view of the whole process.

“These are rented relationships,” he said. “If you have common grounds, common interests, you can do something for a few bucks.”

Well, friend, there’s a certain amount of this that goes on within the body of Christ too. There’s been more than one person who has been baptized into one church, only to switch to the congregation across the street because Calvary Community had a better pitcher in the Christian summer slow-pitch softball league, and they were tired of losing all the time. But what we really find here in Ephesians 4 is an invitation for us to see beyond the limits of our denominational team rosters and realize that in the Christian faith, a person who is being baptized is — in the highest sense — becoming a part of just the ONE team: Christianity. “ONE Lord, ONE faith, ONE baptism.” The NIV text notes give us a bit of historical perspective; here it is:

“Since Paul apparently has in mind that which identifies all believers as belonging TOGETHER, he would naturally refer to that church ordinance in which EVERY new convert participated publicly. At that time it was a more obvious common mark of identification of Christians than it is now, when it is celebrated in different ways and often only seen by those in the church.”

It’s sobering to think of the Colosseum and the distant roar of the lions, the crosses, and the persecution. Back then, a person who went into the baptismal pool for Jesus was truly making a statement about loyalty. And there are many, many stories of Christians being willing to die together for Christ. If you were a baptized Christian, and your next-door neighbor was a baptized Christian . . . man, that was it. That person was your brother. Everything he had was yours; everything you had was his. It says in Acts 2 that they shared everything.

You know, when I was a pastor up in Paradise, California, I often had the joy of baptizing people right into a local church. What a beautiful decision that is! What a beautiful statement! Believe me, I’ve seen the new loyalty shining on wet faces and gleaming through wet, tear-filled eyes. And what did that baptism actually MEAN? What did it SAY? Three things, actually. First, that person was joining the local body of believers: that church in Paradise. Second, that person was also joining this particular denomination, this worldwide community of believers. But friend, please hear me right now. Most of all — trumping all other statements, overriding all other loyalties — that person was choosing Jesus Christ as their Lord and Master and Leader and Friend and Redeemer and Savior. They were pledging allegiance to the same Jesus Christ Paul’s contemporaries faced the lions for. They were stating loyalty to the same Jesus Christ John Hus died to defend.

Speaking of Caracas and the Cayman Island, and the followers of Paul and the intrepid John Hus, it’s an incredible thing to realize that when you’re baptized as a Christian, you’re going through the same beautiful initiation as every single fellow Christian over the past 2000 years. What a heritage! John the Baptist went into the water with new Christians in 27 A.D., and here in 2004, it happens the exact same way. The Tyndale New Testament Commentary makes that very point:

“The outward sign of this faith (whichever way we take it), and the ‘visible word’ expressing the work of Christ was baptism. Instituted by the Lord Himself, it was an experience that EVERY CHRISTIAN SHARED. All had passed through the same initiation. All had been ‘baptized into Christ,’ not into a variety of leaders, as Paul, Peter and Apollos, nor into a plurality of churches.”

Here’s a closing thought, and it takes us back to the jagged, shifting, bombed-out terrain of Afghanistan. So often those desert warlords with their dusty Toyota trucks and their Kalashnikov AK-47 assault rifles lost their loyalty because there was so little to be loyal TO. If people on the other side of the fence had a few bucks for you and a hot meal . . . well, that was a few bucks and one hot meal MORE than you were getting right now. In a foggy kind of way, they were always fighting for “freedom,” but really, who could say which new coalition would ever provide that? And when you’re just fighting to get a warm bath and a new extended-cab pickup, those aren’t really the ties that bind.

And the point is this: you and I, as Christians, are baptized into Jesus Christ! We have our local church, doing its best, performing its mission . . . and we’re loyal to it through good times and bad. We have our worldwide denomination with its doctrines, its mission projects, its magazines and TV ministries, and we’re loyal to it through thick and thin, through scandals and times of healing. But higher than it all, as steadfast as the gospel itself, is Jesus and His Cross. More than anything, we’re baptized into HIM. “In the name of the Father, the SON, and the Holy Ghost.” The God who changeth not. For twenty centuries now, men and women and boys and girls have gone into the waves, died to the old loyalties, and emerged as soldiers of Jesus Christ. You’re a brother and a sister to every other single person to ever do that, and you’re a disciple, a follower, a devotee, to someone whose mission will never change and whose love for you will never fade away.

That’s the kind of baptism which should never go bad.