Jim McGuiggan (00:05)
You know what a rite of passage is? Of course you do. Everybody has them one way or another. Even bad gangs have them. You have to go and beat the blood out of someone under certain circumstances. And that makes you a part of the group. In Africa, in the worst places, they’ll get little boys and little girls, but mostly little boys. Ten-year-olds.
Armed them with weapons and they’re required to go kill a friend or kill a member of their family, shoot them dead. And that’s the rite of passage. North American Indians all those years back, they had a rite of passage. You went out, you know, just with a knife or something like that and you fought an animal, you became a warrior. All kinds of rites of passage.
have existed forever. People become part of a group. People become this, that, and the other through a rite of passage. In the New Testament, this is a rite of passage that it wasn’t culture that came up with it. It was God who came up with it. It was the Lord Jesus Christ who came up with it. He himself, he himself viewed his death
into life as a rite of passage and he likened it to baptism. He said, you know, I have a baptism that I must be baptized with. Talking about his death. And when Israel was called by John the Baptist to repent on fine remission of sins in God, being baptized,
Christ stood in line with sinners and fully identified Himself with His people and became, at that time, the appointed by God Messiah. All of that, all of that. And then texts like Romans 6: 1-11. He goes on then to say, he’s now talked about the baptism thing, and he says this, but remember this, remember this. Baptized or not,
He goes on to say this, do you not know that whoever you yield yourselves as servants to obey, you are his servant?
Here I am. I’m an owner of slaves. You’re on the stand to be bought. I buy you. You become my slave. This is the imagery. You become my slave. And instead of serving me, you continue to go to your former owner and you keep on doing what he wants done. He said it doesn’t make any difference.
What happened if you make yourself a servant?
If you serve the slave master you had, well, that’s who’s servant you are. To be baptized, or as he said in chapter two, to be circumcised, that’s the right thing. These are God-appointed sacramental issues. These are God-appointed rites of passage.
When the child was circumcised the eighth day, they became part of the covenant, don’t you see? Genesis chapter 17 and other places. When you’re baptized, you become a part of the New Testament elect. He said, with that, with that, you must accept what it means. You must seek to live what it means.
Because if you don’t live by the grace of God, grow into it, and if you don’t choose to live, what baptism means? If you live the other way, the way you were before you were baptized, you’re not a servant of Christ at all. You’re not in union with Christ at all.
You’re a slave to your former master.