#2 No Shortcuts To Spiritual Maturity Series

No Shortcuts to Spiritual Maturity

Series: Mark, Sermon 2

Chuck Sligh

November 17, 2019

NOTE: A PowerPoint presentation is available for this sermon by request at chucksligh@hotmail.com. Please mention the title of the sermon and the Bible text to help me find the sermon in my archives.

TEXT: Please turn in your Bibles to Mark 1.

INTRODUCTION

Illus. – When our boys were little, we were scheduled to attend a field conference with my mission board in Interlaken, Switzerland. We decided to go a week early, and begin over in Salzburg, Austria on the opposite end of Switzerland, and then drive west across Switzerland to Interlaken in time for our field conference that was to start that next Monday. After seeing Salzburg, we slowly meandered west, leisurely taking our time.

Susan wanted to visit a quaint village several kilometers south of the main Autobahn, so I looked on the map and it looked like there was a non-Autobahn shortcut from that village straight west over to Interlaken. (This was long before GPS, by the way.) We visited this gorgeous village and then headed west to Interlaken on this road.

Well, what looked like a good straight road on the map was anything but in real life. A trip that should have taken half a day took us almost a day-and-a-half on a one-way road that zig-zagged on hundreds of hair-pin curves directly up into some of the steepest mountains of Switzerland. The scariest part was that about on 90% of the road, you were looking straight down cliffs and steep valleys WITH NO GUARD RAILS…ON A ONE-WAY ROAD! And the VERY scariest part was when we encountered another vehicle. Have you ever tried to drive IN REVERSE to a little pull-off so a car can pass by with deep cliffs and valleys on one side with no guard rails? Believe me; you NEVER want to do that!

You see, sometimes shortcuts aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Hold that thought until the end of this sermon because we’re going to come back to it.

Last time we were in the Gospel of Mark, we had a short intro into the book, and then saw John’s ministry in verses 1-8 and drew some applications from his life for our own. We studied most of the passage, but in verse 8, John dropped a bombshell that I didn’t feel I could cram into that sermon.

So today we’re going to look at the part I left out last week. Look with me at verse 8 – “I…have baptized you with water: but he will baptize you with the Holy spirit.” Today, I would like to talk about this “baptism with the Holy Spirit”

I. FIRST, LET’S THINK ABOUT WHAT IS THE BAPTISM IN THE HOLY SPIRIT?

The key passage explaining Spirit baptism is found 1 Corinthians 12:13 – “For with one Spirit we all were baptized into one body, whether we are Jews or Gentiles,…bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit.” –

Before proceeding, let me point out that the if your translation begins with, “For BY one Spirit we are all baptize,” that is a mistranslation. The second word in the verse is the Greek word en, which, in this context, cannot mean anything other than “with” or “in.” John said, and Jesus also said in Acts 1:5, that Jesus would be the baptizer and the medium Jesus would baptize with would be the Holy Spirit, just as in John’s water baptism, John was the baptizer and water was the medium. It’s seems like a small detail, but we’ll see its importance later.

Now, what Paul tells us in this scripture is that in the baptism with the Spirit, believers are immersed with the Spirit into the body of Christ. The body of Christ is a term Paul uses of the people of God in the New Testament age and describes their integral relationship with Christ. Jesus is the head, and we are all members of Christ’s body.

We don’t have time to delve deeply here, but this idea teaches us that when we come to Christ, we become a member or a part, of Christ, just as my arm, or my stomach or my toes or my feet are parts of my body each with a particular function. They are only alive because the body is alive, governed by the head. There is a vital, organic relationship of the body parts to the body, and likewise, when we trust in Christ, we enter into a vital, organic relationship with Christ.

So, the “body of Christ” is a synonym for what theologians refer to as the “Universal Church”—that is, all the believers from Pentecost until Jesus returns. There are many theological ramifications of this, but these are the main things to get out of it for our purposes today.