These Are Our People
"Jesus answered him, 'Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.'" - John 3:3
Since I’ve spent the last few weeks on big topics spanning multiple posts, I wanted to take a little break this week and just share something short and sweet. From my own church’s pastor!
I’m sure I have heard and read many angles, wide and narrow, on the two ordinances instituted by Christ for the new covenant—namely, baptism and communion. But a couple of weeks ago when my church shared the bread and the cup together, I was privileged to hear a 5-minute summary of an angle I had never heard before. Sparing you too much of an introduction, I will get to the point. I asked his permission to quote him here and the response from our faithful pastor was a humble, “Sure. But only if it’s true!” I assured him that it was and asked him to never feel pressured to gloss over such rich theological lessons, no matter how dry it may appear to be to his audience. To me at least, such morsels are the meat of meditating on Christ.
(A few notes: Emphasis has been added by me to reflect the emphasized moments of his vocal presentation. I have also inserted a few things in brackets to clarify what may not come across as clearly in writing. Finally, I will not be sharing my pastor’s name for my own privacy.)
Born into a covenant
“We have two ordinances in the church, two outward expressions of faith. I want to take just a moment to describe those to you.
In a minute we’re going to quote Jesus from the night of his betrayal, and he will say he is taking a cup. And he calls that cup a new covenant in his blood, because the scriptures talked about a covenant that was coming. In fact, most of scripture, the large section of scripture, there was a group of people called out under a covenant; an old covenant, a mosaic covenant, a covenant that people were born into.
God called out a nation and if you were born into that nation, you were part of that covenant. So much so that, once you were born, eight days later, you were given the sign and seal of that covenant. You were a part of that people, you were a part of that nation.
God promised in days of old that there would be a covenant coming that was different, a covenant coming that was not external, a covenant coming where a hard heart of stone would be replaced with a heart of flesh. And so the question that is natural is: well then how do you enter that covenant? I know how you enter the old covenant. You have to be born into that covenant.
Now, there were some stipulations on how you could be adopted in, but you had to be born into that covenant.
You must be born again
And so Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the middle of the night and he says, “Well I don’t understand, what’s going on here! How do I get into this kingdom?” Well, he didn’t really even know enough to ask that question at it’s best, but God knew what he needed. Jesus knew what he needed to hear and so he told him you have to be born again. Not just born of water, not just born in a nation, but you have to be born from above. And then, when you’re born of above, you’re given a sign and seal of that new covenant.
“These are our people”
Well the Christian church—the scriptures—tell us what is the sign and seal of this new covenant, this new birth. What do we do to the infants in the new covenant as spiritual infants? We mark them out. We mark them out with baptism.
That’s how the church says: “these are our people.” In Israel, that’s how you would say: “these are our people.” We would circumcise our people. And so now the church says these are my people. So when you come and you make a public profession of faith in Christ and your life gives evidence of that, the church goes, “Ah, you’re our people.” And so we give you the sign and seal of that people.
Now, on the backside, if people abandon and they either reject Christ outright or they live in such a way that demonstrates “hey, you don’t appear to be one of us,” the church is given the responsibility to say “you’re no longer one of our people.” Now, you may be. Only God knows the heart, but the church says, “you’re no longer part of our people.” So there’s a removal from that fellowship. But for everything in between—there’s a regular reminder: “hey you’re our people.” And [that reminder] is when we eat.
Around this table
Now, I know you’re not going to call what we do here in a minute “eating” and I regret that. And maybe one day we’re going to be able to figure out how to do this better; where it’s truly a feast and that kind of thing. But, the people of God would be called out by baptism, that’s how you know who we are, and then they would eat together. And you would know: this is our people. We eat together around this table.
And then, if you are removed from that fellowship, you don’t eat with them. You don’t have this table with them anymore. We say that, but what is this, [communion table]?
The broken body and the blood that we’re going to celebrate, that’s reminding us of what Christ has done on our behalf. But it’s also saying to the world, “these are his people.”
That’s why if you are visiting with us, but you have been baptized into [another congregation] that says you are Christ’s people, we welcome you to join us. If you have not, we welcome you to watch and ask questions.
In fact, you have a lot of parents that say: “what do I do with this?” I want you to understand something. If baptism is the sign of the church saying “you are our people,” then you don’t eat at the table until you’re our people. And again, [regarding] baptism and church discipline and the [communion] table… we don’t know people’s hearts. Only God knows peoples’ hearts. But the church has been given these ordinances to give clarity to the world and clarity to us on who are God’s people.
So that’s what we get to celebrate today. We get to come together and say “We’re likeminded. We are here because of Christ… and Christ alone.”
