To Encourage You

Matthew 3:13-15 “Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to John, to be baptized by him.  John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?’ But Jesus answered him, ‘Let it be so now, for thus it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.’ Then he consented.”

Some people are so dissatisfied with who they are that they will go to extreme measures to try to change their identity.  For some, the transgender movement has provided a means for them to deal with this.  Others resort to plastic surgery of some type. I saw a story on the internet yesterday about a woman who had taken this to extremes.  She had had at least a dozen surgeries up to that moment in time which had drastically changed the way she looked. Yet, she was still dissatisfied, and was looking forward to having at least 10 surgeries more!  

On the flip side are those who aren’t happy with how YOU look. Racism and prejudice of all types spring up from this.  Then there are those who are so utterly proud of who they are that they make the rest of us uncomfortable.  It’s all a focus on the externals, but it’s such a misguided view.  

You see, one of the ways that God so drastically differs from us is that His focus isn’t on the outer man.  We have been told in God’s Word that “man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Samuel 16:7).  And what does God see when He looks there?  Sadly, He sees our sin, something that we are so often blind to.  That sin affects our thoughts and our behaviors in a great variety of ways.  Jesus put it this way in Mark 7:20-23: “What comes out of a person is what defiles him. For from within, out of the heart of man, come evil thoughts, sexual immorality, theft, murder, adultery, coveting, wickedness, deceit, sensuality, envy, slander, foolishness. All these evil things come from within, and they defile a person.” Yet, our focus so often remains on the outside as we attempt to deal in our own ways with the dissatisfaction that sin brings within.  

So, is there any answer to this misguided focus on external things?  What does God say about it all? More than that, what has God done?  The answer is the greatest thing that has ever been done by anyone in the history of the human race. We see a picture of this in the passage above from Matthew 3. It’s the account of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan River by John the Baptist.  John’s baptism was called a “baptism of repentance” (Matthew 3:11).  It was a confession by the one being baptized that they were sinners in need of being washed from that sin.  But then Jesus, the only person who never had any sin, came to John to be baptized by him. And why did He do this? He tells us that it was “to fulfill all righteousness.”  But it wasn’t His own righteousness that He was talking about, for He was already perfectly righteous in every way.  Rather, Jesus’ baptism was a picture of what He had done and would do to make those who were sinners to be as righteous as Him.  It’s described in this way in Philippians 2:5-8: “Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” And then this from 2 Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he (i.e., God the Father) made him (i.e., God the Son) to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” 

You see, when Jesus entered the waters of baptism, He was showing us that He was about to identify with us in OUR death. And when He came up out of the water, He was showing us that we, by faith, could identify with Him, wonderfully, in HIS resurrection.  Talk about a change of identity!  It’s a change that goes much deeper than anything on the outside, for it’s a change in the very nature of our heart.  

Isaiah describes it this way: “Come now, let us reason together, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.”  That’s what it means to be born again. That’s what it means to be truly transformed within. And when that happens, the entire focus of our life changes.  It was after Paul was saved that he looked at his past life, his accomplishments, his external identity as a Jew and a Pharisee, in an entirely new way. He said, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith—  that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:8-11). 

You see, Paul now had a new identity. It was a wonderful transformation on the inside. He now had a new heart.  And so he could say to the church, “for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith.  For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26-28).  It’s not that a person no longer has these external identities once they become a Christian. Rather, it’s that the focus of their life is no longer on such external things.  It is our identity as a child of God that matters far above anything else.  All the things that make us different externally fade to relative obscurity.  And so, the apostle John could exclaim in 1 John 3:1, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!”  

It’s this identity change that matters more than anything: the incredible transformation from sinners who were at enmity with God to saints with God’s very righteousness within them!  Have you, by faith, been transformed in this way? You can be, for God has done all that is necessary for you to be born again, a birth that is “not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:13).