Father God, we love you. We thank you so much for loving us, for adopting us as your very own children. We just praise you for that. Holy Spirit, we do thank you for being our teacher and our comfort and our comforter. And we ask you to soften our hearts and speak to each of us this morning. Help each of us to leave lighter than we walked in. And Jesus, thank you for being our Savior and our friend. We praise you so much. That's your name we pray. Amen. So I mentioned that today is Baptism Sunday. More than 70 of us are planning to get baptized this morning. And we'll finish up about 11:15 or so, and then we'll take 15 minutes to get ready. I'll kind of explain that uh toward the end. But if you can stay, it is such a great experience. You know, and it's not a one event where 70 people are getting baptized. It is 70 huge events uh for each person getting baptized, you know, but all rolled up in in one. And it's such a great time, and and just to share that joy and excitement and to see God and feel the Holy Spirit Spirit working in each of our lives. And it's definitely not a stuffy ritual. It's an exciting statement. There'll be a lot of cheering and clapping, you know, when someone just says, I'm all in. And we get to experience the same thing that Jesus Himself experienced. Um, it's a supernatural, spiritual thing as we symbolically die to our past, and then we're buried, and then we're raised to a whole new life. Romans 6 says that that is what happened in baptism. When we went under the water, we left the old country of sin behind. When we came up out of the water, we entered into the new country of grace, a new life in a new land. And that's what baptism into the life of Jesus means. When we're lowered into the water, it is like the burial of Jesus. When we're raised up out of the water, it is like the resurrection of Jesus. Each of us is raised into a light-filled world by our Father, so that we can see where we're going in our new grace sovereign country. One cool thing about uh baptism is that any believer can baptize someone. You know, Jesus didn't actually do the baptizing, his followers uh baptized each other. So if there's someone here that is meaningful in your life and you'd like them to uh to baptize you, uh please uh please ask them. That's uh a great honor. Then uh of course Susan and I and Justin and Bill and Stephanie, and there'll be a bunch of us that would uh love to baptize you as well. I should say that every Sunday when we do this, uh there's several people that just walked in minding their own business, didn't plan to get wet at all, that ends up uh being baptized. And afterwards we'll have clothes and and towels and things that if if if that's you or if you just forgot, they'll be on a table in in the um in the lobby, and then we'll just experience that all together. I wanted to just let you know that some churches uh uh baptize babies. What we do with for babies is we do we baptize them in prayer, basically. And we dedicate babies, and mostly we dedicate their parents, you know, and ask God to to raise up the child, but also to give the parents uh uh strength and uh and love for their child. But I get asked, you know, how old is when is someone old enough uh as a child to be baptized? And I believe that when a child is old enough to ask to be baptized, to want to be baptized, they're old enough to be baptized. Um, you know, that's one of the things that Jesus famously said. He said, uh let the children come to me. And it's a beautiful thing as a child and as adults, we'll have a uh a bunch of all ages this morning, uh be baptized just like Jesus did. It's an exciting time. And we've talked about baptism. Two weeks ago, we talked uh uh about it for the whole time, really getting ready for today, um, how it is doing what Jesus did, how there's so many times that we would like to um maybe walk where Jesus walked or experience something the way that Jesus experienced it. Well, baptism is one of those things that we get to do exactly what Jesus did, experience exactly what he experienced. And Matthew 3 says, Then Jesus went from Galilee to the Jordan River to be baptized by John. But John tried to talk him out of it. I am the one who needs to be baptized by you, he said. So why are you coming to me? But Jesus said, It should be done, for we must carry out all that God requires. So John agreed to baptize him. After his baptism, as Jesus came up out of the water, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and settling on him. And so there's an obedience element to baptism, there's a spiritual, supernatural Holy Spirit element to baptism, there's an all-I'm all in statement in baptism. But there's another element of baptism that we haven't talked about as much, and that is the supernatural Holy Spirit sense of being pure and clean when we're baptized. You know, as soon as we put our trust in Jesus, we're forgiven of our sins. Baptism itself, as we talked about a couple weeks, doesn't uh save us. It's part of our response to being saved. Uh I read uh Romans 4, it says, but how did this happen? He's talking about this is Paul talking about Abraham. But how did this happen? Was he counted as righteous only after he was circumcised, or was it before he was circumcised? Clearly, God accepted Abraham before he was circumcised. Circumcision was a sin that uh was a sin. Circumcision was a sign that Abraham already had faith and that God had already accepted him and declared him to be righteous even before he was circumcised. So Abraham is the spiritual father of those who have faith but have not been circumcised. They're accounted as righteous because of their faith. The reason that's important is because it's the exact same with baptism. We are declared right with God, pure and free from all sins, the moment we turn to Jesus. We're reconnected with him. When we say in our own words, in our own way, I need you, I want you, I'm gonna trust you, help me. And then he fills us with his spirit. He starts the process of transforming us inside and out. But there's something about baptism, about being in the water, about coming out of the water, that helps us recognize, understand, and feel that purity and the clean and just feeling clean. You know, most of what God asks us to do is really for our benefit. You know, that it's not for God, it's for us. And I think that baptism is just an example of that. There's so much about it. And one of the things is that when we come up out of the water, we just feel so clean. I've I've had so many people tell me that, you know, that I couldn't believe it. I just felt so pure and so clean when I was uh baptized. Paul knew that feeling. He writes about it uh to his young friend Titus. See, you're thinking we're gonna talk about baptism again today, but we're going somewhere else. This is just gonna get us there. Paul's talking to his young friend Titus. He says, It wasn't so long ago that we ourselves were stupid and stubborn, dupes of sin, ordered every which way by our glands, going around with a chip on our shoulder, hated and hating back. But when God, our kind and loving Savior, stepped in, he saved us from all that. It was all his doing. We had nothing to do with it. He gave us a good bath, and we came out of it new people, washed inside and out by the Holy Spirit. Our Savior Jesus poured out new life so generously. God's gift has restored our relationship with him and given us back our lives. And there's more life to come, an eternity of life. You can count on this. In Hebrews, he talked about it this way. And since we have a great high priest who rules over God's house, let us go right into the presence of God with sincere hearts, fully trusting. For our guilty consciences have been sprinkled with Christ's blood to make us clean, and our bodies have been washed with pure water. So I say all that because there's a big group of us that's going to be baptized today, and one of the things that each of you is going to experience is that sense of being clean, that sense of being pure and holy and uh right with God. Um it be wonderful if all of us could feel that exact same way this morning? If each of us could leave, knowing that we are pure and holy and clean and right with God, knowing that we're safe with Him, knowing that we are lovable, that we're lovable to God. Well, we can. We can. We can all leave feeling that way today. I think this morning could be big. Every time there's something that could be big, it just feels like it's hard to get going. There's like it's almost like a resistance. Maybe it's a spiritual resistance. You know, it's like um Susan's got the numbers thing, I got the spiritual resistance thing. So we're um we're both weird in our own ways. But I feel that way this morning. I feel like, oh man, this is really like a bit of a fight getting um to where God would want us to go. Where he wants us to go is to leave this morning, each of us, knowing that we are pure and clean and holy in God's sight. Um the that happens first when we turn to Jesus. You know, we can uh our sins are forgiven. We know that we no longer have any guilt, any shame. The second way that we uh get rid of guilt and shame sometimes is uh is fixing something we've done. You know, sometimes we'll have guilt or have shame have shame because we've done something, and so we need to do something else to fix it. In Matthew 5 says, that is how I want you to conduct yourself in these matters. If you enter your place of worship and you're about to make an offering, you suddenly remember a grudge a friend has against you, abandon your offering, leave immediately. Go to this friend and make things right. Then and only then come back and work things out with God. Okay, that's where I thought everybody was gonna get up and leave. So that's uh wouldn't that be funny if you read that verse and then everybody just got up and walked down? But Jesus says, hey, if you owe somebody something, you know, if you're if you're coming to church and you remember, wow, somebody's got a grudge against me and there's something I can do to fix it, go do that first. You know? It it's a way of us staying guilt-free and connected with people. And most of us have done that. You know, we've owed somebody money or we've needed to apologize or whatever it might be, and we feel guilt, you know, maybe a conviction until we go take care of it. And then that goes away. Um sometimes we've hurt people, and we've got to try and make that right. But in general, those aren't the types of things that leave us consistently feeling dirty, feeling unworthy, feeling ashamed. I have a friend who's 75 years old, and and uh he's been a preacher since he was 20. Um we were talking about heaven, and and and I was asked him if he was looking forward to it. And he said, Well, I hope I'm there. And I'm what what do you mean? And he goes, Well, I just what if there's something that I didn't know I was supposed to do? Or what if there was something that I did and I didn't know about it and didn't ask forgiveness? He spent 55 years with his friend, kind of hellfire and brimstoning it up a little bit, but he had never felt the love and the lightness that comes from complete and absolute forgiveness of God, it comes from us feeling the complete and absolute forgiveness of God. And so is there something weighing you down? Something that you don't think God could give could ever forgive you for, or something you haven't forgiven yourself for. I hope that this morning when you walk outside, you will feel the complete and utter forgiveness of God. Um Jesus has done that for us. In 1 Corinthians 1, it says, Christ made us right with God. He made us pure and holy and he freed us from sin. He made us pure and holy and freed us from sin. There's a couple things that I think weigh us down. The first is regret. Regret's a little different than guilt. Um because we might accept that God forgives us of guilt or or uh or forgives others, but regret is usually something that we can't forgive ourselves for. I have regrets. I mean I imagine we all have regrets. I regret the time I swapped out our accounting professors' dry erase markers with permanent markers. The see all the teachers in here are going, you jerk. But uh I've regretted a lot of things in my life, things I did as a kid, you know, things I've done as an adult. I there's business decisions I regret, there's ways that I've acted I regret, there's times I've let people down that I regret, there's uh um things like traveling all the time when when my kids were young. I look back and I regret uh that, that I wasn't home more. Um all kinds of things. And uh you know, jokes that went over the line, things I said that hurt people, uh mistakes I've made. I'm obviously not telling you any of the bad ones, but uh but just regrets, and there's so many of them. I I remember uh when my son Andrew was probably seven or eight. We're out on the porch and I'm cutting his hair, and I just uh wasn't paying attention. I was thinking about something else, and I cut his ear with the scissors, and uh he screamed and he cried, and you know, I mean it was just such a moment of trust where he completely trusted me, he wasn't worried at all that I would hurt him, and yet I did. Um still sometimes when I get my hair cut, I think about that. And um with just regret. How could I not have been more careful? How how could I have uh let that happen? You know, stuff like that. It just all piles up. You know, things where we could have paid attention, things that maybe we should have thought of something, things where we could have been more careful, big things that we've done and and and things that we didn't do. You know, God, our dad, spoke through Isaiah to us when he said, forget about what's happened. Don't keep going over old history. Be alert, be present. I'm about to do something brand new. It's bursting out. Don't you see it? There it is. I'm making a road to the desert, rivers in the bad line bad lands. Is there a regret that you have? I mean, can you think of something? Are you thinking of something now? Something that you just wish you could change, something that you just can't get over every time of it, every time you think of it, it just hurts somehow. In Philippians 3, Paul said, No, dear brothers and sisters, I have not achieved it, but I focus on this one thing forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead. It might be too late to change something, but it's not too late to let it go. Just to let it go, to forget the past, to move on with our future. Now, the other thing is guilt. Some of us believe that that God can surely forgive everybody else's sins. But but there's something we've done that He would just never forgive us for. Maybe we just don't think we deserve it. Maybe we think that we told him we weren't gonna do it, and we kept doing it over and over. Um maybe we think it's just too bad that uh for God to forgive. Since I've been kind of in this role for the last five years, I've had so many people come up to me and tell me about something that they thought was such a huge deal, that they had so much shame over. And it really wasn't that big a deal. Um it's probably something I'd done something five times as bad. But we build up this shame and we build up this huge guilt over things that we've done. In Matthew 11, Jesus said, Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. The heaviest burden that almost all of us will carry is guilt, shame, and regret. There's nothing too bad for God to forgive. It might be something from a long time ago, it might be something from last night. But you can trust God's love. God forgives. I mean, what can we be holding on to? I mean, what would be so bad? Is it murder like Moses and David? Is it sexual uh stuff and adultery like so many people in the Bible? Is it having an abortion? Is it having bad anger? Is it what we've done to someone else, maybe what someone did to us? I mean, what could it be? I mean, we're all just people. We're all just created from dust, the Bible says. That we need God's weak. I mean, we need God's strength, or else we're weak. In Romans 7, Paul says this I've discovered this principle of life, that when I want to do what is right, I inevitably do what is wrong. I love God's law with all my heart, but there is another power within me that is at war with my mind. This power makes me a slave to this to the sin that is still within me. Oh, what a miserable person I am. Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin and death? Thank God. The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord. So you see how it is. In my mind, I really want to obey God's law, but because of my sinful nature, I am a slave to sin. So we're not the only ones, you know, that that struggle and fight. I mean, that was Saint Paul talking about how difficult it is for him sometimes. And so my thought this morning, the uh you know, it started out so exciting, Baptism Sunday. But my thought this morning is what the 70-some people are gonna experience, what you're gonna experience today in baptism, what if? What if all of us could experience the same thing? Now most of us have experienced that forgiveness, and I mean, uh, yeah, for the forgiveness and experience the walk in a new life and the and the Holy Spirit and all those type of things. What if we could experience the feeling of cleanness and purity and holiness, being completely right with God? What if we could all experience that? I asked you if there was some type of regret in your life that you think about over and over, or when you do, it causes hurt or pain. Um is there a uh a sin or an area in your life that you think God just could not forgive you of that? Um so many of us hold things from a long time. We've we've never told anyone. We carry such shame over. Um I want to share an amazing thing about God. One amazing thing. God doesn't just forgive, he completely forgets. It's incredible. We can't even imagine it, really. It's too good to be true. God doesn't just forgive, he completely forgets. I mean, he really does. It's not some weird theology. We're not playing church. We're talking about a real God who really loves you, who cares everything about you, who created you with great care. He doesn't just forgive, he completely forgets. And those things that you're holding on to, when you pray and for the thousandth time, you say, Please God, I'm so sorry. You know, he's saying, wow, I completely forgot about that. Until you said something. For him it is gone. It is completely forgotten. He'll never hold it against you. He will never hold that against you. He doesn't even remember that it happened. He loves you. You are his child. When he looks at us, he does not see what we've done. Or not done. Psalms 103 says, He has removed our sins as far from us as the East is from the West. How far is that? Not even close. In Isaiah 43, he says, I, yes, I alone will blot out your sins for my own sake and will never think of them again. You are clean. You are pure. You are spotless. You are holy. You are completely lovable. You are completely lovable. God loves you. He's erased all your mistakes. And he never thinks of them again. Most of the things that I've had trouble forgiving myself for, maybe my biggest regrets, you know, weren't before I was saved. Weren't before I was baptized. They were after I was saved. After. I thought I should have known better. I should have loved God more. I should have cared more. See, those things are just as forgiven. Just as forgiven. Jesus died once for all. For all of our sins. The stuff behind us, the stuff we're going to do this week. It doesn't matter when. I mean, shouldn't we feel a little guilty? Just to remember how good God is? I mean, shouldn't we feel a little guilty? No. No. You shouldn't feel guilty at all. You should feel pure and holy and blameless, without a spot, the way God sees you. Then we can move forward with confidence, with strength, in his love, in relationship with him. To me, one of the most meaningful verses in the Bible is found in Micah. And this is our verse for this morning. This is kind of where I wanted to get to this morning. It's Micah 7, verse 18 and 19. Where is the God who can compare with you? Wiping the slate clean of guilt, turning a blind eye, a deaf ear to the past sins of your purged and precious people. You don't nurse your anger and don't stay angry for long, for mercy is your specialty. That's what you love most. And compassion is on its way to us. You'll stamp out our wrongdoing. You'll sink our sins to the bottom of the ocean. You know, God sinks our sins to the bottom of the ocean. Do you know how deep the ocean floor is? I mean, it's so deep we can't even explore it. Over 70 of us are going to experience what it feels like to come out of the water this morning. Clean. Old life behind us. Future ahead of us. All of us can leave this morning experiencing what it feels like to have our sins completely forgiven, completely gone, sunk to the bottom of the ocean's floor. So I want to invite each of you to experience that, to participate in that. But we have four big urns. And they're full of blue water. On the side of the rooms where the Lord's Supper was are piles now of rocks and pens. So what I want to invite you to do during this last song that we're going to sing together, then afterwards we'll we'll pray together and finish up. In fact, if the worship team wants to come up, we'll get ready for that. What I want to invite you to do is to go during this song and get a rock. And if there is a regret in your life, if there is a sin that you have trouble believing God forgives you for, if there's anything like that that is holding you back, that is weighing you down, that is a heavy burden to you, I would ask you to write it on the rock. And you don't have to write it all out. Maybe it's initial, or maybe just the rock represents it. But then what you can do is you can walk over to one of these four oceans, and you can look inside and you can watch it sink. Completely out of sight. Completely gone. It's what God does with each of us. It's what God has done with everything wrong you have ever done. It's like he stamped it out and he is put to the bottom of the ocean floor. And that's what baptism does. I mean, not just that, but in baptism, it's something we can experience. So I invite you to experience that. What is it in your life? What regret might you have? What thing have you maybe not forgiven yourself for? Just go get a rock, write it on it, and then go watch, watch, as it sinks out of sight. And then the next time you think of that, you can say, No, I watched that. It was completely gone. It's completely gone. And then the next time, and before long, you won't think about it at all. It'll be just like God. Forgotten and gone. You know, God's got a great future for each of us. In fact, we would you stand and we'll get ready for this last song. See, this is why I said we really need the Holy Spirit this morning. Because with God's help, we can all walk out of here lighter, knowing that we're clean, knowing that we're spotless, knowing that we're pure. Even when I say that, I can tell. It's true. It is true that God sees you pure and clean and spotless, not a fault, as if you have never done anything. To him, anything you've ever done, any regret you've ever had, it's like it's on the bottom of the ocean floor. And Jeremiah says, I know what I'm doing. I have it all planned out. Plans to take care of you, not abandon you. Plans to give you the future you hope for. But sometime to move to the future, we need to get rid of the past. Get those sins behind us. Start out knowing we're clean, knowing we're pure, knowing we're a hundred percent loved by God. So, no pressure. But if you'd like to do that, um, please do while we sing this last song. Then we'll pray. Well, we can uh we can do a lot, but only Jesus Christ can do that. Forgive us of our sins. Not just forgiven, completely forgotten. And so we don't need to spend so much time apologizing to God. We can just thank Him for being such a good dad. He loves you, He sees you as you are, pure, spotless, holy. So let's pray. Father, we just thank you for being who you are, for adopting us as your children, for forgetting everything we've ever done. We praise you and we thank you for that. Holy Spirit, please just fill us and help us to feel clean. Help us to feel clean like you see us. Jesus, we thank you for being the one, for taking that burden, for bearing that weight. We praise you and we trust you and we love you. And it's in your great name we pray. Amen.