Kingdom Baptism.mov

Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. This is a journey that we all travel. Come back with me to the beginning, the beginning of time, the beginning of the Bible, to the poem of beginnings. Day 6. The Creator has finished creating a beautiful world and now he reaches for the dust. He goes to a part of the garden where the ground is still bare, where life has not yet happened, and there's just dry dust on this patch of ground because all of the earth without life is just dust. And he kneels down and he begins to do something new. All week he spoke things into existence, but now with his hands he forms. He pulls the dust together and he piles the dust up and it keeps crumbling, but he keeps piling until he has a representation of a man on the ground. And then he leans over and into the mouth of his dust man, he breathes the word of life, spirit. And then he reaches and he lifts up the man and he says, "You have been born." And they stand up together, and he shows him all that is, all that he has created. Puts his arm across his shoulders and says, "Adam, my son, you are but dust and breath, and yet for you the entire universe was created." Now come forward to today.

Imagine that you have a friend who's just come back from holidays. And this friend comes to your house and says, "Oh my goodness, you have to go to this place that I went to on holidays." And she tells you all about it, and she tells you how amazing it is, and how in this place where she went on holidays, there's no sick people, there's no one who's suffering, there's no poor people, there's no rich people, there's just happiness, there's peace, there's equality, there's kindness, there's fairness.

And as you listen to her talk about this place, you think it's ridiculous, it can't exist. It's beyond fathoming.

And she says, "One day, if you ever decide to go there, let me know because I will come back with you." And you kind of put it out of your mind, but as time goes by, you find yourself when you're drifting off to sleep at night thinking of that place. She's called it another kingdom. And she says that in this kingdom, there are people who love each other. And there are people who, even though they don't know you, they do what they can to help Whenever you need anything, and everything is shared in common.

You wake up, you go to sleep, you wake up, you go to sleep.

Months pass by, and finally it just becomes such an obsession in your mind, you decide, "I have to go. I simply must go and see this place." And so you call her up and say, "I want to go on a trip, on a holiday, to that place that you went to, to that other kingdom." And she says, "Ah, yes, the kingdom of life." And she says, "Well, there's something you need to realize. I'll come over and talk to you." And so she comes over and she says, "When you get there, you'll realize that you can see so much better and you can breathe so much better." And you say, "Well, I can see just fine." She says, "Well, you think you can. You think you can, but everything you see is covered in dust.

And you're covered in dust." And you say, "No, I'm not." And she says, "Yes, you are." And she wipes and she shows you.

And you are. She says, "Everything in this kingdom is covered in dust." But when you cross the border into that kingdom, they take the dust away. There is no dust in that kingdom, and you can see and you can hear and you can be a different kind of person. And so you say, "Well, I want to go to this place." And she says, "Well, I'm going to pack not just my bags but my everything because I'm not coming back this time." And she goes on this holiday with you. And when you get to the border, the border guard stops and says, What is it you wish?

"Oh, we wish to enter this, your kingdom." "Well, I must ask you one question." "Yes?" "Are you willing to leave your past behind you and come fully into this new kingdom, the kingdom of life?" And you nod your head yes. He says, "Are you willing to leave the dust behind?" and enter life? You say, "Yes, yes, I am." He says, "Well then, come in, but might I suggest as you enter that you take a bath, wash off the dust, and you'll never want to go back again." And so you do. You come in and you wash off the dust and you begin to experience this new kingdom. There was once a man This is an ancient story from the Middle East.

And this man realized that something was wrong with him. There was something inside of him that was trying to eat its way out. It was different than the other sicknesses around where people, they look dirty and they became sick because of their unhygiene, because of the dust, if we were thinking of the previous story, all over them. He was clean. He was— he felt like invigorated and powerful, but when he looked at his skin, he could see something was eating its way out on his hand, so he put on a glove. And then he noticed later that something was eating its way from the inside out on his arm, so he made sure he wore long sleeves. And then he realized that he was being eaten from the inside out on his legs, and so he wore long pants. And then he realized on his sandaled feet one day that one of his toes was beginning to be eaten away from the inside out.

So he wore leather shoes instead of sandals. And he knew one day it would happen. One day it would happen on his face. And then he would have to come clean. He'd been hiding it from his wife. He'd been going to bed after she had, in the dark, wearing clothes to bed, getting up in the—

before the dawn and getting dressed. And one day she walked in as he was putting his shirt on and she saw one of the marks on his back.

And she gasped.

And he spun around and then she saw the full extent of what had happened to him and she wept. She broke down crying and he decided, "This day I will not go to work because now it's—

the secret's out. What will I do?" And so he sat in his room sulking, knowing his future, that he would be cast away, that he would be excluded from everyone. He would have to hide in the hills or the caves and his wife wept in the open in her in her lounge. And the little maid came to her and she said, her servant said, "What are you crying about, miss?" She said, "My husband is very, very sick.

Something's eating him from the inside out." And she said, "Oh, he should go to the land where I'm from, the kingdom that's just adjacent to this kingdom. He should go into the other kingdom and there is a God in my land. I can remember the stories from when I was little, from before I was taken by your people to serve you." I can remember in that kingdom that there is a God who can heal the sick and do amazing miracles, even raise the dead.

And so his wife runs back into him and says, "Naaman," which was his name, and he was the leader of the army of his land.

She says, "You need to go in and consult the God of the neighboring kingdom. You need to go to Israel." And he said, "What could their God possibly do?" Our servant girl says that she has heard stories and that they are true stories of miracles. Death brought back to life, sickness healed. Naaman, you must go. And so Naaman puts on his gloves and his full covering and he makes his way to see his king who he works for side by side. And he says to his king, I need to show you something.

And he pulls off one of his gloves and shows him the spots and says, I'm being eaten. From the inside out. And I don't know what it is, but I know that there's nothing I can do. Any washing just makes it worse. It just gets festers and gets worse. And the king steps back and says, well, I don't want whatever you have. What are we going to do about it?

And he says, well, my servant girl says that in the neighboring country, in the kingdom next door, there is a God who can heal me. And the king says, take everything you need here. And he gives him a chariot full of silver and gold and clothes and all kinds of beautiful things. It says, "Go and pay for this healing." And so Naaman goes across the border and he goes to the king of the other land and he says, "I brought all of this to pay you to heal me." And the king tears out his hair and says, "Oh, it's— they're picking a fight. How can I possibly heal somebody of this horrible eating disease that's eating him from the inside out? I can—

am I God that I can heal such things?" Well, God's prophet hears the king's suffering and says, "Send him to me, and I will show you that there is a God in this land who can heal people who are dying from the inside out." And so they send Naaman to the prophet.

And when he gets there, the prophet's servant meets him on the doorstep and says, "I'm sorry, the prophet won't see you.

He wants you to go take a bath in the river." And he says, "I'm sorry, what? He just called for me." "Well, he said you just need to take a bath in the river. Make sure you dip 7 times, then it'll clean you." Dip?

Bath? Do you think I'm dirty? I'm not dirty. This isn't something that's come from the outside in. It's coming from inside of me. It's eating me away from the inside out. And he gets so angry that this prophet won't speak to him that he gets on his horse and he races away. And his men pulling the chariot full of gold and the wagons catch up with him finally and say, "Naaman, slow down.

What if it works?" He said, "That's just ridiculous. Taking a bath, that's not going to change anything." But Naaman, what if they'd asked you to do—

what if he said, 'Go and do something really, really hard.

Would you have done that?' 'Well, of course I would.' 'Well then, why not try this simple thing?' And the truth was, it wasn't so simple because there was that something at his core which was eating him from the inside out, and it needed to die. And they continued cajoling and urging him until finally his pride fell away. And humility took over, and Naaman entered the water, dropped his clothes off of his back as he went towards the water, and the men gasped when they saw the sores. And he entered the water, and he went in and he dipped all the way down under the water and came up and looked. Nothing different.

He said 7 times.

Went down again, again, 3, 4, 6. Finally, on the 7th time, he's expecting to see nothing else than what he's seen before. And his skin is healed.

And Naaman comes running out of the water and throws his clothes on. He's completely well. And he jumps on his horse and he races back to the prophet's house. And he says, "All this silver, all this gold, all these clothes, everything in this wagon is yours. Thank you so much for healing me." And now the prophet's standing there and he says, "Healing you?

What are you talking about? I've never met you before." "But I was just here and you sent me to wash." "Oh, God sent you to wash. That was just a message I gave you." You can't pay me for something I didn't do.

Well, who do I give the payment to? He said, well, give glory to God for what God has done. Well, how do I? Can I give all this gold to your God?

God knows where he put the gold in the mountains. If he wants it, he can go and get it. He doesn't need your gold.

Well, but how do I thank him?

Just worship him and then name and ask something really interesting. He says, "Well, if you won't let me give you anything, can I take something from you?

Can I take as much dirt as I can carry from your front yard?" The prophet says, "Whatever for?" And he says, "I want to take some of God's land back to my country, some dirt from the prophet's yard, and I want to put it in my front yard, and I'm going to build a huge pile, and I'm going to level it out, and I'm going to build an altar to the one true God, the God who can heal people who are dying." from the inside out, and I'm going to tell everyone who goes by my house that I no longer worship gods who can do nothing.

I worship the God who healed me. And the prophet shakes his head and says, "Of course you can take as much dirt as you want." So Naaman loads up two of his donkeys with massive amounts of dirt, and he takes it back, and he pours it out on his yard, and he worships. And he leads that little servant girl who already believed in that God, and she worships. And I don't know the rest of the story. I'm sure one day in the kingdom we will hear the story of how many other people were touched by Naaman's worship of the one true God. Whether it is dust on the outside from this world, just the things of the world that weigh us down and they, they start to eat at us from the outside in, or whether it's something deep-seated within us that eats us from the inside out, we are all returning to dust. Unless we choose. It's a simple choice. To move from kingdom to kingdom. To say, "I want to leave the kingdom of dust behind and I want to enter into the kingdom of life." And this is the decision that our 5 young people have made tonight. They've said, "While I know I won't look that much different to other people, I'll know that I live in a different kingdom from now on." I will accept I will accept what Jesus has done for me by creating a new kingdom and then breaking down the barrier between them. I will say yes. I will leave the old kingdom behind and I will enter the new kingdom and never turn back.