We turn in the word to Psalm 51 and we stand together for that reading, giving attention to the word. We read the first 13 verses and then to Revelation chapter one. Please stand for the reading of God's word. This is to the chief musician, a Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone into Bathsheba. Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness, according to the multitude of Your tender mercies. Blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. where I acknowledge my transgressions and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight that you may be found just when you speak and blameless when you judge. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin my mother conceived me. Behold, you desire truth in the inward parts and in the hidden part you will make me to know wisdom. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me hear joy and gladness that the bones that you have broken may rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence. Do not take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me by your generous spirit. Then I will teach transgressors your ways and sinners shall be converted to you. Now from Revelation chapter one. We'll read the verses four through eight. John. To the seven churches which are in Asia, grace to you and peace from him who is, and who was, and who is to come. From the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, the firstborn from the dead, and the ruler over the kings of the earth. To him who loved us and washed us from our sins in his own blood, and has made us kings and priests to his God and father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen. Behold, he is coming with clouds, and every eye shall see him, even those who pierced him. And all the tribes of the earth will mourn because of him. Even so, amen. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, says the Lord, who is and was and is to come the Almighty. And the grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of God endures forever. We turn in the preaching of the word to Revelation chapter one. Revelation chapter one, if you have your Bibles open, that's where we will be. seeking God's face, that he would teach and instruct us by that word. Chapter one in verse five, and in particular, I don't often do this, but a narrow phrase in the doxology that we find there in verse five, to him who loved us, who washed us in his blood, made us kings and priests, with a special focus this morning on that idea of Washing. That idea is a common idea in the Christian faith, centrally portrayed to you this morning in baptism. We just sung about it, that Christ breaks the power of reigning sin, he sets the prisoner free, his blood can make the foulest clean. And in a moment, in that great hymn, And Can It Be, we will sing about the same thing again. And if you're tracking in this service, The baptism and the singing and the preaching, the reading of Psalm 51, filled with the language of washing, the need to be washed. A few moments ago, you witnessed that baptism, little Henry's baptism. It's a religious rite as old as Christianity with roots even deeper, the old covenant promises of God to Abraham who said, I will be a God to you and your children after you. It's repeated in the new covenant. In Acts chapter two, repent and be baptized, every one of you, for the remission of sins. That baptism was to be in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Apostle Peter preached on Pentecost. It was connected to the gift of the Holy Spirit, and it was a promise that was for those hearers and their children and all who are far off. The promise and call of the gospel is simply what we preached this morning in relation to this ceremonial washing that you just saw a few moments ago. If you thought that you might come today to just be a maybe impersonal observer, the preaching of the word is gonna call you to be a deeply personal observer and to consider the beauty and glory of this picture of washing in the simplicity of the gospel of Jesus Christ. The picture and idea of washing is clear here in the text, and we're gonna look at that through the scriptures, the idea of washing. Then we're gonna look a little deeper at not just the general idea, but that it implies a prior state and a result. That washing is something that says something about a prior state and a future state. The central act tells us more than perhaps at first glance we might think. And it tells us about ourselves. It's a message from God to humanity about who you really are and what needs to change and how alone that can change. The idea of washing here, It's very clear in the text. We have that doxology. The Greek word found here is to wash, to cleanse. There's a similar picture of washing another place in the book of Revelation. Those who are before the throne are those who have washed their garments clean in the blood of the lamb. The picture of the redeemed in the book of Revelation is those who simply have been washed. This brings to mind A lot of other New Testament language bring to our hearts and minds this simple idea of washing or cleansing. And I want you to just take note of a few texts that declare salvation to be washing. And after Paul in 1 Corinthians 6 describes fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, homosexuals, sodomites, thieves, covetous, drunkards, revilers, extortioners, says, they will not inherit the kingdom of heaven. He says something else. He says, such were some of you. The Corinthians used to be all these things. Different people in different ways, but you were washed. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God. Paul, when he writes to the Ephesian church, he cannot help described the work of Christ as washing. Christ also loved the church and gave himself for her that he might sanctify and cleanse her with the washing of water by the word. Washing. Titus 3.5 tells us that the great work of regeneration, the work of the Holy Spirit in the heart, the Apostle Paul calls it the washing of regeneration, to be cleansed. Hebrews 9 and verse 14 and 10 and verse 22 say the same thing. 1 John 1 verses 7 through 9 tell us that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. It's a washing. Recall what we just read from Psalm 51, the prayer of David after he had sinned greatly against God. Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. This picture of washing is one of the simplest biblical pictures of salvation. Christian baptism is a simple sign of the simple way. There's an old baptismal form used in the continental churches that warns the church before every baptism that we should not do this out of custom or superstition. This is not just something Christians do as a sort of interesting ceremony. but that every time we come to it and we witness it, we need to be thinking about the gospel, that it has a divine meaning. What happens in this rite that you just saw, to take a phrase from the Westminster Confession of Faith, water. Wherewith the party is to be baptized is rightly administered by pouring or sprinkling, the simplest of signs, a ceremonial washing, and water washes away dirt and pollution. I just read a moment ago a similar statement from the older Belgic confession made by the reformed churches of the continent. And especially in the picture of The baptism you saw this morning, profoundly appropriate that baptism is applied to a little child. A helpless human being with no capacity to wash him or herself is a fitting picture of what we need to be saved. It's also deeply counter-cultural. What we just said in that rite is that even newborn life, new life, What we would maybe think to be innocent life needs cleansing, pardon. Not affirmation, but cleansing. Deeply counter-cultural. In our age, we are to affirm everything. Someone is by nature. Baptism says, no, there is an old nature that needs to be washed away. Christian baptism is in a long pattern of washings in the scriptures. I can think of Israel that was commanded to wash before they came to God at Mount Sinai, Exodus 19 and verse 10. I can think of the priest who had to wash, especially before the dedication of the tabernacle. I can think of the high priest in Leviticus 16 who had to wash before he entered into the most holy place on the day of atonement. I can think of the unclean in Israel who had to wash in order that they may be declared clean in Leviticus 11 and verse following. I can think of the simple picture of salvation proclaimed to Naaman the Syrian when Elisha said to this powerful general of a neighboring country, go wash in the river Jordan. And that washing was a picture of the cleansing that he needed in his heart. And if we go through the scriptures, we just read Psalm 51, wash me thoroughly from my iniquity. Isaiah 1 and verse 16, wash yourselves, make yourselves clean. Jeremiah 4 and verse 14, oh Jerusalem, wash your hearts of your wickedness. Which brings us to those two simple states, the state of before washing and after washing. There is something commanded that has been set before you, a simple picture, runs through the scriptures, it's the language of salvation from the beginning to the end of the word of God. We're in the book of Revelation here. What is the prior state before washing? Look at chapter one, look at the text here we're looking at again in that little phrase. To him who loved us, and washed us, and what is the filth that needs to be removed? Our sins. Washed us from our sins. If we go back to the Old Testament and then we run into the New, the washing is because of moral impurity. Job nine and verse 13, Job said, if I were to wash myself with the waters of snow melt, purest water I could find, and then scrub myself with soap, I would still deserve the judgment of God. It's an interesting moral impulse, this to cleanse, I need to be cleansed. There's some striking examples in the scriptures of washing and the connection to this ideas of guilt and innocence. Jeremiah chapter two, we have the same thing. speaks to his people and the command is to wash themselves with water and with soap in order that their sins would be washed away. This washing is a moral, is because of a moral impurity. Psalm 26, six, I will wash my hands in innocence so I will go about your altar. And there the idea of guilt and innocence is connected to the washing. And it's not insignificant that a man under the heavy burden of a screaming conscious Pontius Pilate publicly washes his hands before the crowds in order to seek in some way to symbolically declare himself innocent of the murder of Jesus. This idea of washing runs close to the human condition, close to the human conscience. I need to be washed. And so the spiritual precondition, or rather the precondition that baptism supposes is moral pollution. The nature of the human condition proclaimed in baptism is moral pollution. Again, I said earlier today, the idea of just be what you want to be, whatever you think you are, you can be. The scriptures would tell you that on account of our natural fallenness, that road will lead to more guilt and pollution. It won't lead to liberty in life. To magnify and spur along my natural condition, and here's the humbling thing, what you just saw, from birth would mean wreckage, rebellion, and brokenness. moral culpability before God. The human condition is moral rebellion, to resist the will of God, to reject his law, to deface his creation. And Romans 5 tells us why. Just as one man, Adam, through one man, Adam, sin entered the world, and death through sin So death spread to all men because all sinned. All have fallen short of the glory of God. There is none righteous, no not one. There is none that seeks after God. There's this universal, natural human condition called fallenness. Connected to that is rebellion. The rebellion is connected to our moral pollution. And the word is so intensive about this. We just read in Psalm 51, that I was brought forth in iniquity, in sin my mother conceived me, that there is no way to begin with a blank slate according to the word of God. That we, by birth, enter and join a fallen human race. And that this fallenness and the sin that attends it is incompatible with God's moral purity. It consists of hatred and rebellion. A violation of his revealed will, an unwillingness to love his word, want to do his commands. And that's why God says these words, no man shall see me and live. That there's no way to God in that state. Heaven, everyone seems to want to go to heaven. It's a place where there is no sin and rebellion, where there's this perfect, holy, moral purity, the loveliness of God on display. God who dwells in light, unapproachable and full of glory. And here's the thing you need to remember. You would be more successful approaching the Son, which is just a small servant of God, than you would be entering heaven in your natural, morally fallen state without washing. Now, Infant baptism is a critical part of our theology of baptism. I already said this because we are jointly and publicly confessing this before God. The question I just asked Alden and Sarah, do you acknowledge your children are conceived and born in sin and subject to condemnation? I'm gonna say something that perhaps is even less comfortable. It's not acute right. It's a right where we rejoice in. We'll get to that in a moment. There's so much joy in it. But we say first we've been born in Adam. That's how we were born. I was born this way, we say to the Lord. Without you, without hope in the world. It's a public statement of a fallen moral condition and a helplessness of that natural human condition. An act of contrition of the whole church. And aside, this is another reason why baptism of children is so appropriate. We do not baptize children after seeing something first good in them. But we baptize our children because we recognize that apart from the intervening, cleansing mercy of God, there could never be any good in them. Again, I'll repeat it. In sin, my mother conceived me. And that fallenness is ugly. A world of crime and war and rape and greed and murder It's why you have a conscience that sometimes bothers you. It's this natural moral culpability. The Bible says it's intrinsic. You were born with it. It's original sin. It's actual sin that proceeds from it. And the first thing then that baptism says to you this morning is submit to God's clear declaration of your needy condition apart from his grace. The Westminster Larger Catechism, when it says, how can you improve your baptism? One of the things it says is, be humbled on account of your sinful defilement. You pray, I search my heart, oh God. Take away my prayerlessness, my cold-heartedness, my rebellion, my disobedience, my bitterness, my selfishness, my pride. Lord, I, apart from your intervening grace, this is who I would be. And some of you, Perhaps you've never thought about this. And for the first time, uncomfortably, you are thinking about who you are and your conscience perhaps bothering you. I just came and I just witnessed a baptism. I didn't think it would be this personal. But the word says it is. Second state, happier things. Washing, what does it do? It brings you to a second condition. Focus on the act of pouring and sprinkling. Back to the text here. The text is an interesting combination of two things. In verse four and five, it begins with this great gospel language. Well, first of all, the book is the revelation of Jesus Christ. The central figure in this entire book is Jesus Christ. The book is the revelation of his kingdom and glory. It's sent by the hand of the apostle John, the messenger who receives the vision. He's to give it to the churches. Why? Because they're suffering and they're crying and they're weeping under heavy persecution. And what John is to set before them is the triumph of the lamb, the majesty and glory of Jesus Christ, and the beauty and glory and love of the trium God for his people. So he opens with grace to you and peace from him who is and was and who is to come. That's a description of the eternal father on the throne. And from the seven spirits who are before his throne, this sevenfold fullness of the Holy Spirit of God. Grace to you and peace from the father and from the spirit. And then in third place, and from Jesus Christ. The firstborn from the dead, the one who died and rose again, the faithful witness, the teacher and preacher of his whole church, to his whole church, and the ruler of the kings of the earth, the ascended majestic one, not only risen, but now living and teaching and reigning over all things with the very powerful reign that we just read about from Matthew 28, all authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. The promise of this book opens with grace, And peace, the favor of God that transforms sinners, that powerful favor called grace, and the inner tranquility and peace of conscience that only can come from him, peace. Lavished on the church. The nature of the words change in the middle of verse five. For after Christ, the central figure of this book, after his name is mentioned, John turns to what we call doxology, praise. Jesus Christ, the firstborn from the dead, the faithful witness, the ruler of the kings of the earth, he moves now to praise. The moment he says his name, considers his glory, he says, to him who loved us, who washed us from our sins in his blood, and made us kings and priests forever, To him be glory and dominion forever and ever, amen. He says the name, and if you read the rest of the book, you know why, it's the Lamb of God on the throne, takes away the sins of the world, the one who is worthy of praises of men and angels, you read the whole book, that is the great theme of the book. He can't but mention his name without moving into this praise of who he is. And there's the love of God, in Jesus Christ that he's praising him for. But the second thing we want to focus on is the washing away of our sins. Matter of fact, there's a progression here from love to washing to reigning with Christ. Let's deal with a laser focus on this matter of the dealing with sin. The root of that is his love. The result is the exaltation. The text says he washed us from our sins. Some of your Bibles, if you're reading another translation, loosed us, divided them from us. The idea here is that Jesus is worthy of our endless praise because of this great act of redemption. He washed our sins away. washed us from our sins, here's the great division, taking away the pollution, the condemnation, the power, the infecting nature of sin from fallen human beings. He alone is able to do this. There's no one else. How do we know this? Because He did it by His blood, by the cross. This is the language of the cross. The center of Christianity is a bloody cross. The water baptism you saw, the only reason it was water and not an Old Testament bloody circumcision is because of the triumph of the cross. Because by his blood, there is pardon and cleansing for sinners. That as he stood in your place, and then walked in your place, and was nailed to the cross in your place. And as the crown of thorns and the nails in his hands and his feet, they were placed and the blood flowed. That was because he willingly took upon himself your guilt. By his blood, he then is able to wash our sins away. What he came to do, the angel said to Joseph, You should call his name Jesus, why? Because he shall save his people from their sins. This is his great mission, to shed his blood on Calvary's cross, to take the polluted and wash them. Let's go back to the pollution for a moment, even though maybe you don't want to, but the glory of the cross is heightened by our understanding of the desperate nature of the pollution. There's no way you can fix your sins. There's no way you can atone for them. There's no way you can pay for them. You have no power to be out from under the dominion of them. But Christ has washed us from our sins, which means he has the power to do all those things perfectly, completely to the uttermost. And so baptism, what you just saw, declares our helplessness, Christ's exalted glory and power, and what he has done for us at the cross. You know, you couldn't give an example more profound, but you could think of a cancer metastasized to the entire body of a person, for which no human doctor could ever bring healing. It breaks our hearts. But the spiritual cancer of sin and its pollutions, We can't touch it with our hands. We can't fix it with our own moral purity. But why is John praising Jesus? Because out of his love, he went to the cross to deliver us from it all. Full stop, completely. Because he removes our sins from us as far as east is from west. In that great transfer of our guilt and the purging of our pollution, he became sin for us. that we in Him might be the righteousness of God. On display here is the Triune God who has just greeted the church, and the Triune God who in the sending of the Son, empowered by the Spirit, promises the washing away of all sin. And you heard the Triune God's name, the One who is and who was and who is to come, the sevenfold fullness of the Spirit, and Jesus Christ when you heard Henry John Sims, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. You heard and you saw what God is like. His essential glory in nature. And you were reminded that Christ also suffered for sins, the just for the unjust to bring us to God. being put to death in the flesh, but being made alive by the Spirit. And you heard and you saw that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. It's a picture of the scope of the entire work of Jesus Christ, the cross work of Christ, and then the Holy Spirit's application of that work to you as he gives you the gift of faith, the powerful work of regeneration, and quiet your hearts, giving you his grace and peace through the blood of the cross of Jesus Christ. How could this be yours? The Bible says, trust him, Jesus. The one who is the firstborn from the dead, the faithful witness, the ruler of the kings of the earth. You trust him, you put your faith in a man who lived and died in the place of sinners. and who has the power and freely offers and gives and comforts us with the washing away of our sins by his blood on the cross. What's the result? I want you to think about the result, because we're not quite there yet. What's the result of that? Clean, pure, guiltless, holy, undefiled, fit to stand before the judgment seat of God, ready to die. No fear. When you die, you go to glory. Your body, one day it'll be raised, joined to your soul. You'll be in the presence of the Lord forever. The promise of the wiping away of every tear you've ever shed, the cleansing of every sin you've ever committed, in justification, past, present, and future. to him who loved us and washed away our sins in his blood. And then more, Peter says he brings us to God, the language here in Revelation chapter one, we don't have time to look at it all, and has made us kings and priests to his God and Father, who has elevated us to the position of royalty in the kingdom of heaven. Revelation 22 in verse five, the way the book ends, and they shall reign with him forever, sharing in the royal prerogatives of the throne of glory, the throne of the lamb. All of this, this washing that Christ does, signified in baptism, brings us to God. Some lessons for the church. I want to address perhaps, you're here this morning, you're an unbeliever, you don't believe this. The call of the gospel is repent and believe. Maybe you've never considered yourself polluted, maybe you've been on a lifelong quest to improve yourself and you're running from a conscience that accuses you of guilt and shame. Christ alone can wash you clean. And you place your faith and trust in him and he will release you from the bondage and guilt of sin and make you kings and priests in his kingdom forever. It's received by faith alone. Children, you saw another baptism. It's what you need. Jesus promised to you who can wash away your sins. And I'm guessing this week you probably did some things that make your conscience feel guilty, things you shouldn't have done, maybe things that nobody knows but God and you. What do you do, children? You were baptized. That baptism declared two things, that you need to be washed and that there is a Savior Jesus who washes children. And you run to him and you ask him for mercy and you pray to him. And the promise of the scriptures is that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin. Parents, you bring your children for baptism, what a precious promise. I have often thought of this as I sought to raise children in the fear of the Lord. Who is sufficient for these things? And then, if you have been a parent at all, there's kind of a, humbling and sad truth that starts to come into your heart and mind, and it's this. I'm not only unable to change their hearts, there's so much in me that comes up even in my parenting that reminds me that I need someone to cleanse and change my heart. Baptism is the picture which is the answer to both. Christ for sinners, and for families, and for covenant households, and to be worshiped and praised and glorified to him who loved us and washed us in his blood from our sins, and who alone can make us kings and priests in his kingdom. And you pray, and you pray for the mercy promised, and you trust him. Not to baptize, I was thinking this week would be like Noah leaving his children outside the ark, or the Israelites saying to the little ones, deal with the Egyptians on the other side of the Red Sea, we gotta go. Baptism is laying hold of the promises of God and the covenant God who alone can make a difference where we cannot make a difference. And we rightly bring our children to Jesus that he might lay his hands on them. and bless them. Make good use of every baptism then and of your own. Meditate on the nature of it, washing. Remember that Christ gave the sign for you. He knows we're like little children. And so he gave us a simple sign to cut through all the confusion that might be in our hearts and minds about who we are and who he is. And he says, look and remember and believe. It's a sign and a seal. He's saying, this is true. Trust me. I assure you that I forgive sins. I pardon and I cleanse. Consider what preceded that washing, his love while we were yet sinners. The action of that washing, the purification, the future, the glory. Remember it every time you see those waters of baptism flow. And then worship. What's the whole thing here? John, who's bearing witness to seeing through the veil that separates heaven and earth to the throne. To the one who is and was and is to come. The fullness of the Holy Spirit and the reigning, regnant, glorious Jesus Christ at the throne. And John says, to him who loved us, washed us with his blood from our sins, and made us kings and priests to his God and Father. What did he say? To him be glory and dominion forever. Let's pray. Lord our God, we pray for grace to receive your word. in the simple picture of baptism to receive the good news of that word by faith in Christ. We think of Him at your right hand, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, the one who now holds the scroll of your judgments and your plans for history and rules over all things, and the one who can wash filthiness of our hearts by the power of his spirit applying the work of his mediation. And Lord our God, we have come this morning to express our trust in him again and to give you glory. We thank you that you remember us all as little children. And by your word made visible and preached, you assure us of your great and precious promises. And we pray in Jesus' name. The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all.