Bill Leonard, Sermon; CBF, Charlotte, 6/24; Joel 2.28-29 and 1 John 3.1-2
Early Baptists were outcasts and mocked. Began with audacious faith. Membership grounded on personal experience, not geography. Enforced by Holy Spirit, not by the state. They saw believers church. Then and now Baptists are at odds with culture of the day.
We must make our confession of sins and faith; not just our confession of faith. Grace is a gift, not an entitlement.
Cannot assume people know what we mean when we talk about Jesus. Must keep retelling the old story. Baptism is not an end but a beginning.
Salvation is not a transaction but a conversion that takes place day after day, every day for the rest of our lives. Some of us get saved ‘hard’—like that morning we went to hell and lived to tell about it. Not all come to faith that way.
First great witness by Baptists to the world was to church freedom and conscience freedom.
What compels us now? Worship is witness linking ordinary and sacred time. Communion and social ministry is witness. Where do witness and conscience intersect or collide?
Southern white Baptists trashed their witness with slavery and Jim Crow. How do we trash our witness now?
Highland Baptist in Louisville is part of an alliance that sends clergy and laity to gang murder sites and places memorials at those spots. They hope to stop murders but at the least there is a witness.
Wilshire Baptist in Dallas planted a church in Rockwell. It did its ministry. Now it will close. It is not a failure of witness; not every calling has to last forever.
Does your church have a witness in the world?
Judson and wife left on a boat to India as Episcopalian missionaries. After much bible study on the trip, they became Baptists. They were sent as Congregationalists. Became Baptist because the truth compelled them. There was cost to their family. There was also witness.
We are knit together. Merton called the Church a body of broken bones.
Stop worrying about names and reclaim witness. Turn loose consciences instead of fighting culture wars. We are children of God knit together by grace.
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