Carpenter Series Lesson 3

Good morning! God bless all of your connect groups this week!
(Sorry there was not a Pew 2 You last week – we had some technical issues. )

9/30/2012

Carpenter Series Lesson 3

Highlights:

1. Water baptism is a life-imparting experience for those mature enough to understand sin, repentance, faith, and water baptism. It is performed through full immersion (baptizo: to make fully wet).
2. Remission means the separating of sin from the sinner – freedom, pardoned – and it requires the shedding of blood. Because Jesus sacrificed himself, we have freedom from sin. Thank you Jesus!
3. Baptism is for circumcision of heart – a spiritual surgery performed by God on the heart of the repentant believer. Water baptism takes our hard, stony heart and replaces it with a tender heart of flesh.
4. In water baptism, the power and compulsion to sin is dealt with and broken – it is destroyed and rendered powerless. We are given the power to resist and overcome temptation.
5. Reckoning means to consider it in your account. It is a divine bookkeeping where we can see and experience those benefits He has exchanged for our sins.

Discussion Questions:

1. For those who have experienced water baptism, for the circumcision of heart, can you describe how God replaced your stony heart with a tender heart of flesh? How has the way you live and relate with God been changed as a result?
2. What has it meant, or what could it mean, to those that you love if you were to make a public declaration of your faith like water baptism?
3. Water baptism, and other powerful sacraments are life-long transformational experiences. Why is reckoning important for believers to walk in? How can you use the principal of reckoning to bring power to these past experiences (like water baptism) and live daily in the spiritual power they bring?

Key Scriptures:

• Acts 2:38 (… repent and be baptized…)
• Matthew 28:19-20, Mark 16:15-16 (The Great Commission)
• Colossians 2:11-12 (Circumcision of Heart)
• Ezekiel 36:26-27 (… give you a heart of flesh…)
• Romans 6:3-7 (…baptized into Christ…)
• 1 Corinthians 10:13 (…not tempted beyond what you are able…)
• 2 Corinthians 5:21 (… He who knew no sin…)
• Romans 6:7,11-14 (Reckoning)
• Matthew 10:32-33 (… confess before men…)

Dan and Cassi Fitzgerald