Ezekiel 8:1-18, "Have You Seen This?" - a podcast by Benjamin Glaser

This past Lord's Day we began a new sermon series asking the question, "How Can I Improve My Baptism?" Now, this may seem like a strange question to ask. How can we "improve" something that was not done by us in the first place? Well, what we mean by this is that by being reminded that we belong body and soul to God, that we have been set apart from the world around us by the sign of the new covenant, we can then "endeavor to live by faith" and "walk in brotherly love" as we remember that God who has laid His claim on our lives has called us to obedience to His Word out of our thanksgiving for His gracious gift of salvation. By looking back at our baptism and thinking about what this means we will spend the next several weeks seeking to grow in our understanding of the Christian life and the sure hope that we have in the promise of Christ Jesus. 

In Ezekiel 8 we saw how evil Israel had become in the days of the prophet. They had quite literally turned their back on the LORD. They brought the idols of false gods into His temple and were crying out to these statues of stone and wood. How did they get to this point? Why had they not learned from the exile unto Babylon? Well, the reason was the same one that always plagued Israel and Judah. They forgot their first love, forgot who they were in the eyes of the Creator. This is the same thing that causes us to fall away from the faith, and rely on the false prophets/idols of this age. We do not remember that God brought us out of bondage to sin through the blood of His Son, we choose to think that God cannot see us engage in sin and idolatry. Here we see why there is a need to "improve on our Baptism", to reconsider what it meant to be baptized and how meditating on the sign and what it signified can help us to grow in faith and trust in the living and true God, and how much greater are the good things that Christ has for His covenant people. 

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