Foundations Class – Session 8: Water Baptism and the Lord's Supper

Why does the church baptize people? And what's really happening when we take the bread and the cup together? These aren't just religious traditions — they're practices that Jesus Himself commanded and established for the life of His church.

In this session, Pastor Kelly Kinder walks through the meaning and significance of two foundational practices in the Christian faith: water baptism and the Lord's Supper. Starting with the Great Commission in Matthew 28, he explains that both are acts of obedience that carry deep spiritual meaning — not as rituals that save us, but as powerful expressions of what God has already done inside us.

Baptism, Pastor Kelly explains, is an outward picture of an inward reality. Like a wedding ring doesn't make you married but declares that you are, baptism doesn't produce the new birth — it proclaims it. Going under the water pictures death and burial with Christ; coming up out of the water pictures resurrection into new life. That's why Scripture points to baptism by immersion, and why watching someone get baptized is one of the most encouraging moments in the life of a church.

The Lord's Supper, instituted by Jesus on the night before His crucifixion, is an invitation to remember His sacrifice and to be spiritually nourished by Him. It's a covenant meal — what the early church called a love feast — and it's meant to be received with seriousness, self-examination, and an awareness of the community of believers around us.

This is part of the Foundations class at Trinity Community Church, taught by Pastor Kelly Kinder and Pastor Mark Medley.

We are Trinity Community Church in Knoxville, Tennessee.
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Transcript

Setting The Stage: Two Ordinances

Kelly Kinder 0:00

Hello, welcome to session eight of our Foundation's class. This session we'll be looking at water baptism and the Lord's Supper. And when we participate in these events in the life of our church, we follow the Lord and remember his death. Matthew 28, 18 through 20 tells us in these words, Jesus came and spoke to them, saying, All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you, and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age. Amen. And so he is saying in those verses that this is a command. He has commanded these uh activities or these uh sacraments in the life of the church. So water baptism and the Lord's Supper are called sacraments, or we we have heard the term maybe ordinances, but that those words simply mean that uh Christ established them and he or he authorized them to be an ongoing practice in the life of the church. So let's start with uh water baptism and uh consider it for a few moments. When we decide to follow Christ, uh we're baptized according to Jesus' command. So this is one of the first steps of being a disciple, uh, the basic step of being obedient to what Christ has asked us to do. And as an example, if we look in Acts chapter 16, uh there we find a story of Paul and Silas who were in prison, and after a great earthquake, Paul has an opportunity to share the truth about Jesus with the uh the jailer of that prison. So we see in those uh verses uh that says the jailer called for lights and rushed in after this earthquake, and trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them out and said, Sirs, what must by must I do to be saved? And they said, Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household. And they spoke the word of the Lord to him and all who were in his house, and he took them that same hour of the night and washed their wounds, and he was baptized at once. And so you have these two parts in those verses. Uh the first one is believing in the Lord Jesus, and then after that uh being baptized. So baptism again is an act of obedience. Uh in those verses, circle the words I have commanded you, there uh in Matthew 2820 on your notes. And what does this practice of baptism really mean? Because we've mu probably all seen, if we've been in church, we've seen uh people being baptized, and we might not have understood uh exactly what it what it means. Why did Jesus tell us to do this? Well, baptism means that I have simply been united with Christ. Uh Romans six, three through four says, or do you not know that as many of us as has as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death, therefore we were buried with him through baptism into death, that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life. So what the scripture there is saying is that as as we have been baptized into Christ at our salvation, uh, so we are baptized into and his death, it means that I have been united with Christ. When I uh become I'm born again, I've come to know Christ, I am united with Christ at that moment, so that his death for the penalty of my sin became, in a sense, my my death and a spirit in a spiritual sense. I've received forgiveness, and the penalty of uh my sin has been paid for, so that his life uh actually becomes my life. I live through Jesus, Jesus lives through me. And so we say, Well, how can something like that happen? Well, and the Bible says simply by faith, we believe when he died, we died. When he rose again, we rose again with him to live a new life, because we're so closely in union with him, we're so closely connected in fellowship to him that his very life becomes our life. So the scriptures simply say it like this because of God you are in Christ, 1 Corinthians 1 30. So because of our union with Christ, we're not the same person we were before salvation. Uh that old self, that old man uh in Christ is uh now uh died. He's he's he's been buried, and that's the picture we have in bapt in baptism. Physical death is no longer uh the horrible thing it would have been had Christ not died for us. So he died in our place, and so we can identify with him in his death because he took our place. O death, Paul says, Where is your victory? O death, where is your staying? So baptism is an outward expression that symbolizes what happened inwardly when we were born again. Baptism, I mean make this point really clear because baptism doesn't produce the new birth, it is the expression of the new birth that has already occurred. So we don't but we don't get baptized to get saved. We are already saved as a result of Christ coming into our life, and then we're baptized to show what Christ has done. So we we might compare it with an analogy maybe of uh if you think about a wedding ring. The ring doesn't uh make you married, it just symbolizes the fact that you are married, and the same is true with baptism. Um since baptism is an expression of our faith, it is for believers only. As we read this in Acts 836 through eight, it kind of supports this idea, and it says, uh and the eunuch said, See, here is water, what hinders me from being baptized? And then Philip said, If you believe with all your heart, you may. And he answered and said, I believe that that Jesus Christ is the Son of God. So he commanded the chariot to stand still, and both Philip and and he went down into the water and he baptized him. So it's important to understand that although baptism is symbolic, it does picture what Jesus has done for us in being put under the in the gr into the ground and then resurrected. We are picturing that through baptism, water baptism, by going under the water and then coming up out of the water. And so it is it is but it's more than just a symbol. Uh at the very outset of our Christian journey, before we we understand the doctrinal issues regarding what has happened to us, Christ asks from us an act of faith or an act of obedience by faith. So our obedience then becomes uh a means of grace through which we experience more of the blessedness of God in our life. So uh God some some uh through through his uh grace toward us, when we obey him, he uh he actually I think blesses us and shows us more of himself. So John 323 is another verse that we might look at. Now John it says was also he was baptizing in Anon near Selim because there was much water there and they came and were baptized. This kind of gives us an idea what baptism uh really is about and it pictures it more fully. The word baptism in Greek means to dip or immerse. So you're basically putting someone all the way under the water. Why? Because it symbolizes being buried. Uh notice the phrase there was much water there, which implies uh that they needed a lot of water to properly baptize, to immerse people. And so without immersion, the picture of baptism uh loses a lot of its powerful imagery, that that imagery of being buried and then resurrected, coming up out of death. And so uh in uh at Trinity, uh you may have been baptized by sprinkling, uh and a lot of denominations uh baptized that way by strength sprinkling. Uh I don't think it's a legalistic thing. If you want to get baptized again because you were uh you were sprinkled and you didn't really understand what what really all this was about, uh we we encourage you if if you feel like God's leading you to do that, we we would love to baptize you in the way that Scripture kind of talks about. Uh the act of baptism being, again, that picture of burial and a rising from the dead. This is the biblical model of baptism uh by immersion. So that's baptism. Let's also talk about another ordinance or uh or sacrament that the church practices and it is for following Christ, and that's the Lord's Supper. Uh 1 Corinthians 11, 23 through 26 says this. He says, For I receive, and this is Paul talking, I receive from the Lord that which I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the same night in which he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, Take, eat, this is my body which is broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same manner he also took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood. This do as often as you drink it in remembrance of me. For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death till he comes. And so we have the basis there for the Lord's Supper, which Jesus uh instituted on the very night before he was crucified at the Lord's Supper, which which uh really was a replacement for the n for the believers as a replacement for the Passover. It followed up on that and uh showed the new covenant through bath through uh through the Lord's Supper. So Jesus' words, this is my body, in those words, uh, doesn't mean his physical body, which is somehow in the bread or his blood somehow in the cup, they're again symbolic. They represent his death and resurrection. So just as baptism outwardly testifies of an inner experience of salvation, our participation in the Lord's Supper is a confession of our faith in the work of Christ. So there are denominations who believe that it actually becomes the body and blood of Christ. We don't teach that. We believe it does symbolically communicate what Jesus' body and blood represents. John 6.35 says this, and Jesus said to them, I am the bread of life. He who comes to me shall never hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst. Now we wouldn't say Jesus is literally bread. We would kind of get the idea that Jesus is giving an analogy that like bread we feed on him. He is our nourishment. And so this is the same way. When he says, This is my body, it means as you eat this bread or drink this cup, allow this remembrance of who I am and what I've done for you, awaken in you and bring you to a deeper relationship with me. That's the idea, and I think this is what the scripture teaches here. Uh the Lord's Supper should never be an empty ritual, and so it could easily uh fall into that because we are told to do it as often as you uh eat it, drink. A lot of a lot of churches will practice the Lord's Supper every week. We try to do that about once a month. And uh the Lord's Supper uh should never, though, fall into this empty ritual where it just becomes a habit and we don't think too much about it. It's just something we do that's religious. But it was instituted by Christ to feed us spiritually. He is the bread of heaven, and as we partake of him, we are nourished and satisfied in him, and uh it is really a covenant meal. Uh it is a meal that signifies covenant love. The early church called it even uh the love feast, because it was a fellowship meal. And so when we do take the Lord's Supper, we should do so with seriousness and recognizing uh what we're doing. First Corinthians seven eleven twenty-seven and twenty eight uh says this it says, Therefore, who eat whoever eats this bread or drinks this cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of the bread and drink of the cup. So every time we we uh share in the Lord's Supper together, we pause and uh ask God to examine our life. And uh what Paul is doing specifically in these verses in this chapter, he is rebuking the Christian Corinthian church for their selfish and inconsiderate uh conduct when they when they come to church, because they were ignoring one another in the needs of the church. And Paul is basically saying you need to recognize the rest of the church body, the rest of the members, and not be inconsiderate when you come to take come to take the Lord's Supper. Because uh in that that period of time it was a whole meal, and some people were being left out and not uh served and and served the food. So his comments are pertained to the drinking of the cup and eating of the bread in this unworthy way, without thinking of anybody else but ourselves, and they're directly related to their behavior. So uh we need to think about the rest of the the church body and what Christ has paid for by his uh body and his blood. So the implication for them as well as us before we partake of the Lord's Supper is that we need to examine our relationships with others in the church. And so these are some basic things that are uh they're speaking about the Lord's Supper. Uh you know, every time we take it, it is a special time in the life of the church, and every time we see someone baptized, it's a really fun experience because we celebrate with uh the person who has just received Jesus, and they're basically telling us what is what Christ has done in them, and they are dying to their old life and living uh rising to live a new life. So both of these uh sacraments, both of these ordinance are uh very special in the life of the church, and they really do encourage uh the Christian who is participating in them. So let me just pray for us as we intercession and ask God to just uh give more insight into these uh ordinances and uh just encourage you uh just to consider how God has made through Christ this special connection to Him by His grace. So, Father, we're so grateful for these two ordinances that you have put in place, these practices in the life of the church that remind us of who you are, that we actually proclaim your death till you come as we uh as we participate in uh in one of the the things that we ru want to focus on, which is that you loved us so much and you died for us, and your great love shows us that. We pray that these two things, as we consider them, will just become deeper for us and uh we would understand them better and better as we participate with in them in the life of the church. And we just give you thanks for that. In Jesus' name, Amen.