Having fallen behind, I go back a little further than I would have planned. The four topics today are baptism, the military, being set apart, and being readied. A lady discussed the fallout of yelling at her son in the morning. She had a flow of ill will all mapped out. But we are not to be good for its impact. We are to be good because we love God.

The highlight of this period was seeing my youngest get baptized. The sermon to accompany that day would have been lost on me if I had not taken notes. The highlight of the sermon was that Paul did not baptize people. His role was to teach, to explain, to witness. But his first priority was to have others baptize those who were saved even before the next meal. Baptism does not save, but it does symbolize it.

We had a guest speaker one Sunday who was in the military as a chaplain and was doing what he saw as his calling by God to serve others in the military and to share the gospel. His unwavering commitment is to call all to Jesus. His prayer is that his efforts will help the US military reach areas for Christ that no other can. He sacrifices for the sake of the Great commission, and he asks the rest of us to do the same in however we are called.

When we live a life set apart, we do some silly things. One is that we become nothing so that God can create out of our nothingness something to glorify Him. Another is that He uses our mistakes to help us reach the lost; those things that embarrass us the most are most likely to help us in His mission. The final is that we give up our right to say I believe “X” on an issue and begin to say that the Bible says “Y” on that issue.

After Paul was converted from Saul, he spent three years in the desert aligning what he had been taught his whole life in the best Jewish schools and what Christ revealed to the sinner who had murdered Christians for their beliefs. Not only did Paul have to give up so much of what he was committed to, he had to suffer the humility of having been so wrong. Paul learned to listen to the Holy Spirit rather than his own mind.

God has a plan. God is all powerful, so He knows His plan will succeed. We have a role in this plan. Our role is to be saved, to give our lives over to God, to do whatever He asks, and to allow Him to define success. It is such a simple plan, if only the scales are removed from our eyes.