Here Is Water, What Hinders You

In one paragraph

The pastor opened the new year with a baptism, a covenant membership ceremony, and communion, and used the occasion to preach from Acts 8 on Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch. The sermon traced what baptism is, where it comes from, and what it means for someone who believes in Jesus. The whole service, from Noah's baptism to the Lord's Supper, kept circling back to the same question Philip asked on...

Read together

1. John 4:24 opening call to worship: God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth
2. Psalm 32 God promises to instruct and teach in the way to go, and counsel with his loving eye
3. Colossians 3 referenced before the offering as a favorite verse: let the message about Christ in all its richness fill your lives
4. Isaiah 56 God's promise that foreigners and eunuchs who keep his covenant will be given a place and an everlasting name within his walls
5. Isaiah 53:7-8 the passage the Ethiopian eunuch was reading: led like a lamb to slaughter, silent before his shearers, taken away by oppression
6. Acts 8:26-39 the main sermon text: Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch, the desert road encounter, and the baptism
7. Colossians 3:16-17 spoken as the benediction: let the message of Christ dwell among you richly, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus

Talk about it

1. Philip got up and went immediately when the angel gave him directions, even though it meant leaving a fruitful ministry in Samaria for a desert road. What makes that kind of immediate obedience difficult, and what would help us respond the same way?
2. The Ethiopian eunuch would not have been allowed into the assembly in Jerusalem because of who he was, yet he was reading Isaiah 56, which promised him a place and a name in God's house. What does it do to your understanding of the gospel to see God specifically sending Philip to reach someone the religious system had excluded?
3. Philip started from the very scripture the eunuch was already reading and preached Jesus from there. If someone came to you with a passage or a question about the Bible, how confident do you feel doing something similar, and what would help you grow in that?
4. The eunuch saw water on a desert road and immediately said, 'What prevents me from being baptized?' The sermon described how other traditions have delayed baptism for months or even until the moment of death. What do you think the right relationship is between understanding and taking that first step of obedience?
5. After his baptism, the eunuch went on his way rejoicing, even though Philip was suddenly gone. He had no church to go back to, no follow-up plan. What does that tell us about what God can do with someone who has simply heard and believed, and how does that shape the way we think about sharing the gospel?