In the sermon 'Rejoicing With the Angels' by Peter Allison, the focal scripture from Acts 16 tells the story of Paul and Silas in prison, leading to the miraculous conversion of the Philippian jailer and his household. The sermon discusses the transformative power of God, exemplified by an earthquake that opens the prison doors and leads the jailer to seek salvation. The speaker contrasts human self-sufficiency, likened to goats, with the helplessness of sheep, illustrating our dependency on divine grace. The sermon emphasizes the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit in convicting individuals of their sin and need for salvation, underscored by the jailer's question, 'What must I do to be saved?' Believing on the Lord Jesus Christ is explained as receiving Christ, trusting in His word, and resting in His sacrifice for forgiveness and acceptance with God. The sermon also touches on the significance of household salvation, the covenant promise to believers and their children, and the distinction between the covenant and the decree of election. Ultimately, the sermon calls believers to rejoice in their salvation and the joy it brings to the heavenly hosts.

Our Scripture reading is Acts 16. I'd like to begin reading at verse 25 to pick up the context of this passage. Of this passage. Hear God's Word. But at midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.

Suddenly there was a great earthquake so that the foundations of the prison were shaken, and Immediately all the doors were opened and everyone's chains were loosed. And the keeper of the prison, awaking from sleep and seeing the prison doors open, supposing the prisoners had fled, drew his sword and was about to kill himself. But Paul called with a loud voice saying, Do yourself no harm, for we are all here. Then he called for a light, ran in, and fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. And he brought them out and said, Sirs, What must I do to be saved?

So they said, Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved, you and your household. Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. And He took them the same hour of the night and washed their stripes, and immediately he and all his family were baptized. Now when he had brought them into his house, he set food before them, and he rejoiced, having believed in God with all His household. May the Lord consider our affliction and deliver us as we remember His law.

Let's pray. Father, We thank You again for Your Word. It is true. It is refined seven times. It is pure.

And we ask that You would instruct us out of Your Word. That You would comfort us this morning. That You would strengthen us. That You would revive our hearts. That You would increase our love of Your Word and of You.

And I ask that You would sanctify my sinful lips to proclaim the glories of Your grace through Jesus Christ. Amen. Through Christ, through Jesus Christ. Amen. So we pick up this morning where we left off last week, and what we saw last week is that this jailer was ordered to keep the prisoners securely, so he puts them in stocks in the inner prison, and he goes on with his life oblivious to the extreme suffering of his prisoners.

And at midnight, Paul and Silas are praying and praising God when there is a great earthquake that opens the doors and removes all the chains from the prisoners. This is a marvelous earthquake. And the jailer then mistakenly presuming that all the prisoners have escaped, concludes that he has failed and it would be better for him to take his own life on his own terms right now than to be beaten and executed later on by others. But Paul prevents him from committing suicide by informing him that all the prisoners were actually still there, even though the doors were open and all their chains had fallen off. And this jailer who is so astounded that people who could run away to save their own skins should stay in jail to save his skin, is immediately overwhelmed with emotion.

And he runs to Paul and Silas, falls down trembling in front of them, crying out, "'Sirs, what must I do to be saved?' And we see all of a sudden, with great clarity, God's purpose in all the events that are leading up to this moment. You see, by nature, We are self-sufficient. We are okay, we think, and we don't need anybody's help. We certainly avoid asking for help if we can help it. That's why the Bible compares unbelievers to goats.

Goats are self-sufficient, self-respecting animals. They take care of themselves very well, thank you very much. And they don't need anybody's help. They're actually incredibly agile. They can climb cliffs that appear to be completely impassable to not only the casual but also the studious observer alike.

You can go Google and you can find pictures of goats on the sides of basically sheer cliffs. You think how do they get there with their feet, but they can. And they're very nimble. They're incredibly agile. And they certainly rarely get themselves into a situation that they can't get themselves out of, at least not in the natural world.

Sometimes with traps or fences and things they can get stuck, but very rarely in the natural world would a goat ever get stuck. Sheep, on the other hand, are just the opposite. They have a very, very strong flocking instinct, leading them to blindly follow the sheep in front of them. In fact, in 2005, in Jivas, Turkey, a little town in eastern Turkey close to the Iraq border, 1, 500 sheep ran off a cliff simply because the sheep in front of them ran off. 450 of them were killed.

And the only reason they weren't all killed immediately is that the sheep on the bottom cushion the fall of the others falling on top of them. It's a true story. They even have the pictures to prove it. You see, sheep are prey animals with very little ability to defend themselves outside of running away. And that's one reason why they follow each other so closely.

It's the only way they can have any protection. So they pack together and run from danger. But sheep are also very helpless if they roll onto their back. They can't get up. And they will die within 24 hours if a shepherd doesn't help them get back up on their feet.

I think they call it being cast down. And there they are. They're laying on their back, their feet sticking up in the air, completely helpless. And so God's first work in Salvation is convincing us of our sin and misery, showing to us that we are sheep and not goats. We are helpless, unable to care for ourselves.

You see, everyone is born dead in their trespasses and sins, and completely blind to their actual condition. We see this work being done in the Apostles' preaching throughout Acts. Two times in The Pentecost sermon recorded in Acts 2, Peter declares to those hearing him that they crucified Christ. And it's on hearing this for the second time. They're Messiah.

They crucified their Messiah. And on hearing that for the second time, they come under the conviction of the Holy Spirit and cry out, what must we do? The Apostles declare this in their sermon on the Solomon's portico. And in this Philippian jailer, the Lord uses His work of providence to bring the jailer to realize his lost condition. See, it's a supernatural work.

It was a supernatural work of the Holy Spirit to bring this Roman jailer to fall down at the feet of the exact same prisoners that he put in stocks a few hours earlier. He's been humbled. He's been stripped of his self-sufficiency. He now sees his inability, his unworthiness before the Holy God, the mighty God. It's the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit to bring this Roman jailer to tremble at his condition, to be physically shaken.

He now sees himself as he really is, worthy of the eternal unmitigated wrath of God. Unmitigated means full strength without any mercy such as we now receive to restrain the wrath of God. Yes, God does display His wrath at times in things, but it's mitigated. It's tempered with His mercy. This jailer now sees the precariousness of his position.

That's why he's trembling. His very life, his very next breath is the undeserved gift of Almighty God, the God that he has so egregiously offended. You remember when King David sent some ambassadors to Hanun, the king of Amun, to show sympathy and kindness when the king's father had died? And you remember how those ambassadors were so shamefully treated? They shaved half their beards off and cut off their garments at their buttocks and sent them home.

Then, all of a sudden, after they'd done this horrible thing, they realized the obvious, that they'd made themselves odious to David, and that he would come and wipe them off the earth. And so in no little panic and fear, they hired the Syrian army to come and defend them. But it didn't do any good. You know, first Joab, and then David himself, handily destroyed tens of thousands of these people. And that's how we are in God's sight.

There's no power to resist God's power to cast us into the lake of fire. In one of the most famous sermons In Puritan America, Jonathan Edwards described the plight of the sinner in this way. He said, the bow of God's wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and Justice bends the arrow at your heart and strains the bow. And it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God and that of an angry God without any promise or obligation at all that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood. The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.

His wrath towards you burns like fire. He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the fire. You are ten thousand times more abominable in His eyes than the most hateful, venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended the Almighty God infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did His Prince. Or we might add that the foolish princes of Ammon offended King David.

And yet it is nothing but His hand that holds you from falling into the fire this very moment. O sinner, consider the fearful danger you are in. It is a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit full of the wrath of God, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the damned in hell. You hang by a slender thread with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it and ready every moment to singe it and burn it asunder." That's why the jailer was trembling. He now understood his true condition and the precariousness of His position.

That's why He falls down and cries out, what must I do to be saved? It's the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit to bring the jailer to cry that. What must I do to be saved? It's the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit to bring the jailer to cry that, what must I do to be saved? It's the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit to bring this Roman jailer to recognize that he cannot save himself.

See, that verb saved is in the passive voice. What must I do to be saved? Not what must I do to save myself? See, those are two totally, totally different questions. The jailer asked this question in the passive voice.

Because you see, man is not just sick, man is dead in his sins and unable to save himself, unable to do anything good, unable to do any good works that are pleasing to God. The Bible says that even the plowing of the unbeliever is sin. Isaiah says that Our best works are but filthy rags." Now the New English translation is one of the few translations that was brave enough to translate what the Hebrew actually says there. It says, we are all like one who is unclean. All our so-called righteous acts are like the menstrual rag in your sight." You see, emission and menstruation are normal bodily functions that under the Old Covenant made one unclean.

And as such, they serve as regular reminders of our moral condition in God's sight. And so the Roman jailer in that moment saw the sinfulness of his own condition. He realized that he could not only not do enough good deeds to earn God's favor, he couldn't do any good deeds that would even begin to earn God's favor. You see, he and you and I are utterly incapable of doing anything in our own strength that would please God. But he also saw something else.

He also saw that even if he could do one deed, which he couldn't, But even if he could, and we can't either, but even if he could, he could never begin to satisfy God's wrath for even the smallest sin that He had already committed. See, there are two problems of the unbeliever. Satisfying of the sin that He has committed, but also being righteous. And so in falling down at the Apostles' feet, trembling, shaking, physically shaking, He was acknowledging the utter hopelessness of his condition apart from Christ. See, it's by the work of the Holy Spirit.

This jailer has been convinced of his sin and the misery of his actual condition. And it is in this state of fear and utter hopelessness that Paul and Silas reply with those wonderfully comforting words, full of hope and truth, full of hope and truth. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you will be saved." Note that Paul and Silas also explained their meaning to the jailer because after telling him, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, Luke then records that they then spoke the word of the Lord to him. They expounded the Scriptures on what it means to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. Faith comes by hearing the words, and God is ordained and is pleased to work through the preaching of His Word.

What does it mean to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ? What did the Apostles go on to expound to Him from the Scriptures? Well, Luke doesn't record the details of what it means to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, but he does record that the Apostles expounded those details. But the Scriptures tell us what it means to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. This is a very, very common statement in Christian circles.

Nearly everyone that's been to church has probably heard these words many times, but do we really know what they mean? Sometimes words become so familiar to us that we forget what they mean. We're so used to saying them. So I want to take a few minutes this morning to explain what is meant by believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. You see, first, to believe is to receive.

To believe is to, first of all, receive. John 1-12 equates believing with receiving. But as many as received Him, To them He gave the right to become the children of God." And then John clarifies exactly who those who receive Christ are, saying, to those who believe in His name. He gave the right to become children of God to those who believe in His name." That word right, He gave them the right. That word is exousia, and it means authority or power.

It's the same word used in Romans 13, Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities, the exousias, or as the King James says, the powers. To those who receive Christ, He gives the authority or the power to become children of God. Then John further specifies that those who receive Christ are those who believe in Him. So to believe in Christ is first of all to receive Him. To believe on Jesus Christ then is to receive His Word as truth.

His Word is not just true, it is truth. Sanctify them by Your Word. Your Word is truth. See, there's a big difference between those two similar statements. To say it is true means that there is some other standard by which it is evaluated and found to be true.

To say it is truth is to say it is the standard by which all other things are evaluated as to whether they are true or not. And so to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to receive His Word as the truth. Every word, every letter in the Scriptures is the truth. God's word is infallible. So to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to believe His word, every word of it.

To believe on The Lord Jesus Christ is thoroughly to receive Him as the Christ. Jesus is the anointed One. The One who has come to bear the sins of His people, to save His people from their sins. The one who heals us by His stripes, the one who Isaiah said was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities. To believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to receive Him as this one, the Messiah, the Anointed One.

1 John 5.1 says, Whoever believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God. Whoever believes that Jesus is the Messiah, the Anointed One, the suffering servant who is wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities. To believe on the Lord Jesus Christ fourthly is to receive Him as God. It means to receive and acknowledge with our own lips that Jesus is the Son of God. That in the words of the Nicene Creed, Jesus is God of God.

Light of light. Very God of very God. Begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father. 1 John 5.5 says, Who is he who overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God." Fifthly, to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to receive Him as the risen Jesus, the one who has defeated death and risen victorious from the grave. Jesus told Martha in John 11 that I am the resurrection and the life.

He who believes in me, though he may die, he shall live, and whoever believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this? And Martha replies with this full confession, saying with her own lips, yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who has come into the world." You see, she confessed both of these things, that Jesus was the Christ, the Anointed One, and that He was the Son of God, made flesh, come into the world. To believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to receive and to rest in Him. To receive and to rest in Him for both the forgiveness of our sins and for our acceptance with the Father.

To believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to trust in Christ. To trust that Christ by His obedience and death did fully discharge the debt of our sin. To believe that Christ has made a proper, real, and full satisfaction to the Father's justice on our behalf. The wicked, the Bible says, are like the troubled sea. Never able to rest.

To believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to rest in Christ's sacrifice of Himself to fully satisfy God's wrath for our sin. To believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to rest in Christ's sacrifice of Himself to fully satisfy God's wrath for our sin. To believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to rest in His perfect obedience of the law of God, His righteousness as the grounds of our acceptance with the Father. You see, it's to distrust our own righteousness and our own ability to be acceptable or to do anything acceptable to God and to trust in Christ, His obedience, which is perfect, as the grounds of our acceptance with the Father. Paul wrote this to the Ephesians, and It's all one sentence, so it's really just hard to break in somewhere.

So I'm going to have to read a little more. Paul said this, Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, having predestined us to adoption as sons by Jesus Christ to Himself according to the good pleasure of His will, to the praise of the glory of His grace, by which He, He that is Christ, made us accepted in the beloved. He has made us accepted in the beloved. Not what our hands have done. Not what we can do to make ourselves acceptable because we can't.

To believe in the Lord Jesus Christ is to rest in what He has done to make us acceptable to the Father. It's in Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of sins according to the riches of His grace. And to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to receive Him as our King. He's the King of Kings. The Lord of Lords.

The King of Heaven as Nebuchadnezzar, the greatest earthly king of his day, acknowledged. He's the Prince of Peace. He's our Sovereign. He's the Almighty One whose power is limitless. He's the Eternal One whose kingdom is endless.

He's the Unchangeable One whose mercy and love never fail. He's our Lord and our Master. His Word is our law and our guide and our hope. He is our rock and our refuge and our fortress. He is the father of the fatherless and the defender of widows and the weak.

And if He is not your King, He is not your Savior. If He's not your King, If His Word is not your law, then He's not your Savior. You see, this is the greatest of all marvels. Do you marvel every day that He forgives the sins of all those who believe in Him? That He forgives your sins?

Do you marvel every day that His righteousness is imputed to your account? That God's wrath is appeased, turned away, and fully satisfied? See, it's by trusting in Christ's work and not our own. We are saved from the wrath of God. Our sins are forgiven and we are accounted as righteous in His sight.

We are adopted as His children. And we are brought into union with Christ. But in this passage, there's more good news. Did you catch that? It's not just a jailer that is saved.

He is told, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved. You and your household. Now, it's not always clear. It's not clear at all in modern English or in the New King James, but the us in that passage are all singular, not plural. So they would be vows in the King James.

The and thou. The jailer believes and he and his family are saved. Now why should they be saved? Because he believes. It's the grace of God.

His children don't deserve salvation any more than the jailer deserves to be saved. But God's wonderful promise of salvation is to us and to our children. You see, being the child of a believer brings you into special favor. God treats children of believers differently than other children. Paul says that children of unbelievers are both holy and cleansed.

The unbelieving spouse is holy, sanctified, but the child is sanctified and holy and cleansed. God promises salvation to the children of believers. Throughout the Old Covenant, children of believers were reckoned with the believers and were members of the church, and therefore they were circumcised. Genesis 17, 7, I will establish My covenant between Me and you and your descendants after you in their generations for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and your descendants after you." That's God's promise to Abraham, to be a God to him and to his children. And that's why Abraham and everybody in his house were circumcised.

This is what we also read of Noah in Genesis 6-8. It says Noah found grace in the eyes of God. And so when God said that He would destroy the earth with a flood, He graciously promised to save Noah and his family. A little later in that chapter in verse 17, God said, And behold, I myself am bringing floodwaters upon the earth to destroy from under heaven all flesh in which is the breath of life. Everything that is on the earth shall die.

But I will establish My covenant with you, and you shall go into the ark, you, your sons, your wife, and your sons' wives with you." Noah found grace in the sight of God, and so Noah and his family, his whole household, were saved. And there is nothing in the New Testament that changes the treatment of the children of believers. There's nothing in the New Testament that changes the way children of believers are treated. In fact, we see just the opposite. We see that children of Believers are treated in the exact same way in the New Testament as they were in the Old Testament.

Paul told the Galatians, those who are in Christ are heirs of the promise to Abraham. Paul said, If you are Christ, then you are Abraham's seed and heirs according to the promise. What promise? The promise that God gave to Abraham to be a God to him and to his children. If we're in Christ, we're heirs of that promise.

That's why Peter can say in Acts 2.39 after telling the Jews to repent and be baptized, he says, for the promise is to you and to your children and to all who are afar off, even as many as the Lord our God shall call. The promise of salvation is to you and to your children and to all those who are afar off, as many as the Lord our God shall call. The promise of salvation is given to believers and to their children. It's the same promise that was given to Abraham and Noah. Notice that the Word is preached to all those who are in the house.

This is the privilege of being a covenant child according to Romans 3. Romans 3 Paul asks, what's the benefit of receiving the sign of circumcision if receiving it doesn't save anyone? Because he's just finished saying, Jew and Gentile alike, circumcised and uncircumcised alike, they're all condemned. They all are sinners in need of God's grace. Then he says, well, what's the point of being circumcised?

And his answer to his own question is that those covenant children have the oracles of God. They have the Scriptures, which are able to make them wise unto salvation. And so immediately after preaching the Word to the jailer and his household, the entire household is baptized. Acts 16-33. And immediately, he and all his family were baptized.

Now Baptist, Our Baptist brothers like to point out that there are no infants mentioned here, which of course is absolutely true. There are no infants mentioned here. But it is equally true, and they don't mention this, that infants are not excluded either. If the household had children and infants, they would have been included. Babel doesn't say whether there were or not, but it doesn't exclude them.

And so while It's true it doesn't say there were infants. It's also true it doesn't exclude them. And so the way the infants are treated in this New Testament passage is exactly the way they were treated in the Old Testament. And there's a consistency. God's promises don't change.

And the blessings of the New Covenant actually are expanding. And so this brings us to the last verse that we are considering this morning, verse 34, which in many translations seems to indicate that the entire family believed. And quite possibly they did. The New King James that we read translates it as, now when he had brought them into his house, he set food before them, and he rejoiced, having believed in God with all his household. But that's not what the Greek actually says at this point.

The ESV actually translates what the Greek says. And I'll read that for you and compare it to what's in the New King James and many others. ESV is a modern translation, but they got this verse right. It says, "...then he brought them up into his house and set food before them, and he rejoiced, along with his entire household, that he had believed in God." You see, it's a slightly different meaning. The he is singular.

He had believed in God. The whole family is rejoicing that He, the head of that household, had believed in God." No, maybe the rest of the household did too, but the text doesn't say one way or the other. It does say they were all baptized, and it says that the entire household rejoiced. And why were they rejoicing? Because he, the head of the household, had believed.

Young's literal translation says it this way, having brought them also into his house, he set food before them and was glad with all the household, he having believed in God." You see, the Greek is very clear. There's no ambiguity in it. The jailer's whole household rejoiced with the jailer that the jailer had believed in God. The New English translation which I quoted earlier when I translated Isaiah 68, follows most translations in making the verse somewhat ambiguous. It says the jailer brought them into his house and set food before them, and he rejoiced greatly that he had come to believe in God together with his whole household.

It's ambiguous what the whole household is doing, believing or rejoicing or both. But unlike the other translations, they add a note to explain why they translated it the way they did. And it's very informative. I'd like to read it for you. It says, they say, the phrase, together with his entire household, is placed at the end of the English sentence so that it refers to both the rejoicing and the belief.

That's why they stuck it where it doesn't go and where it wasn't in the Greek and doesn't fit grammatically in the Greek there. They go on to say a formal equivalence translation and that's what we want. Formal equivalence, not dynamic equivalence. Formal equivalence is translating the thought. Grammatically.

They say the formal equivalence translation would have it this way, and now they give it to you. And he rejoiced greatly with his entire household that he had come to believe in God. That's how the ESV translated it, because that's what it actually says. But then they add this, but the reference to the entire household being baptized in verse 33 presumes that all in the household have believed. And now we see where this is coming from.

They have a Baptist understanding of the Scriptures. And they force that Baptist understanding onto this passage. The New American Standard also translates it that way, But then they add the same thing in a footnote. They say, Or rejoice greatly with his whole household, having believed in God. He rejoiced with the household that he had believed in God.

You see, The baptism of the whole household only implies that they all believed. If one believes that, only those who can make a profession of faith should be baptized. If you make that assumption first, then yes, that's a logical assumption, but that's not what the Scriptures teach. Children are never treated that way in the Scriptures. Now we do need to distinguish between the covenant and the decree of election.

Although these two things are closely related, they are separate and distinct. The covenant is visible and conditional. The decree of election is invisible and unconditional. But these two things are not in conflict with each other. Confusion though does arise when these two things are conflated together.

And Reformed Baptists define the covenant by the decree of election. If you ask them who is in the covenant, they will likely say those who are elect. Because they define the covenant in terms of election. But consider this, Ishmael was circumcised. He was in the covenant.

But He was not elect. When as a 19 year old lad he demonstrated unbelief, he was cast out. He was no longer part of the covenant. Abraham didn't want to cast this unbeliever out of his house. But God said, you do it.

Listen to your wife. Genesis 21, And Sarah saw the son of Hagar, the Egyptian whom she had borne to Abraham..." That's Ishmael. "...scoffing." Here's a young lad scoffing. "...therefore she said to Abraham, Cast out this bondwoman and her son, for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with my son, namely with Isaac. And the matter was very displeasing in Abraham's sight because of his son.

But God said to Abraham, Don't let it be displeasing in your sight because of the lad or because of your bondwoman. Whatever Sarah has said to you, listen to her voice. For in Isaac your seed will be called." The Ishmael was circumcised, but he wasn't elect. And when he grew up and began to scoff, he was cast out. Abraham was reluctant, but God said no.

He goes, cast him out. Esau was in the covenant, but he wasn't elect either. And Paul uses him as the example in showing that the covenant and the decree of election are not in conflict. But it is not that the Word of God has taken no effect, for they are not all Israel who are of Israel. They are not all Israel who are in this covenant, who are called Israelites.

Nor are they all children because they are the seed of Abraham. So they are the children of Abraham. They are in the covenant, but they are not of the seed of Abraham. They're not elect. They're in the covenant, but they're not elect.

But in Isaac he said, your seed shall be called. That is, those who are children of the flesh, these are not the children of God, but the children of promise are counted as seed. For this is the word of promise, at this time I will come and Sarah shall have a son. And not only this, but when Rebecca also had conceived by one man, even by our father Isaac, for the children not yet being born, nor having done any good or evil, that the purpose of God according to election might stand not of works, but of him who calls, it was said to her, the older shall serve the younger. As it is written, Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated." See, Esau was circumcised, even though he wasn't elect.

Even though it was said before he was born. Jacob have I loved, Esau I've hated. See, water baptism points to the work of the Holy Spirit and the work of regeneration. But it is not the same as regeneration. Water baptism doesn't save anyone.

And this is true of adults too, as well as children. Not every adult believer who is baptized is elect either. Many fall away later. But as Paul told the Romans, the fact that people fall away from the covenant, the fact that people grow up or later on in life if they're adults when they're baptized, if they show themselves to be apostate, that doesn't invalidate either the covenant or the decree of election. It doesn't invalidate the promise of God.

Children of believers have a great advantage. They have the Scriptures taught to them. And as heads of households, we have a great responsibility to bring the Scriptures to our covenant children so that they are brought to saving faith. We don't know whether all those people in that household believed. The Bible doesn't say.

They probably did. But the Bible doesn't say. It simply says that they were all baptized and they all rejoiced that the jailer believed on the Lord Jesus Christ. Now the jailer then immediately demonstrates the fruits of conversion. He demonstrates first a love of God's people.

He cares for their wounds. He doesn't send for a doctor. He cares for their wounds themselves. He dresses them. He elevates them out of jail.

They are baptized, right? This is a command to all believers, repent and be baptized. And He is filled with joy. And that joy comes to his whole family. Because when the head of the household turns to Christ, it affects the whole house.

We saw this with Lydia. She was the head of her house and it affected her whole house See the repentance of the head of a household can have a huge effect on the household And I've heard many times Even I'm even from believers how their repentance in a certain area had an incredible dramatic impact on the rest of their house. It's really a solemn responsibility. The souls of your family are affected by what you as the head of household do or don't do. And so the angels were rejoicing that night.

I say to you, Jesus said, that likewise there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine persons who need no repentance. There is joy, He went on to say, Jesus said, in the presence of the angel of God over one sinner who repents. Are you rejoicing with the angels today that God has brought salvation to you and to your household? We ought to be. Let's pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank You for the joy that You give to us in Christ. A joy that we can know regardless of our circumstances because of what you have done. A joy that no one can steal. Because no one can steal us out of your hand. No one can take away what You have done for us.

No one can invalidate it. No one can remove us from Your protection, from Your covenant love. And so no one, Father, can take our joy. We ask, Lord, that you would grant to us this joy, this fruit of your Spirit. May we abound In faith, hope, love, and in joy.

We ask this in Jesus' name, Amen.