On Baptism – A Christian Basic.
Why, How, When, Who?
People today wonder about baptism. Why do we get baptized? Is one baptism better than another? What’s the deal here?
You may have been baptized years ago. But surely there are people you know who have questions about baptism. Here are some solid answers…
There are three basic positions on baptism today. There is the Reformed Calvinist position which many Baptists hold to, there is the simple church-joining position, and there is the third position which is held by Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians and thoughtful Catholics.
First, let’s look at the most common Calvinist Baptist position, which is also held by many Reformed churches and some Presbyterians.
Their idea is that baptism is a public announcement of becoming a Christian – no more, no less. To a good Southern Baptist, there is nothing more to baptism than this public announcement. Yet, despite this idea that it is only a public announcement of a faith you already have, most Baptist groups have a tremendously detailed list of requirements – you must be baptized by immersion – some groups maintain you must be baptized in a river or creek – you must be a particular age, in some cases you must wear a white robe, and there is a belief that goes along with this that you can - and probably should be - baptized multiple times, with the “best” baptism occurring in the Jordan River, just like Jesus’ baptism.
And why do Baptists get baptized? Officially, it is because it is an “ordinance”, something commanded by Jesus, just as Communion is held by most Baptists to be an ordinance. It is something people do to show that they are followers of Jesus. Jesus said to do it, so get baptized.
Yet there is a fundamental contradiction here. If baptism is simply a public announcement, why the big deal over the details? Couldn’t we just take out an ad in the local newspaper – or make a posting on Facebook – “John Smith announces that he has become a Christian?”
On the other hand, you have the simple church-joining position. The Amish, Mennonites, some Lutherans, and some Catholics take baptism to be your acceptance of God’s Laws as expressed by the church. Through baptism you join the church – a particular church. It is a custom in which you make a promise, in the same way that when we join the Army or take public office we give the oath to preserve and defend the Constitution. Once again, simple and easy to handle. It is much the same as signing a membership agreement.
Yet there is a much richer, deeper purpose to baptism in mainline theology, the theology that includes thoughtful Catholics, the Eastern Orthodox, Episcopalians, Methodists (both the UMC and the GMC), Wesleyans, the Nazarene, and most Lutherans. All of these groups consider baptism to be a sacrament, like Communion, a work of God rather than a work of man. It is a time when God takes control of us and changes us. All that we do is give permission. All the pastor does is act as God’s voice and hands – we have no power in ourselves.
(In fact, in the late 300’s, there was a great controversy about whether or not a baptism performed by a priest who later denied Christ was valid. No less an authority than Saint Augustine of Hippo declared that the validity of a baptism had nothing to do with whether or not the priest was a scoundrel or not, because God did the work in baptism, not the priest nor the one being baptized.)
Here’s how baptism works:
When you believe and declare you are following Christ, (what we call a “profession of faith”), you are now right with God. God’s wrath has turned from you. You have been “justified”, or declared righteous by God. You didn’t do this – God did this. You had been in rebellion to God and now you are no longer in rebellion, but are instead trying to follow God’s Son. When you ask for God’s forgiveness, He truly forgives and forgets your sins. So far, so good. Through praying and asking for forgiveness and declaring your belief in Jesus’ worthiness to God, you are now okay with God – by God’s choice. God was not compelled to justify you by anything you did, but God chose to declare you righteous - simply because you are now declaring your loyalty to God’s Son.
(We believe that Jesus is worthy because we believe that Jesus is God walking upon the earth, and therefore His sacrifice upon the cross was sufficient to pay for our sin-debt. He took the penalty that we deserved for our disobedience to God – death – and He stood in our place. Jesus also promised that those who follow Him will have eternal life – and God endorsed what Jesus said by resurrecting Jesus on Easter morning. (God would not have raised Jesus from the dead if what Jesus said was a lie.) Simply put, when we choose to follow Jesus, we are choosing to follow God, accepting Jesus (God the Son) as the Lord of our lives. We make the free-will choice to follow Jesus. If we say Jesus is our Lord, that means that we will do whatever He asks of us.)
But there is a fundamental change that needs to be made in our souls if we are to remain in God’s good graces and have an eternally happy life. We need to change our spirit. We need to stop chasing our own desires, which is what our natural spirit wants to do, and now begin doing what God wants. Can you all say “Amen”?
Yet how can we change our spirit? How can we find out what God wants?
We have three ways to find out what God wants. First, we can listen to godly people – But now the question becomes: how do we know which leaders are truly godly and teaching correctly? After all, poor leadership was what had the people of Israel messed up by the Sadducees and the Pharisees in John the Baptist’s and Jesus’s day. For there is always the question of how we know that our leaders truly understand God’s desires. We use our best judgment in judging our leaders’ teaching, but we can be wrong, especially if we are new to the faith, because so much of good, solid Christian teaching goes contrary to the world’s generally accepted ideas - and those worldly ideas are deeply embedded in our hearts.
So, thankfully, there is the second way, which is to read and study scripture by ourselves or with others so that we get our understanding of God’s desires directly from the scripture through which God has spoken. We study and read and discuss in Sunday School or a mid-week discussion group – what is often called a Bible Study – and we hash it out until it makes sense. We look at what the Bible says – and use the Bible to guide our ideas about what is good and what is not good. (If we want to get even more detailed, we can learn some of the original languages of Koine Greek, Hebrew, and even possibly Aramaic so we won’t be messed up by poor translations - or translations with a political axe to grind.)
And the third way is to listen to God’s Spirit, which God sends during the baptism ceremony. (I have spoken about this before and will speak about it again, because it is so core to being a Christian, but not much in this sermon. See my previous sermons…)
John the Baptist told us that he baptized us with water to remove our sins, but there was one who was coming who would baptize with the Holy Spirit. This was Jesus. Let’s explore that a bit, that part about being baptized with the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit
People are inherently lazy and uncomfortable with change. If I asked you to switch sides of the aisle today, it would be disturbing to almost all of you. I know. It was disturbing to me when a pastor once asked us to move at a church I attended. We don’t like to do the simplest things if they are different.
Do you think God understands this? Of course He does.
A minute ago, I asked you all to say “Amen” and some of you did. It is relatively easy, from the security of your pew, to say you believe in Jesus or, for that matter, almost anything. It is extremely easy to fool ourselves by saying, in the privacy of our own mind, that “I believe in Jesus and want to follow Him.” But if I ask you to get up out of your seats, to do something mildly uncomfortable like change to a different seat, few of you will do it. How do I know this? I’ve asked and I’ve seen this in action - or inaction.
Once at a church we had Holy Communion. I asked about ten people to help serve communion one morning and most of the people turned me down, which was fine. I only needed two people. But why did they turn me down? Because being upfront involves people watching you. It puts you in a position where you might make a mistake and you remember that day back in grade school when you were asked to read, made a mistake like reading “Chicago” as “CHI’-KA-GO” and everyone in the classroom laughed at you. That remembered fear of making a mistake - and the laughter - makes us uncomfortable to be put on the spot.
We don’t like being uncomfortable. And God knows this. But God also knows we need to change and be ready to follow His commands. So God asks us to get over our fears and get wet through baptism to prove we are really going to follow His Son when the going gets tough. Baptism requires us to do something mildly uncomfortable to show we really mean to follow Jesus. There is something deep and important about actually standing in front of people, saying a few vows, and getting wet that makes a difference in our souls.
On Christmas a few years ago at another church, we had two baptisms. I offered both people the chance to get immersed in the creek, have a pitcher of water poured over their head, or get sprinkled - remember that this was on Christmas Day. And both chose sprinkling – a choice which has been around since the earliest days of the church. (I can’t understand why someone wouldn’t want to get dunked in an ice-cold creek on Christmas Day)…We just don’t like the uncomfortable. Of course, that’s why we call it “un-comfortable”, isn’t it? It is difficult to choose a new way when the old way is comfortable – even if the old way keeps us in slavery to sin, while the new way sets us free from sin’s chains.
Three Methods
Now when we are baptized, the pastor applies water, whether through sprinkling a few drops on your forehead, pouring a pitcher over your head, or dunking you in a stream. The water sprinkled symbolizes either the arrival of the Holy Spirit, the water poured symbolizes the washing away and cleansing of our sins, or the dunking symbolizes a death and rebirth, depending upon which method you choose. In the oldest traditions of the church – even in writings from the first century – any of the three methods is valid. (The details from the Didache, a short first century document translated here, are very detailed. “If cold water is not available, warm water will suffice.”) You have been baptized by water using any of these methods.
God Acts
Now this next point is very important. Because of your consent to the baptism, you are giving God permission to reach into your heart and flip a switch. Shortly after the water, whether you are dunked, sprinkled, or have a pitcher poured over you, the pastor will lay hands upon you and pray for the Holy Spirit to come upon you and now God acts. God ensures that you have a new Spirit within you, a Spirit that wants to do good instead of that natural, rebellious spirit that you were born with, that spirit that wants to do everything your way and not God’s way. You have now been baptized by God the Holy Spirit – which is symbolized by the fire of Pentecost and with the white dove that came down upon Jesus when He was baptized.
Where before you were saved from God’s wrath by your belief, now you have a chance to be saved from your own foolishness, that foolishness that tries to keep going on the old, comfortable, sinful path. But now your new Spirit – the Holy Spirit of God – wants to lead you along the right path instead of the foolish, rebellious path. And so you will gradually see that if you listen to the Spirit, you can notice your sins and get free from them by asking through prayer for help from God.
And it’s worth noting that wherever the leaders of the early church traveled, they told the story of Christ’s death and resurrection, they baptized people with water, and they laid on hands to give the baptism of the Holy Spirit. In Acts 19, Paul met up with some believers in Ephesus who had been baptized by John’s baptism, but had never heard of the Holy Spirit. Paul baptized them in the name of Jesus and then laid hands upon them, and the Holy Spirit came upon them, with remarkable results.
Even earlier, in Acts Chapter 8, we find this scripture: 14 When the apostles in Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to Samaria. 15 When they arrived, they prayed for the new believers there that they might receive the Holy Spirit, 16 because the Holy Spirit had not yet come on any of them; they had simply been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus. 17 Then Peter and John placed their hands on them, and they received the Holy Spirit.
When I’ve laid hands on people and prayed, many of them have reported feeling strangely warmed, as John Wesley reported the night when he first understood that Christ’s salvation is truly a gift of God, without price. (That was the night Wesley stopped believing that he could work hard enough and become perfect enough to save himself. ) It isn’t me doing anything – it is the Holy Spirit. We have heard of the fire that came to the believers with the Holy Spirit during Pentecost in Acts Chapter Two. Is this warming the fire of the Spirit moving into a new person? I can’t say for sure, but a deep change happens when someone receives both the water and the Spirit. It isn’t just the water, but it is God the Holy Spirit that changes the person.
The Meaning of the Word “Baptize”
The earliest known meaning of the word that we translate as baptize comes from from about 150 BC. It meant what happens when a cucumber becomes a pickle. It is baptized – there is a change of something essential in the cucumber. Notice that a pickle lasts much longer than a cucumber, which rots quickly, sort of like the way a natural person lives a short life, but after baptism can live eternally.
Later on, the word took on the meaning of dyeing cloth, changing its color, which you could do by putting the cloth in the dye, or by pouring or sprinkling the cloth with the dye. We even find in Mark Chapter 7 that the Pharisees ceremonially purified cups, pitchers, utensils and – according to some early copies of the Gospel of Mark – even dining couches by “baptizing” them, which meant that those couches were sprinkled to purify them. And so, baptism creates an essential change inside of us and purifies us. That’s why we need to be baptized. We need to be cleansed of sin, changed internally, and receive the Holy Spirit.
Baptized again?
Should we be baptized again? No, for that is saying that God made a mistake the first time. “But I didn’t really understand,” or “I don’t remember my baptism”. That’s fine. God remembers and understands. And once or twice a year, we have a service just so we can all remember our baptisms. One baptism makes us clean enough for God the Holy Spirit to live within us. Besides, it isn’t the ceremony that is important - it is the presence of the Holy Spirit within us.
Why was Jesus Baptized?
But why did Jesus, the sinless Son of God, need to be baptized? He was already pure.
There were ultimately two reasons. The first was that it showed humbleness to do something uncomfortable for God’s sake. Jesus said (in Matthew 3) that it was “to fulfill all righteousness”. It was simply the right thing to do, it was how things should be done, it was proper and even Jesus, Son of God that He was – or perhaps especially Jesus, Son of God – had to do the right thing.
And that leads to the second reason. Following Jesus is a matter of faith. As we get to know Him, we should develop a deeper, more mature and well-grounded faith. Simply put, having faith in Jesus means that we trust Him even when we don’t understand. Jesus said He needed to be baptized – we trust Him – so we put this question off until we can ask Him in person.
And it is possible that that perhaps Jesus – the Word of God - needed to be baptized to purify water for the rest of us?
And, you know, there are three mysteries we don’t understand.
We don’t really understand death and how Jesus will bring us back to life after death. Yet, we trust that His promises and His power are so reliable that we have faith we shall be resurrected.
Secondly, we don’t really understand all the ins and outs of Holy Communion. We don’t understand just how deeply He meant it when He said that the bread is now His body and the wine or grape juice is now His blood. Yet, on a regular basis we eat and drink those elements and have faith that Holy Communion is a way to grow closer to Jesus. We have faith in the power of the ceremony and that the Elements nourish our faith.
And third, we don’t fully understand all the details of the relationship between Jesus, the living water which keeps us from every getting spiritually thirsty again, and baptism. We know that in some way water is tied up with our birth, the new birth, the cleansing of the earth in the Noah story, the crossing of the Red Sea in the Moses story, the crossing of the Jordan River by Joshua and the Israelites, life and new life. Even at the beginning, there was God the Father, the Holy Spirit over the water, and the Word of God spoken. We simply don’t understand it fully. But what we do understand is this: If we have faith in Jesus, if we truly want to follow Jesus, we are to be baptized, especially since Jesus said that His baptism was necessary “to fulfill all righteousness.”
And so we all have to make a decision. In some cases, our parents had such strong faith that Christianity was the right choice that we were baptized at an early age, even as infants, and hopefully those parents raised us up to be Christian believers, declaring to the world ourselves that we were believers when we were confirmed in our teens.
Young Children?
Why should we baptize infants? For the same reason we generally vaccinate infants against mumps, measles, and polio. We want to protect them – and the best protection against going over to the dark side is the presence of the Holy Spirit within us. Some people say that they think their child should make that decision when they are “old enough”.
Let’s be honest. As a parent, do you think that your children should be Christians, or do you think any other belief system, even atheism, is just as good? For that is what you are actually saying when you say that you would rather your children made the decision when they are older. You know best – that’s why you feed your children wholesome food instead of Mountain Dew and donuts every meal. They will have the opportunity to make their own declaration in their early teens, during Confirmation. But for now, you can make the decision for them, giving God permission to fill them with God the Holy Spirit and guide them to make their own decision to follow Jesus.
Are you still uncomfortable with this? Some people say, “If they’re too young, they won’t understand.” Others say, “They can’t give their consent”. Still others say, “They need to be able to answer for themselves.” Let’s look at these situations…
If you were the guardian of a young adult who was severely mentally disabled. Would you deny them baptism because they don’t really understand it? Of course not.
If you were the guardian of a young adult who could not speak, and could not answer for themselves, would you deny them baptism because they could not speak? Of course not.
If you were the spouse of a person who was dying, in a coma. Would you deny them baptism because they didn’t understand and couldn’t give consent? Of course not. You would insist that they be baptized.
Then, why not baptize a young child?
It is worth noting that for 1500 years, the general course of action was for infants to be baptized as soon as possible, typically when they were eight days old. It was only in the 1520’s, that the first adult rebaptisms took place with the early Mennonites. The modern Baptists followed their lead.
But in Scripture, in Acts Chapter 16, Paul and Silas were imprisoned and singing hymns. An earthquake hit that night and the jailor was going to kill himself, for he thought everyone had escaped, which would have meant a slow death by torture for the jailor. But Paul shouted, “Don’t harm yourself! We are all here!.
29 The jailer called for lights, rushed in and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. 30 He then brought them out and asked, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
31 They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your household.” 32 Then they spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all the others in his house. 33 At that hour of the night the jailer took them and washed their wounds; then immediately he and all his household were baptized. 34 The jailer brought them into his house and set a meal before them; he was filled with joy because he had come to believe in God—he and his whole household.
Notice that Scripture expressly states twice “his whole household”. And in a time before birth control, isn’t it very likely that there were infants and young children in that household?
So guide your family to be baptized as soon as feasible.
Your Decision
But many people, like myself, had become adults before we heard the Gospel. We were unbaptized, having to make that decision ourselves. You may still be in that condition, believing that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and worthy of being followed, but you haven’t yet stepped forward and received the water of baptism yourself. Now is a good time to make that decision. Let me know. Let’s talk about your baptism.
A focus upon the things of God is what is eternally valuable to us. This is God’s perspective – to look ahead a hundred or a thousand years and ask, “Does any of this really matter?”
And the answer is “Yes. What matters is that I chose to follow Jesus as God’s Son and chose to follow His example and be baptized”. These things matter – all our politics and controversies turn to dust rather quickly. But following Christ makes an eternal difference. And besides, if you want to change things in this life, first allow the Son of God to change you for the better – and introduce Him to other people so they can also change for the better.
The disciples did not fully understand much about baptism until later. Yet, they had faith, and so they were baptized and baptized other people in the name of Jesus and they laid hands on them and prayed for the Holy Spirit to come upon them. They worshipped Jesus, not fully understanding yet that He was the Son of God, but fully having faith that worshipping this young rabbi was the right thing to do. Will you do the right thing? Will you show your faith and be baptized?
We are planning a creek baptism service in the near future before the weather turns cold. If you would like to be baptized, catch me after the service and tell me so. If you want to take a step forward in your relationship with God, let me know. If you want to surrender that last part of yourself that you are reserving from God’s control, talk to me, or one of the other leaders and let us help you surrender your life to God.
Thought this was really helpful. Thanks, Mr. B!