Thoughts on Baptism
A friend of mine who is exploring faith asked, “If salvation is a gift of God, not of ourselves, so that no one can boast, then is baptism a part of grace or part of works or neither? Or is it part of the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, etc.)? Can you be saved and not be baptized?” I answered my friend, and have expanded on my thoughts here.
Baptism is neither works nor grace, it is an outward sign of obedience to an inward change of ownership. When you believe in Jesus Christ as your Saviour, placing your trust in Him as the one who can reconcile you to God, you are saved.
Being “saved” means that you have told God that you accept Christ’s sacrifice on your behalf, and that you ask God to see you through Christ’s blood — Jesus’s blood covers your sin so that God sees you as righteous. (One way I like to put it is that the only thing that saves me is that Jesus covers all my faults with His righteousness, so that God sees me through “Jesus-coloured glasses.”)
If you are deeply in debt and have before you a lifetime of working hard to pay off your debt while scrimping and saving to meet your absolute needs, and someone else comes along and says, here, I will pay off all that debt for you so that your paycheck is now your own …. you’re going to feel profoundly grateful. Your life will change — not just by virtue of the fact that you don’t have to be a wage-slave so that you can meet your obligations, but also because of your gratitude to the person who bailed you out.
Becoming a Christian is like that. You were separated from God because of your sinfulness, and you owed God a debt you could not pay. Jesus said, “I will pay the debt for you so that you can be reconciled to God.” And once you accept His stepping in to pay your debt, the question for you is: What form will your gratitude take?
Will you just say Okay, thanks, and take the gift and be done with it? Or will you allow the gift to change your life? Will you seek to show that same sacrificial love to others? Will you seek to make the one who bailed you out your model? Because that is what becoming a Christian really means. It’s not so much about getting that debt paid as it is about making the One who paid the debt your master.
When you accept Jesus’s sacrifice for you, you give Him a claim on your life. He has paid for you; you now belong to Him. Baptism acknowledges that claim publicly. We are baptised in obedience to the Lord Jesus Christ, as an outward sign that He has bought us and that we now belong to Him — it is our acknowledgement that He is now Master in our lives. Baptism is a step of obedience in following Jesus, who, though He was God Himself, was humble enough to ask a man to baptise him so that He would fulfill the teaching of Scripture.
In many ways, baptism is a symbol of your own death and resurrection. The immersion in the water symbolizes the death and burial of the old person who is controlled by their sin nature and who worships itself as the most important thing in the world. The rising up from the water symbolizes the cleaned and resurrected soul returning to a life that is given back to it. A life in which it follows a new Master.
Baptism is also a step toward humility. It says to the world that you choose to take yourself off the throne of your life and let someone else direct your life. It says that you are not too full of pride to submit to a ritual that countless thousands have undergone before you … including the One who paid your debt. It shows that you do not think that you, the servant, are better than Jesus, the Master.
Baptism is no more necessary to salvation than putting on clothes is necessary to life. A newborn won’t die if you don’t clothe it. But to leave it naked is to leave it outside the community. Clothes demonstrate our status and position; they give protection and demonstrate our obedience to societal standards.
Likewise, refusing or neglecting baptism leaves one outside the Christian community. Baptism shows that you are willing to obey Christ. It is a public statement that you now choose not to be in charge of your own life, but that you make Christ the Lord of your life. It aligns you with all of the other Christians in the world, for whom baptism was the rite of passage into a new life.
Baptism is one of the sacraments by which God ministers grace to us. To refuse it or neglect it is to refuse a measure of God’s grace. In the Methodist confirmation ritual, we tell the confirmands to “remember your baptism and be glad.” Baptism gives a person a specific point in time to look back to when faith wavers or when circumstances cause them to doubt their salvation, so that they can say with confidence, “I AM a child of God, cleansed from unrighteousness and worthy to approach my Father God with my needs and desires.”
Baptism is also a time for making your private transactions with God public. It’s like marriage: the boy and girl have already said their “yes” to the relationship — the marriage ceremony is simply when they stand before witnesses to make those promises public and binding. Once you’ve said vows before witnesses, there’s no more “he said, she said” if things don’t work out. Because someone else heard what the two of you said — it’s “official” in a way that a common-law marriage is not.
In the rite of baptism in most churches, the candidate for baptism confirms that they are rejecting sin and evil, that they will keep God’s will and His commandments, and that they affirm the Christian Faith (usually with reference to the Apostle’s Creed). Thus, baptism is like a wedding ceremony between the Believer and the Church. You might say that someone who neglects or refuses it “has commitment issues.”
If you are a Believer — that is, if you are a person who claims to be a Christian — if you claim that Jesus is your Saviour, but you resist the idea of getting baptized, then it’s important to figure out why. Is it pride — you don’t want to do some silly ritual in front of a bunch of people? Is it rebellion — you don’t really WANT to put someone else in charge of your life, but you want to keep calling the shots?
If you are claiming to be something, but you refuse even the most basic observances that are called for, then are you really what you claim to be? Don’t ask me, because it’s not my place to judge. That’s between you and God. But if you still have resistance to this simple act of obedience, you need to talk to God about it and ask Him to help you overcome your resistance to His instructions.
The last thing that Jesus said before He returned to Heaven was to tell His followers: Go, and teach all nations, BAPTIZING them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all of the things that I have commanded you. (Matthew 28:19-20) He commanded it. If you wish to truly follow Him, then it seems that your commitment should be sealed with baptism.