Precious Promises

Today I remembered to ponder my spiritual birthday. Some years I forget until the date is past!

 
39 years ago yesterday I flew from Minnesota where I met John in college to Raleigh to meet his family and became officially engaged when he gave me my ring. And the next day, 39 years ago today, we studied through the subject of baptism together, and I was immersed into Christ that evening. It was good news to me to have my questions about what the Bible means when it talks about being born again answered. It was great news to me to see that the Bible gives us straightforward instructions for what is God’s means for personally benefiting from Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. The experience of being immersed in water, sharing in the meaningful rite that is described as being “buried with him…and raised with him” is such a wonderful gift from God, and I’ve never understood why anyone would want to reject it as either unnecessary or only symbolic.
 
I’ve come to suspect that those who reject it have believed the most insidious lie that Satan could perpetrate on sincere believers in God, that is a very subtle twist in the concept of faith. Those who reject baptism as being effectual, meaning that something spiritually real happens when a person goes through the experience of it, have substituted their personal faith as what is effectual. They don’t want to believe that there is real power of God in the rite of being immersed in water with the name of Jesus being confessed by a penitent sinner and forgiveness in that name being pronounced. But they believe that there is real power of God being conveyed to them when they say a prayer of repentance and confession of faith in Jesus and asking for forgiveness. The focus is put on their faith rather than on the source of forgiveness, Jesus’ death and then victory over death in the resurrection. Baptism requires faith and assumes faith in those who were told about it in the Bible. But the focus isn’t on the faith, it’s on the power of Jesus’ sacrifice for us that pays the price for our sin.
 
Nowadays faith has become an end in itself. That’s the subtle twist which I believe is a very successful trick of Satan. People take pride in having faith now, or at least they put their confidence in the fact that they have faith in God. There is faith in faith now. But faith is not what saves us. Faith as described in biblical teachings and examples always results in obedience, in doing what he says because we not only believe IN him, but we believe HIM and know that whatever he tells us is true and best and the way we are created to function. Faith in faith results in the false sense of security that the Bible warns against in many places. Faith in faith is like presumptuously assuming that God should be pleased that we have deigned to grant him the pleasure of our company. Phrases are used now which are nowhere in the Bible, such as “I’ve given my life to Christ,” “I’ve asked Jesus into my heart,” “I’ve prayed the sinner’s prayer,” “I’ve put my trust in Christ.”

 

God doesn’t need my life; I need his life. Nowhere are those who want to receive God’s forgiveness told to say a prayer. And verses that don’t originally address the subject of conversion and are written to those who are already Christians have been taken out of context and told to potential converts that they should “open the door to Jesus” (Rev. 3:20) or “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9). I don’t understand the desire to use verses like that while ignoring the verses that do clearly apply to conversion, such as earlier in the same book (Romans 6:3-4), “Or have you forgotten that when we were joined with Christ Jesus in baptism, we joined him in his death? For we died and were buried with Christ by baptism. And just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glorious power of the Father, now we also may live new lives.”
 
Part of the meaning of baptism is the statement it makes that I know I am dead, hopeless, and come to God with nothing to offer him, calling on him to give me what only he can give. I’m buried in the water as a spiritually dead person and then I’m raised up out of the water in my own personal resurrection granted by God. How anyone can miss the meaning of baptism and try to define it as a “work” has always puzzled me. It’s as far from being something I could claim credit for as anything could be. It’s an act of extreme humility, and even humiliation, in showing that I agree with God’s judgment of me as sinful and spiritually dead and unable to save myself. I went into the water dead, and in that instant under the water, my grave was transformed into a spiritual womb, giving me the new birth promised, and I came up out of the water as a new creation by the power and work of God, born again! I’m so thankful for that historical point in time where I know that God did as he promised and recreated me, empowered me, made me his daughter, wrote my name in his Book of Life, and made a place for me in heaven that is waiting for me. GOD did all that, from start to finish. My humbly submitting to his instructions for how to receive all of those wonderful blessings was the same thing as opening a gift. Just because I opened the gift doesn’t mean that I could think I now have earned the gift. Baptism is when and how God tells us to take his gift and make it our own. That’s so amazing, so meaningful, and such a special memory that I will always be awed by it and not ashamed to praise God for it. It was the beginning of 39 years so far of knowing that God is my Father, Jesus is my brother, and the Holy Spirit is my source of strength and power to be transformed and grow from the inside out.
 
Baptism is God’s will, his command for everyone to experience motivated by faith in Jesus, and it is the new birth. It’s only possible to miss the point of it if one has believed a lie from the Father of lies who of course wants as many as possible to think that faith is an end in itself. But even the demons believe, don’t they! And they shudder because they know the truth about God but they won’t submit to him. I’ve longed for 39 years to find a way to appeal to and reason with friends and family who have rejected the biblical teachings of baptism. I’ve been assumed the worst of, made fun of, judged to be narrow minded or closed minded or unloving, written off as too dogmatic, and ignored even by those who I’d dearly love to have understand why this subject is so dear to my heart and so impossible for me to pretend doesn’t matter. If immersion as described in the Bible is the beginning of one’s new life in Christ, then shouldn’t the question of whether those I love have experienced it be something to care about? If someone I know has cancer and I have learned that there is a sure and certain cure, through no credit of my own but because someone else shared the news with me, then wouldn’t I want to share that with others?
 
My daughters have experienced this in the physical realm from me with the subject of iodine, and they’ve learned to consider the possibility that what I’ve had the opportunity to learn about it could apply to them, too. After developing thyroid problems, I became curious about iodine because I knew it could be connected with my problem. Once my curiosity was aroused, all the information available through the internet made it impossible for me to avoid the fact that iodine was a major missing element and that a deficiency of it was affecting more than my thyroid. Now I know how important it is for many other parts of the body, including breast health, reproductive health, the healthy development of a fetus’ brain, prostate health, and even skin health. After experiencing the healing of what I suspect were precancerous skin lesions and the healing of fibrocystic breast disease (that has been linked as a precursor to cancer), as well as preventing any further thyroid degeneration, I can’t help but feel compelled to “preach” the importance of iodine to others when I know them well enough to broach the subject of their possible (and likely, in our iodine-depleted environment) deficiency. I try to do it in a respectful and informative rather than pushy way, but it always makes me sad when someone is closed to the possibiity that they may need to learn more about it for their own health issues, too.
 
I know that my own openness to learning about my need to put my faith in it’s right place and accept what I saw about baptism was easier because I was already asking the question about what it means to be born again. I realize that when someone has not already asked that question or has confidence that they have a relationship with God even though they’ve never focused on baptism’s meaning in the Scriptures, then it’s disconcerting at the least or alarming and challenging at the most to have someone raise the subject. I know from experience that having someone point out a biblical teaching that I’ve been oblivious to arouses a temptation to be defensive. I hope and pray for myself, and for those I love, that we will all always resist that temptation and be willing to learn and even change throughout our lives here on earth. It’s never too late to change a belief or a way of living. God gives us our days on earth to grow more and more like him, to learn more and more truth from his word and to become more and more free of the human wisdom and sin that would hurt and destroy us if it weren’t for his grace and power and divine wisdom.

 

As I begin my 40th year as a child of God, my motto both spiritually and in my life circumstances: “Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ, is calling us. Let all who are spiritually mature agree on these things. If you disagree on some point, I believe God will make it plain to you. But we must hold on to the progress we have already made” (Philippians 3:14-16 NLT).