Why Be Baptized?

We schedule our yearly baptisms to be on or around the first Sunday of June. It's somewhat symbolic. Our ministry year tends to follow the school year, so we want our baptisms to come at the end of our ministry season - a sort of culmination of our work the past nine months. It's never that clean or neat, but that is the idea - we tie the act of baptism to what people have been learning, experiencing, doing the past year. Makes sense in my mind.

In preparing some Anchorites for baptism, I found myself asking some very basic questions: what in your mind is the purpose of baptism. The answers varied around this theme: to help me feel a certain way. When I pressed for a more biblical purpose for why the church even baptizes people in the first place, there was a blank look. There was no judgementalism on my part towards them, that was just the way it was, and now I have an opportunity to help them begin to grasp the purpose/meaning of baptism.

Here was my simple three-point outline.

We get baptized because...

...Jesus got baptized.

...it symbolizes our death to sin and our promised resurrection when the Lord returns.

...it symbolizes our purity before God and towards others in our love and service.


To flesh it out a bit:

Because Jesus was baptized, we also do it since we hold as a high value the Imitation of Christ. We want to be like Jesus, so we want to pattern our lives of faith after him. If he got baptized we do too, since we also will pick up our cross like him, die with him that we may live with him.

Just as Jesus was laid in the tomb, so we die with him when we go under the water; and just as Jesus was resurrected, so we are when we come up out of the water. Jesus died our death that we might have resurrected life when he returns at the End of All Things.

The ancient Jews had a ritual bath which by which they cleansed themselves, consecrating themselves for worship in the Temple or for a special Festival. So we are baptized, being cleansed before the Lord and consecrating ourselves for a life of worship and love and service to the world as part of the church.



All of this stuff gets kind of intricate, but only because there are layers and layers of meaning to baptism. It's stuff that needs to be introduced and taught. But if there was one central point that was worth driving home, I made it this: God wants your whole-heart. When you get baptized, you are communicating to people in highly symbolic action that God indeed does have your whole-heart. What you are not communicating is that you WANT God to have it, but that your life already demonstrates the attitude and actions of one who has given (and keeps giving) your whole-heart to God. Too many people get baptized thinking that the action of immersion will help them give their whole-heart to God. It just doesn't work like that.

Only get baptized if you have put into action the loving the Lord with your whole-heart.

If there was a throne in your heart - who sits on it? How much of the time do you sit on it, and how often do you resist the Lord sitting on it? How often are you calling the shots in your life? How much do you want the Lord to call the shots? How often do you let him? Get baptized when you are actually letting the Lord call more and more of the shots.

Don't get baptized to help you let the Lord call the shots in your life: be active in your church community, interact with others over the teachings of Jesus, get accountability in your effort to love and serve like the Lord. If you are actually, currently committed to doing that everyday - and for the rest of your life, then get baptized.