How I have sold baptism short. Growing up a Southern Baptist, I couldn't begin to tell you the number of baptism I have witnessed. Yet, it has been in the last year that I have really begun to understand what is happening when those waters are stirred. It is our declaration to the world of whose we are. Paul said it in Romans 6, that we are buried with Jesus in baptism unto death. We are dead. Sin no longer has a hook in us. The enemy no longer can cause us to quake with his toothless roar. We are dead, what is there to fear. In baptism we can accept all that comes our way as loss compared to the riches that await us in our Savior's kingdom. And as we are risen to walk in the newness of life, we are able to shake our fist in the face of the world and it's god and say do your worst, take all I have have, hurt me, even kill me, but you can't destroy me for I belong to Jesus and he will keep me, even to his coming kingdom.
Yet the bread and the body and blood. Oh, I am so grateful for these. Just as baptism begins my outer testimony, the host, the sacraments, the Lord's supper is my inner confession. The bread reminds that it is under the weight of my sin that He, my Savior, was crushed. How dare I live in my own self-righteousness, and needlessly suffer under it's weight. And the wine, the blood that was shed to seal my salvation. The fulfillment of the great promise of sin forgiven.
