Next week, we have the solemn and exciting privilege of witnessing brethren from our church respond obediently to Christ’s command to be baptized. Our baptismal candidates will each share his or her personal testimony and then step into the baptistery to be immersed in water in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Many of us know that baptism was given as a sign of a believer’s salvation as well as a testimony to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but do we truly recognize the depths of all that baptism teaches us about the believer, his Savior, and the relationship between the two?
While our major presentation of gospel truth will come from those being baptized on Sunday, we will spend some time together in the scriptures, focusing on Colossians 2:6-15. This passage bears out the significance of baptism in such a profound way. Too often, evangelical (particularly Baptist) baptism services spend so much time focusing on what baptism is not (i.e., not salvific as in baptismal regeneration, not so correlated to circumcision that it is administered to infants, etc) that we lose focus on what baptism is. Rather than considering this passage in a merely polemical way, we will highlight the glorious truths that a believer’s baptism conveys.
