Our articles at Worldview Church this month relate to the worship of the Church. Part of our worship is the practice of those sacred acts of Baptism and Holy Communion. This is article, part tongue in cheek, part serious, discusses the daily impact of  Baptism on the entire Christian Life.

“Remember Your Baptism!” I recall snorting with disdain. Next to the bumper sticker admonishing one to “Practice Random Acts of Kindness” it seemed the most ignorant saying I’d ever heard. True kindness is purposeful, not random. I suspected some damning internal contradiction lay just beneath the surface of this cliché as well.

“Remember Your Baptism?” Having grown up Baptist, I recognized immediately my superior moral claim to make judgments about baptism. After all, weren’t we the sect who judged the authenticity of baptism by the water bill for filling the baptistery, and the sincerity of baptism by measure of the candidate’s hydrophobia? The lingering  effects of a close fraternization with frostbite after baptizing in a watering trough one freezing day only to have some Oneness Pentecostal tell me I’d done it wrong for baptizing in the name of the Holy Trinity were the badge of my own dedication to the truth. I would let no such silliness on Baptism pass through my ears unchallenged.

“Remember Your Baptism?” One does not need to remember one’s baptism. If one ever gets to the point of NEEDING to remember his baptism, and God’s solemn promise to wash away our sins through Jesus Christ, then it’s obvious that this previous pass through the  water was based on a spurious profession and you just get baptized again...no need to remember!

Thank God, we’re not still doing circumcisions! It could get bloody around here!

Though I’ve exaggerated, something like these thoughts ran through my mind at the admonition to “Remember Your Baptism.” I was new then to the Reformed and Evangelical faith (in the Reformation sense of the term “Evangelical”, which hearkens back before the word’s use to describe America’s “not quite fundamentalists”). Baptism to my mind had previously been about what I myself had said and done – my profession, my faith – and so my failures then seemed to invalidate it in the practiced piety of my childhood –  and even amongst many of the people I serve now.

I came to realize that baptism wasn’t just about me and my faith. As Ezekiel foretold (36:25ff), God would send a washing and command a baptism as a sign that the times had turned and the Last Days of the New Covenant had come – not the “end of the world” per se, but, through Jesus Christ and His Kingdom, the end of the world as we knew it as the sons of Adam and the slaves of sin.

Seeing baptism as God’s act and not merely my own changed everything for me. Recognizing that God had drawn near to me in the waters of baptism and cut a covenant, just as He had drawn near to Abraham and cut a covenant, let me see life through new eyes. My faith in Christ found new depth – not in myself for I remain shallow, but in the promise of Almighty God, Who would sooner cease being God than betray His covenant promises. That indeed is the message of the strange (to us) ritual we see in Genesis15 of God’s presence passing through the severed animals.

When I was in a position spiritual to finally receive it, Question and Answer 167 in the Westminster Larger Catechism explained to me what it means to “Remember Your Baptism.” My reservations over the phrase were gone. I could begin to enjoy remembering my baptism daily not as a celebration of water per se, much less a celebration of “me” and “my decision”! No. I could “Remember My Baptism” as the sacrament of my ability – through God’s promise and declaration of my adoption to sonship – to pray “Our Father Who art in heaven.”  The catechism puts it this way,  and I commend it to you for your consideration whoever you may be:

Q. 167. How is baptism to be improved by us?
A. The needful but much neglected duty of improving our baptism, is to be performed by us all our life long, especially in the time of temptation, and when we are present at the administration of it to others; by serious and thankful consideration of the nature of it, and of the ends for which Christ instituted it, the privileges and benefits conferred and sealed thereby, and our solemn vow made therein; by being humbled for our sinful defilement, our falling short of, and walking contrary to, the grace of baptism, and our engagements; by growing up to assurance of pardon of sin, and of all other blessings sealed to us in that sacrament; by drawing strength from the death and resurrection of Christ, into whom we are baptized, for the mortifying of sin, and quickening of grace; and by endeavoring to live by faith, to have our conversation in holiness and righteousness, as those that have therein given up their names to Christ; and to walk in brotherly love, as being baptized by the same Spirit into one body.

So now I call upon us together, in all seriousness, to “Remember Your Baptism.” Then your faith each day will be renewed upon the foundation of the Rock of what God has accomplished in Christ and conferred to those with whom He has drawn near in covenant bonds through Holy Baptism.

“Remember Your Baptism” and each day you do, you will no longer be building upon the shifting sands of your weakness.

Pastor Chuck Huckaby serves St. Andrew’s Church of Lawrenceburg TN, a church in the Reformed and Evangelical Tradition. You can visit their website at http://MissionLawrence.org

For more insight to this topic, get the book, Baptism: Three Views, by David Wright and Sinclair Ferguson, from our online store.

Or read the article, “We Have Known Water,” by Robert Lynn.