Baptism is a sacrament. It is also a work we do as an expression of our faith. But even more than that, it should be our immersion into everything we believe about Christ, making His suffering, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension the real experiences of our walk with God.
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Show Notes:
The Scriptures tell us that if we suffer with Christ, we are glorified with Him. That is not something you simply take by faith and say, “I believe He suffered for me, and so I believe I will share His glory.” No, you suffer with Him. That means the cross is more than something you believe happened in the past; it is something you experience now. It is something that moves from the realm of faith into the reality of experience. This is a truth that baptism teaches us.
James wrote that faith without works is dead, and baptism is a work you do to express your faith. It must be more than symbolic, however, because our new way of life is to be immersed in Christ after we first believe in Him. That means we can be immersed in all that Christ experienced for us. We can live through His shame and suffering, His death and burial, and His resurrection and time on earth in a glorified body. We can experience His ascension to the right hand of the Father and be seated with Him as He begins to rule and reign.
That is why we take up our cross daily. Our salvation can grow daily and become greater and greater as we experience deeper and deeper experiences in the Holy Spirit, in the Word, and in our waiting and meditation before God. He has given us these events so that through our faith we can experience them. We reach into God for the reality of the provision and the promise of baptism that He has given us.
Key Verses:
- Romans 8:17. “We suffer with Him so that we may also be glorified with Him.”
- Matthew 27:51–53. “The tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints … were raised.”
- James 2:14–26. “Faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself.”
- Romans 6:3–14. “If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him.”
- Colossians 3:1–8. “You have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God.”
- Galatians 6:14. “The cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”
- Hebrews 11:1. “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”
Quotes:
- “The resurrection of Yeshua was so powerful that those who had gone before Him in death were literally pulled out of death into resurrection bodies also, came out of their graves, and began walking the streets of Jerusalem.”
- “I think we have to be careful that we’re not just being dunked under water and getting wet. We are to come up out of that water with experiences that are life changing for us.”
- “Your faith should lead you into a life of prayer. It should lead you into a life with the Word. And as you immerse yourself into the Word, you’re going to find that you not only want to believe that Word. You find yourself needing to experience what that Word is saying.”
Takeaways:
- Our faith is given to lead us into the experiences that we are to have. We can have experiences with the things of God that are even historical, bringing them up to the present moment, making them alive in our lives, and making them part of our walk with God.
- The events of Christ’s death, burial, resurrection, and ascension are more than historical events that we believe in. These are events that we should be experiencing through baptism as the next step in our relationship with God and the building of our faith.
- We need to see baptism as something beyond a secondary confession of faith. It should be our immersion into the fullness of Christ’s experiences as our new life.