Baptism

Baptism is a very important part of your Christian walk. Despite what many think, merely sprinkling water on the forehead is useless. All you do is get a sinner's hair wet. Complete submersion is necessary, as you will soon understand. Also, doing it to an infant is equally useless. They are too young to be accountable for sin, and for that matter are too young to even have committed any sins.

Nobody should be baptized without understanding what is going on. All that happens otherwise is you go down a dry sinner and come up a wet one. Many churches offer courses spanning anywhere from an evening to several weeks on the subject. If not you may have someone you can go to that can sit down with you and go over the details of what goes on in a baptism. No matter where you go, just understand that you should not waste your time being baptized until you have the understanding. Any church or leader that puts you under without requiring this is not, in my mind, worth his salt, as he clearly does not understand it himself.

There is a lot to say on the matter, but I will make this as to the point as I can. That said, let's cover exactly what happens.

Rom 6:1-11:

¹What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound?

²God forbid. How shall we, that are dead to sin, live any longer therein?

³Know ye not, that so many of us as were baptized into Jesus Christ were baptized into his death?

⁴Therefore we are buried with him by baptism into death: that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life.

⁵For if we have been planted together in the likeness of his death, we shall be also in the likeness of his resurrection:

⁶Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin.

⁷For he that is dead is freed from sin.

⁸Now if we be dead with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with him:

⁹Knowing that Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him.

¹⁰For in that he died, he died unto sin once: but in that he liveth, he liveth unto God.

¹¹Likewise reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord.

So what can we gather from this statement? When you decide to live for Christ, you also decide to die to sin. However, this is more than just a conscious choice. You must bury what we in our house refer to as the Old Man. The person you once were, the sins you committed, that is your Old Self. Once you are baptized, that old man is buried underwater, and you rise a new creation.

This is where you are truly born again. All of those things that once bound you to earth and death are put down when you go under. They should stay there ever after, and you are no longer held to them, because they are no longer a part of who you are. This event is symbolic of when Christ died on the cross. As he died, we die, and just as he rose again, we rise again from the water, newly born into the kingdom of heaven.

So, you are a new creation, a new person with a new beginning, a new history to write. Just remember what it says in Galations 5:1:

Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.

Now that you are free of it, don't allow yourself to be burdened again by the bondage you lived under before. When you hear the enemy whisper in your ear, judging you for past transgressions, or someone tries to bring sin consciousness to you, don't allow it. That is no longer who you are. When you are tempted to go back to your old ways, remember that those ways no longer bind you and don't allow yourself to fall victim once again, or what was it all for?