What is baptism
Baptism is a Christian ceremony that acknowledges a person’s public decision to be a follower of Jesus. When a person decides to be baptized, he or she is making a declaration to the community they are part of that they are responding to the grace and authority of God, and are submitting their life into his care. This practice was demonstrated first to us in the Gospels as Jesus himself is baptized. (Matthew chapter 3)
When a person is baptized, identity changes. Just as Jesus’s identity shifted in the public eye from being the son of Joseph the carpenter to the Son of God, when a person is baptized, his or her identity also changes. Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 5:16-17:
So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now! This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun!
This means that when we are baptized into the Kingdom of God, we are declaring what God has already done to change our lives! Baptism is not an act that mechanically fixes our problems, rather it is an act that serves as a reflection to what God has done within us. That means that a person should be baptized once they have experienced the grace of God on their life and responded to it wholeheartedly.
When a person decides to be baptized, he or she is fully immersed in water by another Christian in the community. This indicates how we died to our old self—the version of ourselves that was ruled by selfish desires and insecurity—and we are raised again in new life filled with the heart of the Father and his grace.
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