What is Baptism, and when should a person get baptized?

We started the Sacraments series with the one that happens once.

Baptism is God’s sign and seal that marks his people as belonging to Christ and his visible church. Not a badge you earn and not a promise you make — a sign God puts on you. That distinction did most of the work tonight.

Jesus commanded it. At the end of Matthew, the last thing he tells the church before he leaves is to go and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. So baptism is not a tradition the church invented; it is an instruction the church received.

Then we asked when. Acts 8 gave us the clearest answer: Philip explains Jesus to an Ethiopian official on a desert road, and the man looks out the window and says, “See, here is water! What prevents me from being baptized?” They stop the chariot and Philip baptizes him right there. He did not go home and think about it for a year. He heard, he believed, he asked.

Six things we said about it, plainly:

• Jesus commanded his church to make disciples and baptize them
• It uses ordinary water — nothing special about the water
• It is administered in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
• It is administered by a minister of Christ
• It ordinarily takes place in front of the gathered church
• It is ordinarily received only once

That fifth one caught a few people. Baptism is public on purpose. You are being marked as belonging to a people, so the people are there to see it.

The question that took the longest was whether the water does anything. It does not. The water signifies washing; Christ does the cleansing. Getting wet has never saved anybody. But God gave us a sign we can see and feel, because he knows we are the kind of people who need one.

We finished on the last question, and it is the one worth carrying home: if you have not been baptized, do you want to be?