Tag: evangelism

What Is the Future of the Church?

We don’t need a church that celebrates the cult of action in political ‘prayers’. It is quite superfluous…the future of the church, this time as always, will be shaped anew by the saints. By people who are aware of more than mere phrases, people who are modern but have deep roots and live in the fullness of the faith.

We don’t need a church that celebrates the cult of action in political ‘prayers’. It is quite superfluous. Therefore it will collapse of its own accord. From today’s crisis this time too a church of tomorrow will rise, which will have lost much. It will become small, and to a large extent it will have to start again from the beginning. It will no longer be able to fill many of its buildings that were built in times of prosperity. Because of the number of its adherents it will lose many of its privileges in society. Unlike in the past, it will present itself much more strongly as an optional community, which can only be joined through a decision to do so. It will surely find new forms of office and ordain reliable Christians as priests, who also have other jobs. But, as before, full-time priests will be essential too.

The future of the church will not come from those who just follow recipes. It will not come from those who just want to choose the easy way. Those who avoid the passion of the faith and call anything demanding false and obsolete, tyrannical and legalistic. To put it positively: the future of the church, this time as always, will be shaped anew by the saints. By people who are aware of more than mere phrases, people who are modern but have deep roots and live in the fullness of the faith.

But despite all these changes which we can imagine, the church will again decisively find its essential being in what has always been its heart: faith in the triune God and in Jesus Christ. It will be an inward church, which does not bang on about its political mandate and flirts as little with the left as with the right. It will rediscover its own core in faith and prayer and experience the sacraments again as divine service, not a problem of liturgical design. The church will find it hard-going. For the process of crystallization and clarification will cost it much labour. It will become poor, a church of the little people.

The process will be long and difficult. But after the test of this letting go, great power will stream from a church that has been taken to heart and become simplified. For the people of a wholly planned world will become unutterably lonely. When God has disappeared from them, they will feel all their terrible destitution. And then they will discover the little community of believers as something completely new. As a hope that takes root in them, as an answer, which they have always secretly been seeking – as a home which gives them life and hope beyond death.

Joseph Ratzinger, Glaube und Zukunft (Munich, 1970) (quoted in Peter Seewald, Benedict XVI: A Life (Volume 2), p.70)

How Does God Love the World?

This is how God loved the world, he gave his only Son that whoever puts their trust in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Love is a big deal for Christians. It’s because of the centrality of love to Christianity that it appears so prominently in our culture. We all love to love.

But as soon as we say this, it begs the question: how? How does God love the world? What does ‘love’ mean in that context? In culture, ‘love’ is often a synonym for sex. Yet at the same time grown men will say they ‘love’ their football teams.

When Scripture talks about God loving the world it has something very powerful and particular in mind. It isn’t something that can adequately be summed up in words – it has to be shown rather than told.

The best I can do is to say that love consists in choosing to give oneself completely for the good of another. Thus, in John 3:16 we read that, God loves the world by giving his only Son that whoever puts their trust in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

That’s an idea that is quite easy to repeat. It is sufficiently well known that the wrestler, Stone Cold Steve Austin, used to parody the endless references to it on signs at Wrestlemania with his own version: Austin 3:16.

The rest of this post is trying to explain what these verses actually mean and why they matter.

I’m not going to quote John 3 here. But the rest of this post will make a lot more sense if you have read it.

  1. What’s Going On Here?

Our scene opens at night. That is significant. It is dark. As you read John’s gospel you will notice that he often mentions light and darkness as symbols of a spiritual or mental awakening. For example, we are told in John 1 that Jesus is the light that shines in the darkness.

So we are on the alert for someone who does not understand – who is, so to speak, “in the dark” and to whom Jesus is going to bring light.

Into the scene comes Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a very senior leader and religious teacher in Israel. He is part of the council that runs Jewish religious life and is a brilliant man.

I find this story so poignant.

Here is someone who is faithful, who is clever, who has worked hard and achieved an enormous amount. But even with all of that he knows he needs Jesus. He has seen something in Christ that goes beyond all the power and all the prestige and all the wisdom he has acquired. And he knows he needs it.

Whether you are the Teacher of Israel or a street Prostitute, eventually you have to come to Jesus and ask for help.

I love Nicodemus. I love his humility. I love the way a supreme official in the religious hierarchy has come to sit down with a provincial street preacher in order to ask him about the Kingdom of God. He reminds me of the best of brilliant people.

Nicodemus comes to Jesus and asks him about what Jesus is doing. He and his colleagues have seen Jesus at work and they get there is something going on here. But they don’t quite grasp its implications.

Maybe that is how you feel about church or Christianity. There is something you have seen that you recognise as good. It might be a feeling you get in worship, a peace that comes when you pray or hike, or a deep hunger you can’t quite understand (like an itch you can’t reach) but which seems to be satisfied when you listen to the Bible. 

If that resonates with you then you are the type of person Jesus is speaking to in this conversation.

  1. Why Jesus Came

Jesus tries two ways of explaining this to Nicodemus. 

First, he says, getting into God’s kingdom is like having a fresh start, almost going right back to the beginning, like you are born for a second time. But instead of this being a physical birth, it comes from two things: God’s Spirit moving on you and you being baptised; from Spirit and water.

Nicodemus doesn’t get that metaphor. So Jesus reaches for something he is very familiar with – the Old Testament.

There is a story of the people of Israel in the desert after God had set them free from Egypt and before they had entered the land they would call home. They were bitter and angry and complained about God, about being set free, about the food they had and the lives they lived. They began to reject God as provider and leader and look back towards the slavery of Egypt.

And so God allowed an invasion of snakes to come into their camp. They were biting the people and causing pain, even death. The people were sick. 

God provided a way out for them. He commanded Moses to make a bronze snake and put it on a pole. Moses lifted it in the air. Whoever looked up to the bronze snake was healed from the effect of the snake bites.  It was as if the bronze snake had taken all the effects of the snake bites into itself and the people could be healed.

This is what the kingdom of God is like, Jesus says. In fact this incident was put there in the Old Testament so people like Nicodemus could recognise this moment when it came and know what they should do about it. 

Human beings are sick and they are dying. They are dying from the inside out – spiritually killed by the decision to reject God and to turn inward to selfishness and pride. This is what we call sin – the human propensity to mess things up, particularly our relationship with God and each other.

And so Jesus has come, and would be lifted up on a cross and die, punished as a sinner, taking all the world’s sin on himself and offering healing to everyone who would look to him.

Notice three things about this description:

  1. The people aren’t condemned by Jesus.
    They are sick already. It is their choices, our choices, which kill us. That is why Jesus didn’t come into the world to condemn the world but to save it. The world is already dying. Naturally we are already dying, mortally wounded by a thousand rebellions, petty hurts, treasured prides and self-centredness. 
  2. It is God who takes the first step to redeem us.
    Jesus came to us, we didn’t go to him. The point about the bronze snake is that God (through Moses) gave it to the people so that they could be healed. This is what we call grace – the free gift of healing and forgiveness and a future. It isn’t earned, like exchanging a day’s labour for a fair wage. It is given, like receiving medicine.
  3. It has to be accepted and trusted.
    The gift has to be received. It has to be trusted. The people had to look up, away from themselves, away from the snakes, away from their staffs and solutions, and trust the provision God made.
    This is what we call faith. To paraphrase St Thomas Aquinas, it is the response of trust to the testimony of someone we believe. The way Jesus (and the Church after him) teaches we should exercise this trust is by turning away from ourselves and being baptised; be born of Spirit and water.
  1. Why Do We Choose (or Not Choose) the Light?

The conversation finishes with John (or possibly Jesus – the Greek is unclear) explaining how people react to this. 

We can react in one of three ways.

  1. We can hold on to our sin because of shame (misunderstanding what the light is there to do – he came to save, not condemn).
  2. We can refuse the light because we actually prefer our sin. This gets worse the more we choose darkness. When we refuse the light, it gets harder to choose it next time. 
  3. We can choose to say yes to the light and find it brings healing. This has the opposite effect- we find the light is pleasant and good and so the more we choose it, the easier and more desirable it is to choose it again.

Application

What does this mean for us?

  • The first response is for those who haven’t yet trusted themselves to Jesus. Maybe you’re one of those, like Nicodemus, who senses there is something good, vital, even divine about what Jesus says and does. God’s word to you is that he loves you and came for you.
    But you need to know that the yearning you feel is a symptom. It’s like a hungry body’s craving for food, a thirsty man’s need for water. Your soul is sick and it craves the cure.
    Put your trust in Jesus, be baptised, and you will receive a new start and a new life.
  • What about showing hope to others? Here we need to remember that Jesus came to a world that hadn’t asked for him but needed him. He came in love, to bring help and healing to people who had rejected him.
    Ask God to show you who needs your help. And then give it. That is the way of God.
  • Finally, what about sharing hope? Learn from the way Jesus deals with Nicodemus. He listens to him, knows him, and talks to him in a way he can understand. The first step to sharing Jesus effectively with others is to listen to them.

How Can We Follow a Good God in a World of Pain?

Precisely because Auschwitz exists, we need faith, we need the presence of the Resurrection and of the victory of love; only the Resurrection can make the star of hope rise that allows us to live.

This is a question everyone wrestles with at some time or another. Here’s what Joseph Ratzinger, whose family were persecuted by the Nazis, addressed the subject in a talk to those about to be ordained to the priesthood:

“The answer to an oft-asked question became clear to me as well. How often has it been said: Can anyone still believe in a good God after Auschwitz? I understood: Precisely because Auschwitz exists, we need faith, we need the presence of the Resurrection and of the victory of love; only the Resurrection can make the star of hope rise that allows us to live.
Making the Resurrection present—my dear young friends—this in fact describes completely the essence of what being a priest means. It means, most profoundly, being able to bring about this reality on the killing field of this world, in which death and its powers reap a continual harvest; it means bringing about the presence of the Resurrection and, thus, giving the answer of life that is stronger than death.“1

In turn, this changes the way that we see evil. We mourn and fight it but regard it ultimately as a defeated and vanquished foe. Thus, as Ratzinger returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau and celebrated the Eucharist, he found his perspective changed:

Making the Resurrection present… It was an exciting thought and an exciting experience, over this vast harvest field of death, on this killing field on which over a million people met their death, to live to see the presence of the Resurrection as the only true and only sufficient answer to it. It was exciting to experience how this memorial to hatred and inhumanity became a place of the triumph of the love of Jesus Christ and of love.2

  1. Ratzinger, Teaching and Learning the Love of God, p.95. ↩︎
  2. Ratzinger, Teaching and Learning the Love of God, p.94. ↩︎

Suffering, Joy and Evangelism

The Gospel can be proclaimed credibly only by someone who, on the one hand, has suffered, who has not evaded reality, the difficult reality of this world, and has stood fast in his faith in the love that is stronger than suffering.

Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) is one of my favorite writers. Almost everything he produced is gold: joyful, wise and saturated in Jesus. Here he is on great form, preaching about suffering, joy and Christian evangelism:

“When a person receives a great love, when he is privileged to know that he is loved by someone who is good and powerful and absolutely reliable, then this is no guarantee that something terrible will not happen to him, too, and remain terrible. Nevertheless, it will not be able to destroy him, because there is something in him that all these terrors cannot touch: a light and a strength that are stronger than all that. The Christian, though, is such a person; for to him is granted the gift that he is loved by God, who is absolutely kind and powerful, whose love does not depend on any moods and whose fidelity never wavers. And therefore resignation, joylessness, sullenness, humourlessness, and cynicism do not suit one who is Christian… Joylessness in this most profound sense is the repudiation of the faith, the repudiation of the God whose Yes is still the foundation of our life, whatever may happen. “Rejoice” therefore means: be believers, immersed in the certainty of what the Gospel has proclaimed to us: God loves with a love that is not fickle…

But someone who is resigned or embittered himself cannot be a bearer of Good News. The Gospel can be proclaimed credibly only by someone who, on the one hand, has suffered, who has not evaded reality, the difficult reality of this world, and has stood fast in his faith in the love that is stronger than suffering. Only someone who is an evangelist in this way can hand on the joy that we need, which is not a surrogate, a brief anesthesia, but withstands the truth of this world.”

Teaching and Learning the Love of God, p.139-140

How to Be People of Influence and Purpose

Do you want to live a life of influence and purpose? Jesus wants that for you too.
Jesus wants you to live a life of influence and purpose by learning to pray, to talk and to listen.

One of the issues that comes up most often in my pastoral work, particularly as I and my peers hit middle-age, is how we can live a life of influence and purpose.

I think a lot of us crave both of those things. We want to know what we are doing with our lives and to feel it is worth it.

I’ve noticed that this sense is even stronger among the young people I meet. They struggle with the pressure (and desire) to change the world, but simultaneously with the knowledge that doing so seems next to impossible.

I have often wondered to myself if this is a major contributor to the epidemic of anxiety and self-harm that is well documented among under-20s. They know they want to do something about a world they are repeatedly told is dying (and have a moral obligation to do so) but practical forms of action that make a real difference are not available to them. The result is familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of religion and history: a sense of guilt accompanied by helplessness that generates anger and anxiousness. The guilt cannot be forgiven because there is noone to absolve, and the helplessness cannot be overcome because there is nothing an individual can do to atone for a shared sense of failure (that the planet is burning or some such) or to repent by putting the wrong right.

I was meditating on some of these concerns as I read Mark 1:20-39.

Before I explain what I think this passage has to say about this in any more detail, I what I’m going to say in one or two sentences so it is easy to remember. Here is today’s:

Jesus wants you to live a life of influence and purpose by learning to pray, to talk and to listen.

Before you go any further, you should read the passage using the link above. What I’m saying will make more sense if you know what I’m talking about.

  1. Let Jesus Influence You By Learning to Pray

The first thing we see in this passage is that when we choose to bring Jesus into our lives he can bring real and positive change.

The scene is set in Capernaum, a town in Northern Israel where Jesus was based. He and his students had been in the synagogue, worshipping and Jesus had delivered a man who was afflicted with an evil Spirit. You can read about it in the previous couple of paragraphs.

Now they go back from the synagogue to Simon and Andrew’s house. 

Notice that they don’t go there because Simon’s mother-in-law is sick; Simon doesn’t tell Jesus about it until he’s already at the house. They go because Jesus’ students are making Jesus a part of their whole lives. He isn’t just someone they listen to in the Synagogue and then try to remember what he said, or marvel at what he did. Those are good things. But the disciples do something more. They take Jesus home with them.

The benefits of making Jesus a part of our whole lives become obvious when we look at verse 31. Because Jesus is with them outside the Synagogue, they are able to ask him for what they need when they need it. So they arrive home and Simon’s mother-in-law is sick, very sick. And because Jesus is there, Simon is able to ask him to help.

It’s a process. First you accept you need Jesus outside church. You start to read your Bible (or a Bible app) and to worship at home during the week, build a devotional life, begin to pray about work, or family, or your day. Then when a crisis starts to emerge – your family are sick or you need help – you know who to ask and know he is there.

It is then that Jesus heals her. He responds to Simon’s request, in effect to Simon’s prayer. 

This is a pattern that occurs again and again throughout the Scriptures. Jesus doesn’t impose himself on people (unless they are completely bound by demons or sickness). He allows us to choose the extent to which we will accept his presence in our lives.

You might be thinking: “That’s fine for Simon. He had Jesus there with him. I’d invite Jesus around for lunch if he were here.”

That’s a completely understandable response. But I do have a couple of observations.

First I’d gently push back and say: would you? 

Lots of people didn’t. How can you be so sure? How can I? I know I make a lot of excuses for why I don’t cultivate my spiritual life – why I don’t pray and read the Bible that range from the good (I’ve been called to rush to hospital) to the bad (Spurs might score and I don’t want to miss it).

But more importantly, second: we can be with Jesus in all of our life, not just in church. 

Christ isn’t still here bodily. It’s better than that. That is the reason for his Ascension into heaven and the sending of the Holy Spirit. In Simon’s day, only one person’s house could have Christ in it. Now he can be with you wherever. 

That’s the starting point for everything. A great preacher once said that, “Jesus’ power is in his presence”. If you want to be someone of peace, purpose, and influence the most important thing is to be someone whose life is full of Jesus – not just someone who comes to church on a Sunday morning.

He’s what you ultimately need.

  1. Influence Others By Learning to Talk

The next thing I notice in these verses is that word spread.

We’re not told how, but at some point during that afternoon the word about what Jesus had done for Peter’s mother-in-law spread all around the village. 

Capernaum wasn’t a huge place. Even so, this is very impressive. In a matter of hours word has spread and there are queues of people outside waiting for Jesus.

What have they come for? For an evangelist or preacher it is tempting to want to see this as a revival – of people desperate to receive forgiveness or to hear Jesus preach.

That isn’t what Mark says, however. It’s much more relatable than that. 

Look at verse 33. The crowds come to ask Jesus to do for them what he had done for the man in the Synagogue and for Peter’s mother-in-law.

What has happened is that the man who was set free – who experienced mental and spiritual healing – and those who had been blessed by the physical healing have gone around and told people. 

They haven’t tried to tell everyone who Jesus is. As far as we know, they haven’t given them a tract or called them to repent (there’s certainly no evidence of that here).  They have just told their stories of how Jesus has helped them, of how they have benefited from his presence. And others have decided that they want some of that too.

Again, this is a pattern we see repeated over and over again. Heather touched on it a couple of weeks ago in her talk about how Philip and Nathaniel came to follow Jesus. 

One of the main ways, if not the main way, that ordinary people brought others to know Jesus in the New Testament was to learn to talk about how they had benefited from him, what he had done from them. Then others think they want a piece of that.

Again, we’re going to look at the practical way to do this more in a moment. 

Fundamentally, however, it relies on two basic ideas that I think most people who know Jesus would agree with but that we sometimes forget.

  1. Knowing Jesus is good for us – we get loads from it.
  2. Knowing Jesus would really help others – they would get loads from it.

If you agree with both of those ideas then it makes sense that we would want to talk about our own experiences of Jesus or church with others. I get this is difficult so I’m going to explain how to do it better in a moment (not that I’ve particularly nailed this, but I am learning!)

  1. Find Purpose By Learning to Listen

So I have argued for making Jesus a part of our whole lives – at work, at football, at school, at a care home, even at church. And that when we do, we should then want to share that with others.

But what about direction? This is one of the biggest felt needs I come across pastorally. And I don’t have a magic bullet. 

There isn’t a way to buy a cheat-map of life with all the right answers on it. And for good reason. 

A life of faith is a life that is necessarily built on trust. It isn’t about me knowing all the answers and then being able to implement them. It is more about me entrusting myself to someone else to lead me and guide me.

In that sense it’s more like rally-driving than it is Formula 1. 

In Formula 1, everyone knows the track – it’s easy. The question is how well can you navigate it as fast as you can. In rally driving the track is varied and variable. You’re driving but it is the navigator who knows where you’re going. The driver needs him and has to trust him.

A life of faith is like a rally-race.

But that doesn’t mean we’re helpless. What we see when we look at Jesus’s example in verse 35-39 is that, while we may not know every turn we should take in advance, we can know the principles that help us to make good choices. We can know why we are here, what we should prioritise, and when we need to be alert to dangers.

That kind of sense of purpose comes from spending time in quiet prayer with God. It might be sitting silently in a chair. It might be going for a long walk. It might be something completely different. But it is about learning to quiet every other voice, to present ourselves to God and then to say what do you want? What do you want for me?

When we do that regularly, we don’t get all the answers to every choice we should make. But we become aware of the values and principles that should guide us – why we have come, to paraphrase Jesus’ words.

It might be saying yes to a promotion because it allows you to provide for more people or lead in a way that will bless them. Or “no” to a promotion because God has called you to be a father or mother first.

It might be saying no to an opportunity because you know it will distract you from something else or to go and try something new because you want to meet new people to speak to about Jesus.

I can’t answer that question because I’m not you. 

But the only way to get peace and stop being restless is to ask, to make time to listen to the answer and then act on it.

Jesus wants you to live a life of influence and direction by learning to pray, share and listen.

Application

What does this mean for us as we try to know hope, show hope and share hope.

Choosing to make Jesus a part of our life isn’t harder now than it was then, it’s easier. This is a quick set of suggestions for how to do it. You can add to them or take them away as you wish. I’ll start at the beginning of the day.

  • Set up part of your house as a prayer area. That’s where you’re going to go to pray or meditate in the morning and evening. You might designate it with an icon or a cross or something.
  • When you wake up in the morning, pray. The amount you can pray is going to change depending on your circumstances. But everyone here can pray first thing. Everyone here has some time.
    You can make up your own prayers – using T.A.P. That takes about 4 minutes.
    You could use a prayer book or app – I’m happy to recommend them.
    But pray. First thing. Before checking Facebook.
  • Take on Scripture. You can do this by reading it, listening to it, or meditating on it. Again, everyone can do this. You can listen to a 10 minute podcast while you breastfeed or a 15 minute devotional while you drive to work. Or if you have more time, you can spend an hour in silent meditation.
    But do something. You probably won’t feel an immediate benefit but over time it will help immeasurably.
  • Pray before meals and before work. This sounds as simple as it is. Say thank you for your food 3 times a day. Before you start work or a task, thank God for it and ask for his help.
    This starts to build an awareness that Jesus is at work in these places and changes our attitude.
  • At the end of the day, before bed, spend 5 minutes remembering the day. Then say thank you for anything you are grateful for and sorry for anything you regret. I find it helps to journal this 
  • Find times when you can be away from others and quiet. Take headphones out or off. If there are decisions that have to be made, ask God about them and then walk or sit in silence. For at least 30 minutes.

Jesus wants you to live a life of influence and purpose by learning to pray, to talk and to listen.

Why Get Baptised?

Why get baptised?
Jesus died because he loves me and gives me new life. Baptism is how I receive that gift.

Then Peter stood up with the Eleven, raised his voice and addressed the crowd: “Fellow Jews and all of you who live in Jerusalem, let me explain this to you; listen carefully to what I say…

“Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah.”

When the people heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”

Peter replied, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins. And you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. (Acts 2:14, 36-38)

Introduction

The gospel is amazing news. Jesus died because he loves me and offers me new life.

Think about that for a moment.

The Son of God loved us, saw us in our sin, guilt and shame, came to live with us as one of us, took the punishment, the stain, the poison of sin, and then buried it in the ground. He releases us, cleans us, changes us, forgives us, and defeats the Devil for us.

Basically it’s brilliant.

But why do Christians get baptised in response to it?

After all, it is on any view a strange sight. An otherwise sane boy or girl, man or woman stands in a massive bath, fully dressed (thankfully), and then allows a pastor or leader to dunk them under the water. They emerge, drenched, for a room full of Christians who are clapping, cheering and (occasionally) crying.

Ancient Roots

It’s weird, properly weird. But it is also ancient.

It is the earliest recorded teaching of the Christian church that we receive new life by believing that Jesus rose from the dead, acknowledging that we need his love and forgiveness, committing ourselves to follow his teaching and being baptized into his church. Everyone who wants to follow Jesus is commanded by the apostles and their successors to be baptized.

We could give loads of examples from the New Testament. Here are just a few:

  • Jesus got baptized (Matthew 3:13-16; Mark 1:9-11; Luke 3:21-22).
  • Jesus’s followers then baptized new believers while Jesus was alive (John 3:22).
  • Jesus told his followers to go and baptize people all over the world (Matthew 28:19-20).
  • When the first church began at Pentecost, Peter commands new believers to be baptized (Acts 2:38-39).
  • That pattern is replicated over and over throughout the early churches – people hear, they believe in Jesus, they trust him, and they get baptized (Acts 8:34-40, 9:17-19 etc).

These are just a few references that you can look up to see the way baptism is a central part of the start of a Christian journey. That pattern carried on after the New Testament. Everywhere people became Christians, they got baptized.

But Why?

There is an enormous amount that could be written about baptism. At its heart, though, baptism has both a spiritual and practical effect in our lives as Christians.

Spiritual Effects

We believe that baptism is about what God has done and is doing in us through Jesus Christ.

When we are baptized we receive God’s grace and are united to Jesus and to the church.

Two pictures help us understand this: burial and bath-time.

When we go under the water we are identifying with Jesus dying and being buried. That is what St Paul means when he says “we are buried with him through baptism”. Then when we come up out of the water we are identifying with Jesus rising from the dead.

It is as if we are looking at what Jesus has done for us and saying ‘yes, I want to be a part of that’ and in response God says ‘OK, then I’ll make you a part of that’.

This isn’t just a sign or an act; it really changes us in our spirits. When we are baptized, we receive God’s grace and are united to Jesus and to the church. 

This brings me to the second picture: a bath.

I love to play football. When I do I end up covered in dirt and sweat and (sometimes) blood.

I come in from a game and before I can get on with the rest of my life, I need a bath or a shower. I need to soak in the clean water to get all of this grime and grease and stain off me. Then I can start afresh.

Part of the symbolism of baptism is that of a bath, of washing. I don’t mean that we clean our bodies. It’s about a deep cleansing for our souls.

Baptism, as a part of the whole process of identifying with and trusting in Jesus, is how God washes us clean of all the dirt and grime of sin – of the human propensity to mess stuff up, the unkind words, acts of temper, moments of violence and bitterness, the selfishness or snideness, the dishonesty or disrespect – that cling to us through our lives.

Practical Benefits

But there is a practical benefit too.

Following Jesus can be a life of great joy and peace and purpose. It is to live in tune with the moral and spiritual music of the universe, to find community and comfort and peace.

But it can also be really hard. There are times when we mess up, times when others hurt us, times when we are rejected or bereaved, times when we doubt God’s love for us, our faithfulness to him, or even his existence.

When we go through these experiences, God has given us something concrete to cling to.

Whenever you feel like this, you can look back to today and remember the feeling of being wet. You can remember the way the water touched every part of you. That was real, it was tangible. And it is a promise; that God will never leave you or forsake you, that, in the words of St Paul,

neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.[1]

So What?

What does this actually mean for us?

Some of us may never have actually responded to what Jesus did for ourselves.
Jesus lived, and died and rose again for all of us. But we have to accept it and make it our own. It’s a bit like being given a cheque for a huge amount of money. It doesn’t benefit me unless I cash it.  You might have been in church your whole life or this might be your first time. If you’ve never consciously responded then take a moment to do so even as you read this.

Others might have become followers of Jesus recently or in the distant past. But maybe you haven’t yet been baptised. If that’s you, I want to encourage you to get baptised. It is commanded by Jesus, it is good for you now, and it will help you in the future.

Jesus died because he loves me and offers me new life.Baptism is how I receive that gift.

[1] Romans 8:38-9