Baptism – Page 2 – What Does This Mean?

What is Baptism?

Encore Post: You may have discovered that Christians value Baptism a lot. Yet there are few subjects that the various Christian traditions disagree about more. Catholics believe baptism is a means of grace that removes original sin and forgives all actual sins committed before baptism. It does not forgive sins committed after that — for that you need to go to confession, be absolved and do penance. For many Protestants, it is a work you do in obedience to God’s command, showing you’ve accepted Jesus as your personal savior. For others, it is just a meaningful symbol of salvation.

Lutherans believe that baptism is a means of grace, one of the ways, instituted by Jesus himself, God uses to save us. (Matthew 28:19) It combines the Gospel of Christ’s saving obedience, suffering, death and resurrection with water to wash away our sins. (Ephesians 5:25-27, Titus 3:4-7) It is God himself who does the baptizing, using human hands.

Like the other means of grace, Baptism creates faith in hearts where there is none and strengthens faith where it exists. Baptism also marks us with the name of the Triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It makes us his children and heirs — heirs with Christ.

Finally, it is an undeniable declaration that we are saved. Why? Because we had nothing to do with it. In most cases, it is written in record books we can see and in all cases is written in the Book of Life. When Satan tries to cause us to doubt our salvation, we can tell him: “get lost! I am baptized.” Nothing can separate us from the Love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. And where he is, we will also be.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

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What is a Sacrament?

Encore Post: The Roman Catholics have seven sacraments. Lutherans have two (or maybe three). Protestants of a variety of confessions have none. The reason why the list differs is because each has a different definition of sacrament. The word is from Latin and literally means “holy things.” It was used by Jerome in the Vulgate, the Latin version of the Bible used by the Catholic Church, to translate the Greek word μυστήριον (mystery), a word for the saving truths of the Christian faith.

The Church came to use it for the ways God gives his grace to his children. The Roman Catholic Church lists seven sacraments: Baptism, Holy Communion, Confirmation, Penance, Marriage, Ordination and Anointing of the Sick (Last rites)

Lutherans, following Martin Luther, use a narrower definition. For us, a sacrament is something that Jesus instituted, that God uses to give us his grace and so create faith and save us and that combines God’s promise with a physical element (water in Baptism, bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper) Lutheran theologians sometimes have included Absolution, where God forgives the sins of his people through the voice of a pastor. Because Absolution does not use a physical element, Martin Luther and other Lutheran theologians have been reluctant to list it as a sacrament.

We treasure the sacraments because they are gifts from God. They are objective and outside of ourselves. Because they do not depend upon us, but upon Christ who gives them, we are absolutely certain that in them we receive God’s grace, that we are saved, that he forgives our sins, that we are his children and that we will live with him forever.

For us, this changes why we go to church on Sundays and other days. We don’t go because we are doing something for God but because God has done something for us and wants to give us gifts. Here is the strength to live life in the struggle against the world, the devil and our flesh. Because of these gifts, we have the strength to do good works. For these gifts we thank him and give our lives over to his service and to care for others.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Blog Post Series

The Forgiveness of Sins

Encore Post: King David was a prime example of someone who needed forgiveness. In one episode, he managed to shirk his duty as a commander, lust after his neighbor’s wife, use his power to rape or commit adultery with her, lie to her husband, send him on a suicide mission to murder him then marry Bathsheba to cover it up. He sinned against everyone it seems. Yet it is to God he goes for forgiveness. In the end, all sins are rebellion against God. (2 Samuel 11:1-12:25 and Psalm 51)

Forgiveness is hard to come by in this world. When we are hurt, we want to return that hurt in kind. Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism have no forgiveness — you pay back the bad Karma you give with suffering in this life or nearly endless reincarnations. Mormon must cease sinning to pay for forgiveness and progress towards godhood. Pagan religions require a suitable sacrifice to an appropriate spirit.

Christianity is different. We have a loving and merciful God, who in Jesus died to pay for our forgiveness and through the Holy Spirit gives faith, the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. The Spirit chooses to use his Church to bring this forgiveness to all. In the Church, the Gospel is preached, God adopts his children through baptism, Jesus gives his body and blood for the forgiveness of sins and he hears our confessions and absolves us of our sins by pastors he sends to do so.

So, then, the Church is not a country club, a place where only good people need apply. It is a hospital, where we who are sick can get well, taking the only medicine that can make us well. We are, after all, beggars telling other beggars where they can find bread.

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Blog Post Series

Enlightened with His Gifts

Encore Post: Everyone loves receiving gifts. They show us that we are appreciated and that someone was thinking about us. This is true even when it comes from someone you love. Of course a young woman loves to receive an engagement ring. It not only shows her that her boyfriend cares about her, but it carries with it a promise. The day soon will come when he will make her his bride. It is filled with visions of a happy life, children and the hope that she will not be alone as long as they both live. It is likely the ring is not the first gift that she received from him or gave to him. And it will not be the last. Yet she would never consider returning a gift from her beloved. Each new gift comes with the same reminded that she is loved.

God the Holy Spirit gives to us many gifts. The Means of Grace are the most precious of them. While they are simple in form — written words on a page or said by a man, water poured on your head, bread and wine eaten with other very ordinary people — they are precious gifts. All of them come with the power of the Holy Spirit to create faith in our hearts, make a new Adam or Eve within us who loves God and wants to serve him and gives us the forgiveness of sins, life and salvation. In the waters of baptism, we are adopted as God’s children. With the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, with eat the body of our Lord broken on the cross to pay for our sins and drink the blood of the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. In Absolution, we hear the words of Jesus that our sins are forgiven in the voice of the one sent to say them to us.

These are gifts that produce more gifts. love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. These gifts serve God and our neighbors and testify that God is indeed good. (Galatians 5:22-23)

Rev. Robert E. Smith

Concordia Theological Seminary

Fort Wayne, Indiana

Blog Post Series

Christ is Risen!

Encore Post: From ancient times, Christians first greet each other on Easter: “He is risen!” or “Christ is risen.” The words of the angel to the women at the tomb (Mark 16:6) are still joyful to this day. In Lutheran churches it is common for pastors to open sermons throughout the Easter season with these words. The greeting is repeated at the end of Lutheran burial services, reminding us of the resurrection. So, why does the resurrection strike such a chord with Christians? After all, the full price for our salvation was completed when Jesus died on the cross.

The reasons why we cling to the Resurrection of Jesus are many. The most important is that the resurrection of our bodies is tied to it. In baptism, we die with Christ and when he rose, we rise to new life. (Romans 6:3-4) If Jesus did not rise from the dead, we would remain in our graves. We would have believed in a lie. But Christ did rise from the grave, the first harvest of God’s children. (1 Corinthians 15:20) His resurrection broke the seal of the grave. On the last day, we will rise, body and soul to live with Christ forever.

The resurrection of our Lord also fulfilled all of the promises of God’s word and the predictions of Jesus himself. When he rose, he demonstrated that God’s promises are kept. The three days in the grave — Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday evening — fulfilled these in great precision. So, with the Church of all times and places, we confess, “on the third day, he rose from the dead,” knowing that it makes our resurrection a sure and certain hope. So, we can face death, knowing it has no sting any longer.

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One Flesh in Two Persons: Marriage

Encore Post: For six days, God had been creating the world. He spoke and light appeared, earth took form, land appeared out of the great sea. The sun, moon and stars shown in the sky. Plants grew on the ground, fish swam in the sea and animals roamed the earth.

Now Father, Son and Holy Spirit conferred and said let us make man just like us. And so he made us – male and female. He planted a garden, came down and formed Adam (His name means “ground, soil” in Hebrew) from the soil and breathed life into him. But something still was not quite right. Adam was alone.

So God brought all the animals to him. He named them all one by one. While they were good, something just was not right. Dogs and Cats just didn’t do it. So God made woman from his own bones. Now at last man was just like God – two persons in one flesh. Adam called her woman — she-man and named her Eve–life, because she would be the mother of all people. God’s creation was finally complete. He had made marriage and the family. This was very good.

This perfect image of God, holy like him and the closest human beings have to understanding the nature of God, was ruined by sin and its consequences. When people make themselves the center of the universe there is no room for a god or another. Now sin tempts us to look everywhere for pleasure than in the very good gifts God has given to us. As we turn our hearts from our beloved and the Beloved, they grown cold and unfeeling.

This is why God condemns adultery, pornography, same sex relationships and acts, pre-marital sex, sexual assault, rape and all other seeking of desire outside of the love of one man and woman, united in marriage for a lifetime. It divides what God himself has joined together and marrs the image he placed in us. It destroys the image of the marriage of Christ to the Church and obscures the work he has done for us.

But when we were lost, unfaithful to God our husband, Jesus came and sought us to be his holy bride, with his own blood he bought us and for our life he died. When he found us, he washed us, cleansed us in baptism, so that he could present us as his radiant bride. One the last day, he will come for us, and bring us to the wedding and the marriage reception that lasts forever.

Old Man, New Man

Encore Post: When the Holy Spirit uses his gifts to create faith in our heart, he does more than just change our minds. He creates a whole new person within us. (2 Corinthians 4:6, 5:17) Our new self, our new Adam or Eve, loves God, is thankful for the salvation he won for us when Jesus died on the cross and desires to do good works, serving God and our neighbors. Our new person produces truly good works, deeds done because we love God. The Holy Spirit makes us more and more holy through these things we do for him and produces his fruits: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (Galatians 5:22-23)

Yet, in this life, even though our old self, sometimes called by St. Paul the flesh, is drowned in the waters of Holy Baptism (Romans 6:3-4), it is not quite dead yet. Our old self seeks to serve ourselves and looks out for our own interests, to satisfy our bodily hungers and appetites rather than channel them to serve the way God made them. It seeks praise from the world and fills our hearts and minds with evil thoughts and desires. Every day in this life is a battle between our Old Adam and our New Adam, our Old Eve and our New Eve.

The Holy Spirit does not abandon us to fight this battle alone. He uses God’s law to remind us of our sin, the Gospel to forgive that sin, reminds us of our baptism and its power, feeds us with Christ’s Body and Blood in the Lord’s Supper and uses the ears and the voice of the pastors he calls to care for us to hear our confessions of sin and forgive them with the sure promise of our Lord Jesus.

We are never alone, then. Our Counselor stays by our side, prays for us and calls to our mind and heart all that Jesus promised us. With him, we will grow holier until the day death finally kills the Old Person in us and we go with him to be with Jesus until the day the resurrection of all flesh.

The Need of a New Heart

Encore Post: God used Moses to give his people the Lord’s Law on Mt. Sinai. It was the Lord’s holy will for Israel. And in effect, the way that Israel was called to live was to serve as an effective witness to the nations that surrounded it. Their way of life was to point to the Law of the Lord and bring life to the nations. That is why that he calls us to teach our children and their children. I think that is a call to remember the 3rd commandment because on the sabbath day Israel was to remember what the Lord had done for them and their salvation (Exodus out of Egypt). The generation with Moses were either eye witnesses or they were the generation that followed the eye witnesses of those events.

Israel was told not to forget the things they had seen, lest they lose life. But the problem was that Israel had a bad heart. And that is our problem too. We don’t listen and take to heart what the Lord our God tells us. If we look long and hard at our own hearts, or better yet, let’s let God talk about our heart. According to Him, we have a heart of stone. Israel could not be the witness the Lord called them to be, and neither can we. We utterly fail to walk in the way of the Lord. And we can’t make our hearts of stone alive. We need a new heart.

Dear Christian, you have been given a new heart, a new spirit.. This happened at your Baptism. This heart is made in the image of the One, the Word made flesh. Jesus walked in the ways of the Lord our God, His Father. He walked in the statutes and laws of His Father on your behalf. It was through Him and by Him that the nations learn of the mercy of God. And because of this wonderful One, Jesus Christ, you have life everlasting. Your heart is made alive in Christ, through baptism into His name. There at those baptismal waters you were made God’s child. He made Himself your God. And in and through Christ you certainly and do keep the laws and statutes of your Heavenly Father, for He has done them for you. And now we want to walk in His Way which leads us to life everlasting.

Rev. Jacob Hercamp
St. Peter’s Lutheran Church
La Grange, MO

See Also: The Law of God is Good and Wise | Fence, Mirror and Guidebook | What is Baptism? | Baptized into Christ’s Body | Sabbath as Day the of Salvation

The Faith of Children

Encore Post: Evangelicals reject infant baptism is they think faith is all about understanding and agreeing to a series of teachings about God, Jesus in particular, and how we are saved. Since infants and young children have little ability to understand things intellectually. For Lutherans and the Holy Scriptures, faith is not an exercise of our reason, but a trust in God’s promises.

The problem with understanding faith this way is that even adults do not always have an ability to think, and, when they do, may still reject the Gospel. Lutheran theologians point out that we do not think when we sleep or in a coma. Sometimes disease can take from us our mind in old age or brain trauma. Yet such adults are not considered by anyone to have lost their faith.

On the contrary, Jesus and the Apostles tell us children do have faith. In fact, Jesus praises their ability to trust God. (Matthew 18:2-6, Mark 10:13-16) John the Baptist and Timothy believed in the womb (Luke 1:41-44, 2 Timothy 3:15) So, faith is all about trusting in God to save us and children are the most trusting of all people. Jesus does not urge children to become more like adults when it comes to faith. He urges adults to become more like children.

Children are Sinners, Too

Encore Posts: On the surface, we might think that the Evangelical challenge to infant baptism is about the practice itself. If the objection was that simple, perhaps there would be much less passion in the debate.

I believe the real issues are deeper than that. For Lutherans, the emotion behind our defense of the baptism of infants comes from the assurance that our children are saved by baptism. For Evangelicals, the objection comes from their belief that children are not accountable for their sins until they can ask Jesus to be their personal savior and because they believe baptism is a human act of obedience. In short, they do not believe in original sin.

Original sin is the name theologians give to the teaching of Holy Scripture that all people are born as sinners and that that state is inherited from Adam and Eve, resulting from their first sin in Eden. The big problem that we have is less that we commit sins, than that we are conceived sinful. (Psalm 51:5)

Everyone, including children, are accountable to God for who they are and the sins they commit from the very beginning of their lives. (Romans 3:10-19) Every thought we have inclines to evil (Genesis 6:5, Genesis 8:21). These thoughts are the cause of all the sins we commit. (Matthew 15:17-20) Only by being born of water and the Spirit can we see God’s kingdom. That is why we baptize infants and children.