A Baptism in 3 Acts

Baptism is a place of death. The drama plays out in 3 acts.

In Act 1, you are living a certain way in a certain place. In Act 2, you pass through some medium of destructive power. The media include rivers, wildernesses, fires, graves, oceans, the Holy Spirit, and maybe a thousand other possibilities. The commonality in each of them is the power to destroy something. By your response to the destructive presence of the particular medium, you decide what gets destroyed: the habit, the spirit, the relationship, the lie, the cruel master, et cetera, that your God has sent the baptism to destroy, or your time, energy, or other resources that you may waste trying to avoid the process.

In Act 3, you are transported out of something and into something else. In the Scriptures, people were described as having been baptized “into Moses,” “into Christ,” “into repentance,” “into death,” “into one Body,” and there are many implications of the idea presented in other terms, like being transferred into the Kingdom of His marvelous light.

As grandma says, “eat your vegetables.” Don’t avoid situations that are sent to bring you life and freedom and strength just because they don’t look like cakes and pies. Dive in deep, come out clean.