What Does It Mean to Be Baptized? Clear Forgiveness
- What does it mean to be baptized? Baptism is described as the normative point where faith connects with God’s grace and forgiveness is received.
- Acts 2 and Romans 6 show baptism as repentance, burial with Christ, and resurrection into a new life where God no longer counts sins against us.
- Across the church’s history, baptism “puts on Christ,” unites believers as one family, and begins a lifelong journey of discipleship.
In chapter 5 of New Birth, we really begin to talk about baptism, and we answer the question, what does it mean to be baptized for the forgiveness of sins? The answer we come to is this:
Baptism is the normative place where our faith connects with God’s grace, and we become new, with a clean slate and a restored relationship with God.
Now, when you hear that word “baptism,” it’s almost exclusively a religious word. It comes from a Greek word, baptismos, and so you can see how the one word influenced the other. But it really just means to be immersed or to be dipped into water.
And if you know much about Jewish history, you know that in Jesus’ day there were many different kinds of ceremonial washings, and that Jesus himself wasn’t the only one who practiced baptism. John the Baptist did as well. In fact, John the Baptist actually baptized Jesus, but not for the forgiveness of sins. When Jesus was asked why he did it, he said, “We’ll do this to fulfill all righteousness.” Jesus came to fulfill all the things that Scripture said he had to do, everything that was right. 
And when Peter preached about Jesus and about his death and resurrection in Acts chapter 2, he said that the people should repent and be baptized for the forgiveness of their sins. And so it’s at baptism that we contact the blood of Jesus and receive the forgiveness that God has promised through him.
In Romans 6, Paul describes it this way. He says that we are buried with Christ in baptism, and we’re raised with him to live a new life. Baptism is the point at which God no longer counts our sins against us.
“Baptism is the point at which God no longer counts our sins against us.”
More than that, the waters of baptism connect us with all the Christian believers who came before us who’ve also gone through that rite. In Galatians 3:27, Paul says all who have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ. So we get our “new clothes” when we’re baptized. And in some ancient churches, as they practiced baptism, they literally would take the clothes off of the new initiate, and they would go into the waters of baptism. And when they came up, after proclaiming Jesus Lord, they would have a new white robe put upon them to represent the new life that they were now living.
I referenced Galatians 3:27 just a moment ago, where it says that we’ve been baptized into Christ and put on Christ. Right before that, Paul says that we are all children of God through faith in Christ Jesus. And then right after that, he says that in Christ there’s neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for we are all one in Christ Jesus. Baptism unites us with the great fellowship of believers throughout the ages.
It’s also important to say that baptism isn’t the end of the process of discipleship. It’s really the beginning of a lifelong journey with Jesus. In the sixth century, there was a monk named Mark the Ascetic who said this: “Our entire spiritual life is the activation of the seed planted in baptism.”
And so Jesus calls us to be baptized, to have our sins forgiven, and to live baptized lives. And so he invites us to come on in. The water’s fine.
