GodReflection: Power Words

Reading through some old family records I came across the following anecdote:

Ollie’s oldest was riding along in a buggy with her daddy when she was very small. He said, “Here is water; what doth hinder thee to be baptized?”  She said, “But Daddy, I haven’t ‘pented yet.” Ollie’s husband was Oscar Billingsley.

They must be tied to family. They knew The Acts of the Apostles and the language of the King James Bible.

For generations Jesus call to the waters of baptism has been a common thread among aunts, uncles, and cousins.

My mother was baptized in a muddy stock tank on a dry dirt farm on the plains of eastern New Mexico within its first twenty to twenty-five years of statehood. My dad was baptized as a boy in southeast rural Oklahoma less that than thirty years after it became a state.

For reasons I don’t understand I was born on third base. I didn’t have to learn the game, make the team, make the lineup, and move from the dugout to the on-deck circle, to the plate, get a hit, and safely pass first and second base.

My parents raised me from diapers within the community of the church.

There came an obvious point in my live when I realized if I was going to surrender to Jesus I would need to follow him into death, burial, and resurrection of the waters of baptism.

It took years of growth to begin to understand the impact of God’s grace received through my baptismal event.

Baptism remains a power word in my walk all these years later.

I love its symbol. In the Gospels Jesus went into the waters of baptism as an act of obedience to Father God.

Paul—the apostle—describes it as death to life without Christ, burial of the former self that lived the illusion of self-sufficiency, and resurrection to life eternal lived within the rule of King Jesus.

This is the picture that baptism brings to mind. It is this picture I can point to as a historic moment in my life. It was that act that placed the responsibility of my walk more squarely upon my shoulders.

My baptism reminds me the old is gone and I am a new creation in Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:17). My overall decision pattern as a new creation started at my resurrection from the grave of baptismal waters.

So here I am decades later. With all of the ups and downs on my life chart, I still attempt to follow the one I submitted to and imitated in death, burial, and resurrection through the waters of Baptism.

That make baptism a powerful word in my walk, don’t you think?

The neat thing is it can become your power word too.

Stay tuned.

Dr. Gary J. Sorrells – A GodReflection on Baptism.

Gary@Godreflection.org     www.MakeYourVisionGoViral.com