The godly man who baptized me almost 54 years ago was hospitalized not long ago. Thankfully, he got a quick fix on whatever ailed him, so he’s back at home.
But hearing the news of his illness got me to thinking about my own conversion to Christ.
On the warm May night when I was baptized, I was not unlike most 10-year-olds. My experiences were limited. So much so that the “dying to sin” and “rising to new life” theology enacted by Christians for centuries in immersion baptism didn’t mean much to me.
Oh, I could glibly recite the words of Romans 6:1-3. But dying was just a word to me. I would have to live another decade or so before “death” meant much to me.
The Bible image I did understand that night was the one about getting clean again. Today some are afraid to use the Bible’s exact words to encourage baptism. They are afraid it might imply salvation by human works.
But to people who confessed new faith in Jesus, first-century preachers like the one in Acts 22:16 summoned their converts to the waters of baptism by saying, “Arise, and wash away your sins.”
It worked for me. I came up out of the water feeling marvelously free from guilt.
Even with my juvenile theology, however, I knew the water was not what cleansed me. Faithful Christians had taught me about the blood of Jesus.
Ignorant as I was at that age about the finer points of Christian doctrine, I also knew instinctively that nothing I did that night saved me. Only Jesus could do that, and he had already done it on the cross.
As a preacher many years later I was thrilled to discover how simply the Jerusalem Bible expresses this truth in Ephesians 2:8-9. After explaining that we are saved by grace through faith, this translation says it’s “not by anything you have done.”
In my immature heart I knew instinctively that the kind of saving I wanted when I accepted Jesus had to be done by him. He alone can save us in that way.
More than half a century later I look back and am amazed. When I accepted Jesus, I was too young to understand most of his promises. But in his goodness he has granted me all his finest blessings anyway.
This is our only hope, of course. Christ saves us not because we deserve it but simply because he is good.