 Welcome to Foundations of Faith. Today I want to talk to you about water baptism. Water baptism is a public declaration of a personal faith that we have come to in Jesus Christ and is an act of obedience in following Jesus. You see, Jesus himself was actually baptized. When we go back into the Gospels, the Gospel of Matthew, we see that Jesus began his earthly ministry by being water baptized. When Jesus was baptized, the heavens opened up, God sent forth the Holy Spirit upon him and a voice was heard that said, This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased. It was from there that Jesus entered into the wilderness temptation. When he came out of the wilderness temptation, he immediately began his earthly ministry and we see the effects of that even today. We're here today because of the ministry of Jesus that we read about in the pages of Scripture that has set a pattern for all of us, not only how to have a personal relationship with God through what Jesus did on the cross and the resurrection, but also the pattern of how we should follow Jesus. Do you know that every person that Jesus ever called to be a disciple, he did it with two words. He said, Follow me. And part of following Jesus means to follow his example. The reason why Jesus was baptized, he told John the Baptist when John protested and said, No, you should baptize me. Jesus said this. He says, Do this so that all righteousness might be fulfilled. What Jesus was saying is, Let's do this because it's an act of obedience. And one of the things that we need to realize about water baptism is that after we've become born again, after we've experienced salvation, is now we need to take our next steps in following Jesus and our next opportunities to demonstrate our faithful obedience in him. And that's one of the things that baptism is. The word baptism actually comes from a Greek word, baptizo, and it means to completely submerge, to saturate, or to overwhelm something. So when we read the pages of Scripture, whether it's the Ethiopian eunuch in the book of Acts, who when Philip comes up alongside of him as he's reading the scroll of Isaiah says, I believe what prevents me from being baptized. The Bible says that Philip took him down into the water and immediately baptized him. He believed in the Lord Jesus Christ and he was baptized. Philip took him, put him under the water, brought him back up just like Jesus was baptized and just like the disciples themselves were also baptized. They were completely submerged and immersed in the water as a physical act that was a prophetic declaration of their death, their burial, and their resurrection in new life. Paul writes in Romans chapter 6 that when you and I are baptized, that's exactly what's happening. It's a burial of our old man. So when we're saved, we become a new creation in Christ Jesus. What do we do with the old man? The same thing that we do with physical bodies when they die, we need to bury it. And the place that we bury it is in the chaotic waters of baptism. And we come up out of the water in Christ just like he came out of the tomb in the newness of life. And what we're doing according to Romans chapter 6 is we are identifying with Christ. We are saying we're no longer in Adam. We no longer live in this world just as our old identity would try to define us. But now we bury that old man, and we're coming up in the newness of life in the footsteps of Jesus, walking in the power of Jesus as a disciple of Jesus. And we're doing this to declare to the heavenlies and to declare to the world around us and to declare to the rest of the Christian community that we are now a new creation. When God created the first creation in Genesis chapter 1, He called everything out of the waters. What does Jesus do in the new creation? When we're baptized, He calls us forth out of the waters as a new creation in Christ Jesus. It's a powerful declaration of what we believe. And it's something that Jesus commanded all believers to do. Matthew chapter 16, Jesus said, Those that believe and are baptized shall be saved. Jesus also said in Matthew chapter 28, He said, Go and preach the gospel in all the nations of the world, make disciples of all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And then teach them to observe all things that I've commanded to you. Now it's important that we know that baptism doesn't save us, but baptism is an outward declaration of the fact that we are saved because it's our first act of obedience. It's bearing the old and coming up in the new. And the last thing that we need to know about baptism is that baptism changes something in our heart because we've obeyed God. In the book of Colossians, Paul talks about baptism as being a circumcision of our heart. It's a cutting away of the old, Adamic nature. And it's unveiling and embracing a new soft, impliable heart that is shaped by the Holy Spirit. The very first act of obedience as a Christian typically is water baptism. And when we do that, there's literally a cutting away that takes place by obeying Jesus that gives us a new soft, pliable heart to hear His voice and to obey Him and to faithfully walk in His footsteps. If you're a believer and you've not been water baptized, let me encourage you to take that next step as a believer and make a public declaration of your faith by being water baptized.