I Have Need to Be Baptized Again
What should I do if I become convinced that I might take been built-in again after my baptism? That tin can be a tricky question (for baptists, at to the lowest degree). There are a lot of people who finish up being baptized 2, three or four times. The Gospel Coalition recently shared two answers to the question, i from a credobaptist (a person who holds that baptism should follow conversion) and one from a paedobaptist (who holds that infants should be baptized). Recently I read J.D. Greear'due south book Cease Asking Jesus Into Your Middle (my review) and found his respond to the question very helpful. B&H, the publisher, was kind plenty to allow me to share it with you.
What practise you do about baptism if you think that you lot might have been "born again" after your offset one?
There are several answers to this question, depending on your particular state of affairs. If your baptism occurred equally an infant, I recall the reply is clear: y'all should exist baptized over again. Your babe baptism was more a symbol of your parents' faith (and thank God for their religion!) than yours. Every baptism we see in the New Testament, however, was a believer confessing his or her own religion. So be baptized "once more," fulfilling the hope your parents had when they baptized you lot equally an infant. Don't fear that you lot are dishonoring them. What better mode to honor the hopes they expressed in your baptism than to choose for yourself to follow Jesus?
Merely what if you were baptized later an initial conversion experience but now doubtable that your actual "regeneration" occurred later? Should y'all get re-baptized? There's no hard and fast answer, but here's what I'd suggest: if you know clearly that you were not saved at the bespeak when yous were baptized (i.eastward., you were pressured into baptism by your parents or friends, had no existent grasp on salvation, had some ulterior motive, etc.), then be baptized once more.
However, if your baptism depicted the beginning of a journey of organized religion, a journey marked past numerous "awakenings" and defining moments, permit it stand, fifty-fifty if yous wonder that perhaps your "regeneration" happened afterward.
Baptism is postconversion because it symbolizes a public option to follow Jesus. Thus, to knowingly baptize people who aren't saved yet would pervert and undermine the symbol and its role in the church. But getting the technical order wrong in your own experience is not a perversion of the symbol, it'southward only a timing mistake—and a modest i, at that.
Baptism is not similar the number sequence on a combination lock that if you become out of order will not open up. So don't obsess nearly making sure it happened later on your regeneration. If you were baptized after making a sincere, conscious confession of faith, take that and motility on, even if you sometimes suspect that your regeneration may take happened later. Equally Christians nosotros continually have new experiences of grace that make us feel like everything we have experienced upwardly to that betoken was only dimness.
C. S. Lewis describes a 24-hour interval in 1951 (afterward writing The Four Loves and giving the talks that became Mere Christianity) where he passed from "mere intellectual acceptance of, to realization of, the doctrine that our sins are forgiven." He did not think of this as his conversion, only he did say that in light of it "what I had previously chosen 'belief' looked absolutely unreal."After writing one of the best classics of the Christian faith. When that happens to you lot, I would encourage you not to run across information technology as conversion, but as a progressive deepening of your relationship with Jesus. God is standing to mature you in Christ, intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually. Don't get re-baptized.
If you lot are walking with Jesus now, encounter your initial confession of Jesus as Lord as the outset evidence that God had planted the seed of life in you, even if what you understood then is hardly comparable to what you run across now. The validity of our faith is revealed not by the intensity of our first reaction to it, but past our perseverance in it. Then, if you are walking with Jesus today, the first sprouts of faith that led to your baptism were probable real ones. Let your first baptism stand up.
The writer of Hebrews calls baptism an "unproblematic" affair that nosotros should build from, non work upward to (Heb. 6:1–iii). So, unless you know you were either completely ignorant or willfully hypocritical at the time of your baptism, get decorated with the meatier things of Christianity (i.east., serving Jesus and pouring yourself out for Him)! Movement on.
And, if maybe you get to sky and find out that you were regenerated subsequent to your baptism, it'due south not like y'all're going to be demoted to a bottom, "out-of-gild-baptism" section in sky. Baptism is indeed a very important symbol of the faith, a moment in which we identify with Jesus and declare our faith in His finished work to the world. But don't make information technology more than that.
(Download in PDF)
The comment department is open for your feedback. I'd appreciate it if my paedobaptist friends would refrain from defending their view of baptism here; that is a discussion for another time and place. And don't become also bothered over the discussion "re-baptism" either; we acknowledge that from God's perspective each of us is baptized only once, but, as we acknowledge also in even having to inquire this question, some Christians wonder whether they were baptized before or later on they were saved.
Source: https://www.challies.com/quotes/should-i-get-re-baptized/
0 Response to "I Have Need to Be Baptized Again"
Post a Comment